[H-verkko] CFP: 2014 Berkshire Conference On Women's History Themes

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Agricolan Artikkelipyyntötietokantaan
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on tullut seuraava ilmoitus:

2014 Berkshire Conference On Women's History Themes

2014 Berkshire Conference on Women’s History Themes
 
Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche
 
University of Toronto: May 22-25, 2014
 
Proposals due Jan 15, 2013
 
For the first time in its history, the Berkshire Conference on
Women’s History (also known as the “Big Berks”) will be held outside
of the United States, at the University of Toronto, on May 22-25,
2014. The major theme of the conference is Histories on the
Edge/Histoires sur la brèche.
 
Our theme reflects the growing internationalization of this triennial
conference. It recognizes the precariousness of a world in which the
edged-out millions demand transformation, as well as the intellectual
edges scholars have crossed, re-created, and worked to bridge in the
academy and outside of it. We invite all modes of critical thinking
and work that represents a wide range of historical methodologies. In
addition to established historical approaches and sources, we seek
sessions using other evidence, such as visual and material artifacts,
sonic objects, oral traditions, and affective archives. We encourage
methodological risk-taking and hope for a mix of established and
newer approaches. We especially invite conversations across
centuries, cultures, locales, and generations. We welcome media
panels that bridge historical and contemporary work related to art,
image, film, and other types of cultural production and cultural
institutions.
 
The conference in Canada prompts conceptual, historical and analytic
engagement with critical edges – sharpening, unsettling, de-centring,
decolonizing histories in a global context. Edges are spatial:
impenetrable borders, stifling boundaries or protective borders and
spaces of smooth entry. Edges evoke the creative and the avant-garde.
Entangled in the idea of edges are rough encounters, jagged conflicts
as well as intimate exchanges. It speaks to the alternative spaces
the “edged-out” have carved for themselves and to efforts made to
create a common ground, or commons, on which to make oppositional
histories.
 
As a nation-state shaped by imperialist histories and its own
colonial dynamics, past and present, Canada itself sits on the edge
of a powerful if, perhaps, waning American empire. Like other white
settler societies, it is a colonial state that has operated through
dispossessing First Nations peoples, guarding the edges of white
citizenship, and endorsing patriarchal models of assimilation; yet,
this history unfolds and is resisted in myriad ways. Its historical
trajectory, on the edges of empire, includes colonization first by
the French with the resulting ongoing Francophone presence, and later
the British. Its distinctive features include socialized medicine,
same-sex marriage, and official but contested multiculturalism. On
Anishinabe land, Toronto, a creative, cosmopolitan, and contested
city, is both “home” and “elsewhere” for many of its diasporic
residents. What better place to consider edges as sites of hope,
excitement, and possibility but also of danger, displacement,
struggle, and exile?
 
Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche invites contributions
from the edges because change so often emerges from such sites,
however slowly, painfully or partially. Many scholars who write about
the “edged-out” seek to talk back to the powerful or challenge the
empowered by listening to others. This conference is interested in
de-centring US scholarly dominance by inviting histories of the
Caribbean and Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, Africa and the
Middle East, and Indigenous, francophone and diasporic cultures
around the world. We welcome papers that destabilize the white,
able-bodied, liberal citizen subject through focus on bodies and
objects on edges of all kinds. The theme also invites work that
queers gender and sexual binaries. How can we historicize emergent,
residual, and ongoing gender constructs such as ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’ as well as gender performances, sexual practices, and
social identifications that challenge binary modes of gender and
sexuality?
 
Our theme encourages critical reflection on how gender, as analytic
category, material embodiment, cultural resource, or signifying
system works in many ways. Gender has its many ragged edges: where
private and public spheres have been defined and redefined; where
class, gender, race, ethnicity, nation, kinship, sexuality, and
ability/disability have interacted; where masculinities and
femininities have been constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed.
So, too, is gender on the edge of debate: a term in need of scrutiny
to expose its uses, contradictions, strengths, and weaknesses. The
theme respects feminist theory and praxis as a critical stance in
need of constant interrogation. Western forms of feminism, for
instance, have long faced challenges from in and outside its borders.
We invite work on non-western and other feminisms and scrutiny of
feminisms within the context of historically shifting global power
relations and international alignments. The conference seeks to
operate at the edges by engaging anti-racist, anti-colonial, and
other critiques. It provocatively asks if “mainstream” feminism can
reinvigorate its critical edge. Should we, as scholars, however we
are positioned, seek to destabilize the centre and authorize the
margin? Or sharpen our critique in a world that, now, as so often in
the past, stands seemingly on the brink?
 
Please submit proposals to one of the 2014 subthemes (and note a
second choice):
 
Borders, Encounters, Conflict Zones, and Memory
 
Empires, Nations, and the Commons
 
Law, Family, Courts, Criminality, and Prisons
 
Bodies, Health, Medical Technologies, and Science
 
Indigenous Histories and Indigenous Worlds
 
Caribbean, Latin America, and Afro/Francophone Worlds
 
Asia, Transnational Circuits, and Global Diasporas
 
Economies, Environments, Labour, and Consumption
 
Sexualities, Genders/LGBTIQ2, and Intimacies
 
Politics, Religion/Beliefs, and Global Feminisms
 
*A detailed Call for Papers will follow; the logistics of inviting
global speakers explains early due date.
 
For questions, write: bcwh at utsc.utoronto.ca or visit the Berks
website at http://berksconference.org

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Ilmoituksen lähetti: Anders Ahlbäck <aahlback at abo.fi>
Ilmoitus vanhentuu: 22.05.2014
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