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Thinking Community (UMN, Minneapolis)

Thinking Community (UMN, Minneapolis)

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Alexandre Dubois)

Thinking Community

April 8-9 2016 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Twin Cities

 

Call for Papers/Appel à contributions

Deadline: January 18, 2016

 

The Association of Graduate Students in the Department of French and Italian is pleased to announce its upcoming conference “Thinking Community,” to be held April 8-9, 2016 at the University of Minnesota.

 

Confirmed keynote speaker: Professor Carolyn Dean (Yale University)

         

In the last three decades, the notion of "community," its definitions, and understandings, have been discussed incessantly in the humanities. More specifically, there has been a lot of engagement on the necessity of thinking about Community as an unfixed entity, constantly struggling with its identity and its constituents. This conference aims at tackling what it means to envisage "community" and what a community says about those who constitute it.

From the apparently simple, yet unfathomable, question of humankind as a global community, a series of historical, literary, philosophical and political interrogations unfolds. If community is considered as a relation of togetherness, does it necessarily involve thinking the relation with the non-identical as being-with and being-together? In this light, how do we define our personal identity within a collective one? Should we consider that in order to communicate, one would need to suspend one's identity?  If we consider the French communauté, where commun (common) is the root, do the common and the community imply universality and what do we mean by the universal? These matters still need to be questioned and better articulated today in order to underscore not only what defines Community, but also what communicates and constitutes the “common.” Therefore, this conference will provide a platform for participants from diverse disciplines and backgrounds in the humanities, in order to take an interdisciplinary approach on a wide range of critical issues linked to these questions.

 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Inheritance/heredity

- Communities in (times of) conflict

- Shared identities

- Alterity

- Belonging

- Community of language

- National and global laws/policies

- Dispersal /displacement

- Transitory Spaces

- Marginalized gender

- Sexual communities

- Politics of Community and Diversity


Please submit a 250-300 words abstract including the name of your affiliated institution and your contact information to agsfrit@umn.edu. Presentations should be limited to 15-20 minutes and must be given in English.