(Second) Conference Call for Papers
BORDERLANDS: REMAPPING ZONES OF CULTURAL PRACTICE AND REPRESENTATION
March 30-31, 2001
Extended Deadline: January 1, 2001
In contemporary theorizing and other areas of cultural production, the
notion of Borderlands has helped to make sense of a variety of cultural
processes, experiences, and practices. We take Borderlands to be those
in-between places defined by the flow of people, labor, capital,
information, and cultural products across borders, physical and otherwise,
both within and between cultures. They are zones that are simultaneously
ordered and disordered, contested and accepted, and invariably constituted
byand constitutive of various communication practices and forms of
identification. Because Borderlands are social scenes and places that
people inhabit, they are also sites where ways of relating, feeling, and
imagining are articulated into new constellations of social identities,
practices and subjectivities. As a metaphor, Borderlands suggests those
spaces, moments, and situations where difference becomes manifestwhere
pre-existing lines of demarcation have been crossed, blurred, and
disrupted and where new ones are continually being (re)mapped.
The graduate students of the Department of Communication, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst invite you to BORDERLANDS: REMAPPING ZONES OF
CULTURAL PRACTICE AND REPRESENTATION. The conference is open to graduate
students, faculty, and independent scholars. We seek paper and panel
submissions that interrogate how various Borderlands are produced,
represented, negotiated, performed and lived. We encourage submissions
from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Topics may
include (but are not limited to) the following:
Subjectivity and Identifying practices: How are various forms of
identification and embodiment (e.g. cultural identities, including hybrid,
transnational, transgendered, etc.) constructed, experienced and
performed?
Space and Place: How are specific localities produced through both
economies of exchange (e.g. market, symbolic, and political) and concrete,
situated social interactions and discourse?
Global Politics and Media: Questions of global audiences, media
conglomerates, cultural imperialism, cultural policy, citizenship, and
communal life
Global/Local nexus: Explorations of belonging, displacement, personhood,
and "worldhood"
Aesthetics and modes of representation: How do different modes of
representation (e.g. film, video, television, cyberspace, music, etc.)
define, erase or recreate aesthetic spaces and experiences?
Transculturalism, Multiculturalism and Cultural Hybridity: Questions of
diaspora, migration, decolonization, and core/periphery relations
Political intervention: How might different modes of theorizing and forms
of political practice (e.g. feminist, queer, postcolonial, etc.) define
borderlands as sites of cultural and political transformation?
Deadline for paper and panel submissions has been extended to
January 1, 2001. We are only accepting on-line submissions
(www.umass.edu/commgrads). Extended paper abstracts should be 750 words
maximum. For panel submissions, please include a title, a brief
rationale, and a description for each of the papers on the panel (150
words each maximum). For additional information contact Lynn Comella:
comella@comm.umass.edu