The Graduate Students of the Departments of Modern Languages and 
Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, and Political Science at the 
University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada invite proposals for their 
5th Graduate Student Conference on September 28th-29th 2006:

Declensions of the Self:  A Bestiary of Modernity

Is it possible to revitalize our thought and praxis as, and about, 
modern human subjects?

Declensions of the word reflect not only the role it plays within a 
sentence but also its status as an element acted upon by the sentence.
Declensions of the self reflect not only the role the self plays as one 
who uses a myriad of modes of representation to construct his or her 
world, but also the extent to which s/he is subject to, and constructed 
by, those codes, languages, symbols, metaphors and modes of 
representation.

A bestiary is a carefully staged spectacle consisting of these modern 
dichotomies: the real and the ideal; the said and the unsaid; the 
rational and the irrational; the bound and the free; the familiar and 
the exotic; word and language; self and world.  It makes the self at 
once the beast within the cage?the spectacle?and the spectator: the one 
who gazes through the bars, the one who is subject to that gaze and the 
architect of their predicament.

The dearth of frank discussion about the fears, desires and anxieties 
of the modern subject is of urgent concern to us.  The abundance of 
writing about these matters, and the lack of current, public discussion 
of them calls for action.

As Graduate Students in Philosophy, Political Science, Modern Languages 
and Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, we invite reasoning 
about the irrational, speech about the unspeakable, thought concerning 
the modern human beast in all of its forms and follies, in theory and 
practice.

We welcome submissions from graduate students in Film Studies, Gender 
Studies, Fine Arts, Anthropology, Psychology, History, Economics, 
Social Sciences, Literature, and Religious Studies. Given the broad 
scope of the conference, we will also consider submissions from any 
other relevant realm of scholarly inquiry.

200-300 word abstracts ought to be submitted to the Organizing 
Committee by July 15th, 2006.  Please send abstracts to 
[log in to unmask]  Presentations ought to be approximately 20 
minutes in duration.  Submissions in English, French, Spanish and 
German are welcome.  It is our intention to publish a selection of 
articles (20-30 pages) from the presentations that address the theme of 
the conference in a particularly relevant fashion.