Sorry for the late notice, call for papers still open!

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Space, Race, Bodies—Geocorpographies of the City, Nation and Empire

8-10th December, 2014

University of Otago, New Zealand

Keynote speakers:

- Professor Joseph Pugliese, Research Director, Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University

· Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva, Inaugural Chair in Ethics, Director, Centre for Ethics and Politics, University of London

· Associate Professor Jasbir K. Puar, Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University

· Associate Professor Jacinta Ruru, Faculty of Law, University of Otago

· Associate Professor Susan Stryker, Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, University of Arizona

Space, Race, Bodies—Geocorpographies of the City, Nation and Empire is a forthcoming conference hosted by the Department of Media, Film and Communication (MFCO), the Postcolonial Studies Research Network (PSRN), the Somatechnics Research Network (University of Arizona) and the Sexuality Research Group at the University of Otago.

The title of the conference is taken from Joseph Pugliese’s ground-breaking work on technologies of surveillance, law and terrorism. The conceptual merging of the corporeal body with geography—geocorpographies—draws attention to the institutional, cultural and legal forces that influence the global movement of people, capital and technology across cities and national borders.


Space, Race, Bodies is an interdisciplinary conference that invites papers to address the following questions:

      how are racial and ethnic identities contested and/or reaffirmed through local, national and global spaces?

      how do media, law and politics frame space and geography in racialised ways?

      how are geographies of sexuality and desire linked to processes of racialisation? how do tropes of the ‘exotic’ function in media, capital and technological flows?

      what are the tensions between Indigenous and colonial notions of national space?

      how is mobility geopolitical? how do notions of spatial mobility presuppose normative conceptions of the human, gender, class and ability?

      how do spaces of violence, war and ‘terrorism’ reconfigure citizenship in local, national and global contexts?


The conference will also accept papers under the general theme of Somatechnics research on the intersections between bodies, media and technologies.

Papers from the conference will be selected for publication in the journal Somatechnics (Edinburgh University Press, ISSN: 2044-0138).

The conference committee will accept 200w abstracts on a rolling basis until September 30th.

Please send abstracts, 50w bios and inquiries to the conference committee at: [log in to unmask]

For more information, please visit the conference website: http://www.otago.ac.nz/mfco/research/otago071039.html