Dear all,
Thought below Call for Papers might be of interest to this lists' members. This year's Birkbeck Graduate Conference with the main theme "Crossing Borders: Negotiation, Provocation, and Transgression". We
aim to have a multi-disciplinary dialogue between early career
researchers, activists, artists as well as established academics.
Hoping to see you among us.
Güneş Tavmen
PhD researcher and Tutor in Film, Media and Cultural Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
Crossing Borders: Negotiation, Provocation, and Transgression
Graduate Conference, Birkbeck, University of London, 5-6th May 2017
Across the globe, borders are once again being erected, entrenched, and
enlarged in order to contain, as well as to subject to the perpetual
surveillance apparatus, people considered threats to the integrity of the
national and supra-national state. From Calais to Lesbos, the camp has returned
with a vengeance in Europe, supported by dubious claims for security. The
spectre of the Jihadist and economic migrant haunts the political imaginary of
the ‘advanced’ nations of Western Europe, who now spare no mercy for those
displaced by civil war, environmental disaster, or material immiseration. Areas
of conflict are increasingly being captured by drones, which, crucial for
security, are profoundly redefining the borders between state, civil society,
and privacy. Yet the very instantiation of the border speaks to and raises the
possibility of its being breached, of forms of traversal, of lines of flight.
This could be the contested borderland, a zone of indiscernibility where state
violence regulates the movement of capital and labour, as in the case of the
Mexico-US border and the region of Kashmir. It could also be the borderless
world of ubiquitous data collection, which, paradoxically is recorded and
stored in obscurely located and highly centralised data centres. Or, the
faltering border between the conscious and the unconscious, whereby libidinal
drives perpetually upset any stable sense of the sovereign self. Finally,
‘crossing borders’ poses a temporal question, directed to conceptions of
historical change, the unpredictable instant of revolution which in shattering
the known retroactively constitutes a border.
This conference is a call to intellectual arms, then, a provocation to
think geographical, political, bodily, technological, and environment borders.
What constitutes a border, how are they stabilised, and how can they be
crossed, negotiated or transgressed? How are borders enacted, defined and
re-defined by surveillance, technology, regulations and resistance? Are borders
necessarily the logic of a colonial structure of thought, predicated on
capture, division, and domination? How else might difference be thought and
engaged? What is the discourse, language, imagery of the border? How are human
bodies reciprocally shaped by the social environment? What model of the psyche
can help us understand the rich diversity of socio-political mechanisms? How
can we cross the border of rationality in order to explore and release the
unconscious factors in our sense-making? And, crucially, how can we as
academics cross institutional and disciplinary borders? We welcome submissions
from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, and especially encourage
contributions from artists and activists.
Suggested topics, but by no means exclusive to:
· Approaching the
Fortress State: Migrants, Asylum Seekers, and Refugees.
· Borderlands,
Hinterlands, No-Man’s Land: Contested Borders.
· Settlements of the
Border: Walls, Camps, Gates, and Occupation.
· Media Ecologies:
Governance, Surveillance, and Hacking in the Anthropocene.
· Geographies of Data:
Drones, Data Centres, and The Digital Commons.
· Borders and the Case
of Psychoanalysis.
· Psychosocial
Methodologies.
· Climate Change.
· Transnational and
Transcultural Aesthetic Forms.
· Fictions of Passage.
· Theorists of Flight,
Movement, and Non-Transcendent Crossings.
· Caste, Class, Gender,
Race, Sexual Transgressions.
· Borders of Time:
Revolution, Reaction, Restoration.
Proposals are invited for twenty minute papers and panels of three
papers. Abstracts (300 words) should be submitted to crossingbordersgradconference@gmail.com by 7 February
2017. Please also include a short bio (no more than 150 words), contact
details, and institutional affiliation. Accepted proposals will be notified by 28 February 2017.