FYI: I thought that perhaps some of your members would be interested in
this conference cfp. Please circulate as appropriate. Thank you! Ricia
Chansky
Encounters Across the Americas: Archives, Technologies,
Methods View
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[image:
IABA logo] 1st Biennial Conference of IABA-Americas
Chapter Encounters
Across the Americas: Archives, Technologies, Methods
June 4-7, 2015
Institute for the Humanities
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA *DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: November 1, 2014*
*BACKGROUND*
The International Auto/Biography Association (theiaba.org) was founded in
1999 as a multidisciplinary network of scholars working on all aspects of
life writing. Three regional chapters have been established since then:
IABA-Europe, IABA-The Americas, and IABA-Pacific Rim. The Americas Chapter
of IABA, launched in San Juan, Puerto Rico in July 2013, has the following
aims:
- Fostering the participation of auto/biography scholars across the
Americas;
- Soliciting participation from scholars internationally whose work
focuses on auto/biography in the Americas;
- Identifying research networks and encouraging partnerships among
scholars in the Americas; and
- Supporting graduate students of the Americas working in life
writing.The biennial conferences, as well as the contacts and
collaborations generated through the IABA-A website (iaba-americas.org),
facilitate these goals.
*THE THEME--ENCOUNTERS: ARCHIVES, TECHNOLOGIES, METHODS*
Across the Americas auto/biographical acts and practices create
encounters--with ourselves and our past, with others, with storytelling
genres, with language and culture, with economic and political conditions,
with historical legacies, with possible futures. The media and arenas of
auto/biographical encounters are multiple and heterogeneous: testimony and
autoethnography, graphic memoir and ecocriticism, digital media and
performance art, popular lyrics and material objects, political forums and
family gatherings. We invite proposals for papers and panels that explore
auto/biographical encounters of all kinds, particularly encounters with
archives, technologies, and scholarly methods for interpreting
auto/biographical acts and practices.
*Archival Encounters *
Archives document encounters in stories of conquest, invasion, genocide,
transportation, enslavement, cultural loss and survival, national expansion
and global repositioning, local indigeneity and diaspora. They attest to
acts of migration, mobility, conversion, transformation, or re-embodiment.
Archives can be large or small, long-lived or ephemeral, drawn from Big
Data or fragments. They may include letters, diaries, identity papers,
inventories, logbooks, lyrics, or objects in many media: textual, visual,
graphic, haptic, oral, aural, material. They encompass myths, memories,
personal aspirations, and evidence of public spectacles. While archives can
be, and have been, lost, silenced, overwritten, they can also be digitized
and exposed as sources of stories to sustain individuals and
communities--or disrupt and separate them.
How do life writers across the Americas encounter and use archives? What
modes of evidence are discoverable in and through them? What kinds of life
stories, acts of translation, and encounters do archives call forth? How
are digital technologies enabling scholars of life writing to build
archives? What issues of curation, preservation, assemblage, and
circulation do archives present?
*Technological Encounters *
Technologies may be conceptual, as in Foucault’s sense, or material, analog
or digitally enabled. Encounters with technologies enable the recovery of
histories of colonial violence, the circulation of postcolonial legacies,
and the evocation of posthuman agencies. Technologies are employed in
reorganizing ethnic identities and indigenous politics. Via cultural
collisions, across contact zones, they produce multi-temporal histories
that express the legacies of transport in both new and long-lived forms of
witnessing. They point up intersections of geographic and sexual
imaginaries embodied in disparate modes, from queer performance art to
computer games about gender transition, and register the impact of
environmental degradation in the Americas through ecocritical writing.
What is an auto/biographical technology? How have technologies enabled the
telling of lives within and across the Western hemisphere, and to what
effect? What histories of technology do auto/biographers draw on in
constructing their stories? How do technologies facilitate the creation, or
collection, or circulation of life narratives?
*Encounters with, and as, Method *
Our acts of critical practice are encounters as well. In the medium of
storytelling personal stories trace a history, generate a legacy, revision
the possible shapes of embodied experience. But the heterogeneous
aesthetics and politics of personal storytelling make the methodology of
reading life narratives necessarily a choice among possibilities. What
methods of analysis do scholars of auto/biography now rely on? How is a
particular method related to past theorizing of the autobiographical or a
larger theory of language, culture, subjectivity, sociality, or politics?
That is, papers might foreground method, asking, for example: What is
entailed in performing a deep reading of an individual life story? What
reading practices are marshaled in understanding a prosopography as a
collective story? What issues arise in assembling an oral history of one or
more marginalized subjects? When the focus is the subject, the self, the
person, the community, the nation, or the corporation, what kinds of
evidence or data are used in the analysis? Are there methodologies that
point up networks of life writing practice specific to the Americas, with
their long history of both heterogeneous reception and occasional
congruence? If some theoretical approaches seem exhausted, what new
approach to familiar or emergent forms of life narrative might be
productive?
*GUIDELINES*
Papers and panels should address aspects of the genres, histories, and
politics of life writing that circulate from the Arctic to the Antarctic,
the Atlantic to the Pacific, and along the routes of life writing across
the Western Hemisphere to distant worlds. Ideally they will pose
theoretical and methodological questions of interest in and beyond the
humanities. Accessible and provocative papers and panels proposing new
terms or employing concepts from other disciplines are eagerly sought to
expand claims about life writing for wider publics and conversations.
*Specifics of Proposals for Papers, Panels, and Lightning Rounds*
- The length of papers will be restricted to eighteen minutes to enable
sufficient time for questions and discussion.
- Proposals for panels that focus on a single issue or question, with
three speakers and abstracts for all panelists, are welcome.
- “Lightning rounds” on specific one-word concepts or topics, with six
participants, may also be proposed; each presentation should not exceed
five-seven minutes.
- When submitting your proposal, please state any media
requirements--DVD player, internet connection from your computer, visual
projection, audio enhancement, etc.
*Languages*
Because our scholarly association seeks to reflect our multilingual
heritage yet communicate collegially across languages and cultures,
proposals for papers and panels in Spanish, Portuguese, and French are
welcome, although most papers will be presented in English. If a panel
and/or individual paper is delivered in a language other than English, a
written English translation needs to be provided by the author two months
ahead of the conference for copying and distribution to the audience. In
exceptional cases, arrangements can be made for simultaneous translation
during question and answer.
*Deadlines*
Your paper and/or panel title and a proposal abstract of not more than 300
words per paper should be submitted by *November 1, 2014*, along with a
brief biographical statement (100 words) listing name and email address,
affiliation and position, major publications, focus of interest in life
narrative, language of presentation, and technical requirements. It may be
written in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French. Regretfully, late
submissions cannot be considered.
Please send submissions to [log in to unmask] Shortly after submission
you will receive an auto-generated notice that your proposal was received.
Proposers of papers and panels will be notified regarding acceptance by
January 15, 2015. The conference website will, by that time, have
information on options for and cost of lodging and registration fee, as
well as small grants in aid for travel from other countries. Please note
that a passport will be required for visitors from all other nations
entering the United States, and a visa for most Latin American citizens.
NOTE: The tradition of IABA is that conference attendees attend and
participate for the full four days of the meeting. Please plan to make this
commitment.
*Co-Convenors:*
*Sidonie Smith ([log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>)*
Director, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan
*Julia Watson ([log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>)*
Professor Emerita, The Ohio State University
*Ann Arbor is an exciting site of encounter. Near Detroit, Ann Arbor
combines the congeniality of a Midwestern small town with the cosmopolitan
energy of a great university city. Participants will be able to reach all
conference venues on foot from university residence halls and local hotels,
and will enjoy a wide range of dining, entertainment, and recreational
possibilities. Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a major hub for flights to and
within the U.S., is conveniently located 30 minutes from campus, and easy
ground transportation is available.*
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** * * IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING International
Auto/Biography Association http://www.theiaba.org/
<http://www.theiaba.org/>Craig Howes, list manager craighow@hawaii,
[log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> Center for Biographical Research,
University of Hawai'i at Manoa On Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii <http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii>*
--
Ricia Anne Chansky, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Co-Editor, *a/b: Auto/Biography Studies*
www.tandfonline.com/raut
