**** apologies for cross-postings **** Hello, all. The graduate students in my department are organizing what promises to be a terrific conference on cultural production and the construction of social identities. I have appended the conference CFP below. For more information, please contact Lynn Comella at <[log in to unmask]>. --Marty Norden ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Martin F. Norden OO Dept. of Communication, Box 34815 [log in to unmask] [_]<| University of Massachusetts-Amherst fax: 413 545-6399 /|\ Amherst, MA 01003-4815 USA vox: 413 545-0598 home page: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~norden ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Conference Call for Papers BORDERLANDS: REMAPPING ZONES OF CULTURAL PRACTICE AND REPRESENTATION University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA -- March 30-31, 2001 Submission Deadline: December 15, 2000 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 by-and 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 manifest-where preexisting lines of demarcation have been crossed, blurred, disrupted, and where new ones are continually being (re)mapped. We believe that such ways of envisioning Borderlands offer rich opportunities for theorizing contemporary experiences in ways that challenge received assumptions and paradigms. To that end, the graduate students of the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, invite you to BORDERLANDS: REMAPPING ZONES OF CULTURAL PRACTICE AND REPRESENTATION. 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 discourses? 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 is December 15, 2000. 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: [log in to unmask] ******************** Lynn Comella Ph.D. Candidate Department of Communication University of Massachusetts, Amherst Amherst, MA 01003 USA ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite