Edited Collection on Biopolitics and Utopia
We are seeking chapters that address and explore approaches to utopia and biopolitics, both very broadly conceived. Scientific progress in “improving” the human body and experience has provoked ethical, moral, and policy considerations regarding both intent and results. This edited volume seeks to address questions of utopian drives and desires in these modern advances, as well as the idea of governmental and other institutional interventions into the human body.
The primary aim of the volume is to serve as an interdisciplinary reader on utopian studies and biopolitics. We are interested in contributions both disciplinary and interdisciplinary from across the range of theoretical, methodological, and critical frameworks within the fields of political science, history, sociology, philosophy, bioethics, and public policy. Essays should demonstrate clear links between biopolitics and utopian studies themes.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Biometrics: The use of biometrics or biometric authentication technologies and concepts, physiological identification, as well as biological surveillance issues more broadly.
Environment: Social movements that target environmental concerns; technological advancements offered to mitigate the effects of environmental degradation; or the social and economic impacts of environmental problems.
Food: Contemporary agricultural practices like genetic modification or the use of technology in food production. Other topics may address food movements in urban agricultural, localism, or organic practices.
Gender: Gender as an apparatus of biopower; gender-based oppression and discrimination.
Medicine: Medicine and medical practices designed to “enhance” the human body for therapeutic or non-therapeutic purposes, to include gene therapy, cognitive science advances, and nanotechnology.
Race: Pseudosciences of race and racial hierarchies; biopolitical state racism; may also be tied to eugenics and/or notions of empire and colonialism.
Reproduction and/or Eugenics: Practices in assisted reproductive technologies or genetic testing.
Self: Utopian ideas and personal practices of the body affecting identity, aesthetics/appearance, performance, and health, including body modifications, weight management, and athletics, among others.
Technology and the Body: Biotechnology and its applications for the human body writ large; theoretical frameworks exploring technological solutions for ideas about the utopia of the body.
We also welcome other topics that show a clear connection with these themes.
Please send completed essays of 5,000 to 7,000 words, along with a brief (300 word) biography and a CV, in either *.rtf (rich text format) or *.doc (MS Word document format), to editors Andrew Byers and Patricia Stapleton (utopianbiopolitics@gmail.com) by April 1, 2014.
Interested collaborators are encouraged to send 500 word abstracts to the co-editors by January 15, 2014, if they would like their topic reviewed before completing a full essay for submission.
The History and Political Science Department at Chestnut Hill College will
host an interdisciplinary conference on “The Legacy of World War I,” November
14-15, 2014. Keynote speakers will be Jay Winter (Yale University) and
Laura Lee Downs (European University Institute, Florence, Italy).
Proposals for papers or panels are invited on any issue related to “The
Legacy of World War I.” The Great War was a cataclysmic event with
consequences for the world up to our own day. Papers may relate to the
immediate or long-term ramifications of the war – – political, diplomatic,
military, social, economic, technological, intellectual, cultural, etc.
Proposals should be about 250-300 words and be accompanied by a CV.
Proposals from advanced graduate students will be considered. Papers will
be allowed 20-25 minutes for presentation. We also seek individuals who are
interested in serving as a Chair of a session. Presenters of papers and
chairs of sessions are required to register for the conference.
In 2003 Chestnut Hill College inaugurated the “Legacy Conferences”;
previous conferences have addressed the “Kennedy Legacy” (2003), “The
Legacy of the Second World War” (2005), the “Legacy of 1968” (2008), and
“The Legacy of the Civil War” (2011).
Deadline for proposals is April 1, 2014. Send proposals to William Walker
at wwalker@chc.edu or mail them to him at Chestnut Hill College, 9601
Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19118. To be placed on a mailing list
for conference registration, send your name, mailing address, and email
address to William Walker at wwalker@chc.edu .
Graduate Centre for Europe, University of Birmingham
8th Annual Conference
‘Travelling Europe’: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Place and Space
26th – 27th March 2014
This year marks a number of exciting events in the fields of travel
and tourism within the UK and Europe. From the UK’s own Yorkshire
earning the accolade of Europe’s leading travel destination to recent
debates surrounding the High Speed 2 railway line, transport and
travel have seldom been out of the headlines. In addition, several
other developments are underway including the pioneering efforts of
the European Commission to simplify visa procedures in a bid to
attract more tourists. Coupled with our increasingly globalised world,
it is now more pertinent than ever to consider these fields of travel
and tourism in a European and indeed global context.
The Graduate Centre for Europe’s Eighth Annual Conference invites
contributions from postgraduates across a variety of disciplines. It
aims to promote dynamic cross-disciplinary dialogue, foster valuable
links between postgraduates and academics across different areas, and
develop new and exciting ways of thinking within ‘European’ research.
We would welcome proposals for individual papers and panels on any
aspect of travel, tourism and space within Europe in relation to
politics, communications, education, economics, history, law,
literature, music, geography, environmental sciences etc. Panels have
been proposed on the following themes and further panels or individual
papers are also invited on either these or similar topics:
– ‘Travelling Ideas’: Intellectuals in Europe
– ‘The Past is Another Country’: Imagining Europe’s Past through Heritage Sites
– Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Europeanization
– ‘Inside-Looking Out’: Europe’s Relations with the World
– Geographically Sustainable Tourism in Europe
– Natural Area Tourism and the Conservation of Geodiversity
Participants are also encouraged to submit their conference papers for
publication in the Graduate Centre for Europe’s postgraduate journal,
the Birmingham Journal for Europe.
Lunch and refreshments will be provided throughout the conference, as
well as a conference dinner on the first evening. A limited number of
bursaries will also be available to assist with travel and
accommodation expenses.
If you would like to present at the conference, please send an
abstract of 200-300 words, along with your contact details, to
gcfe@contacts.bham.ac.uk by 12th January 2014.
********
Central European Cities and Towns at AHA in NYC 2015
I am working with editors Bridget Heal and Neil Gregor to organize a
special issue of the journal German History (Oxford Journals) focusing on
Central European urban history.
As one preliminary step we are aiming to create a “Workshop” of two or
three traditional sessions at the 2015 AHA meeting in New York City (02 –
05 Jan.). These sessions will help us survey and assess the current state
of research in this field as it is unfolding in Europe, North America, and
elsewhere. For that purpose the Workshop “New Research on Cities and Towns
in Central Europe” is broadly conceived with in terms of time periods
(medieval to modern), subjects (material to ideal), and disciplines
(history and all others). From the pool of replies we will organize
appropriate sessions which might be based on periods, methods, or themes.
Bridget Heal and Neil Gregor have agreed to chair one session each, so we
are looking for 2 or 3 commentators and 6-10 paper presenters. If you wish
to propose a paper for the Workshop, please send an abstract of 200 to 300
words to me, Robert Mark Spaulding, at (spauldingr@uncw.edu) by Friday
24 January 2014.
If you know colleagues who are working in this field and who might be
interested in participating in the Workshop, please bring this notice to
their attention or send along their names to me and I will contact them
directly. – Robert Spaulding
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History, Memory and European Identity
The *History of European Integration Research Society (HEIRS)* is seeking
papers for its 10th annual conference: “History, Memory and European
Identity”. The conference will take place at *Maastricht University
(NL)* from *5-6 June 2014* and aims at bringing together PhD students,
young researchers and renowned specialists from both social sciences
and history.
The question of how to generate a sense of belonging to a multinational
political community has preoccupied intellectuals and politicians since the
founding moments of the European Union. Particularly in times of stress and
doubt calls for a European identity have become a central topic. Currently,
in the wake of the on-going EU crisis discussions about the connection
between the construction (or the lack) of a common European identity and
legitimacy of EU governance are coming back to the fore. Debates centre on
the question if and how the EU can effectively and lawfully operate if its
citizens do not sustain the integration project sufficiently enough. Apart
from discussions on the possibility of and the need for a political
identity we can discern a separate discourse on questions surrounding the
development of a cultural identity and common memory of Europe. The
concepts of identity, memory and lieux de mémoire are in fact deeply
interwoven.
Attempts to generate a European cultural or political identity are almost
as old as the European integration project itself. Official identity
politics on the other hand are a fairly new phenomenon. Despite the fact
that social scientists have invested considerable efforts in trying to
analyse the latter, historical approaches are still underrepresented. This
conference aims at understanding the on-going debates on cultural and
political identity. It will investigate efforts made by different political
and social actors since the 1950s to generate a sense of belonging to the
European Union. How did early attempts of fostering a European identity
look like? Who were the actors and agents? Is a common identity dependent
on the actions of classical political actors? Which elements of European
history have been harnessed in order to provide a basis for a common
identity? HEIRS particularly welcomes papers that focus on the relationship
between memory and identity on the one hand and political versus cultural
identity on the other.
Paper proposals (max. 250 words) together with a short biographical note
(max. 50 words) on the author should be sent to
aline.sierp@maastrichtuniversity.nl by *1 February 2013*. There will be no
extra conference fee.
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Germans in the Pacific World from the late 17th to 20th Century
March 5-7, 2015
Conference at the University of California in San Diego
Conveners: Hartmut Berghoff (GHI), Frank Biess (UCSD), Ulrike Strasser
(UCSD)
While the transpacific networks and the cultural
encounters of Asians have received a relatively high level of attention in
recent years, especially in subjects like Pacific, Oceanic, Area or
Colonial Studies, the German element in these transit regional exchanges has often
been underestimated or overlooked. This holds especially true for research on
the European presence in the early modern period when Germany¹s lack of formal
colonies long seemed to obviate the need to look for Germans in this part
of the world.
In recent years individual scholars have started to
uncover the significant presence and influence of Germans in the Pacific
since the late 17th century in the economic, cultural, educational,
religious and academic or intellectual spheres: from early modern
missionaries and merchants to modern entrepreneurs and Cold War strategists. They have
also probed the ways in which the Pacific figured in the development of German
thought about culture and national identity in relationship to a larger
world. In addition, a growing number of works on the German colonialism in the
Pacific have appeared.
This conference seeks to summarize the
state-of-the-art of research so far and aims at developing a
trans-disciplinary research agenda for the future. To capture the multi-faceted and
multi-nodalconnections between Germany and the Pacific, the conferences deliberately
pushes the temporal frame beyond the period of colonial expansion, and
investigates instead questions of continuities and discontinuities in the German
presence abroad across the early modern/modern divide and into the 20th
century. The conference also takes a
very broad view of the Pacific. It seeks to illuminate the myriad of
Pacific worlds that stretch from the different landmasses bordering the globe¹s
largest ocean to the innumerable islands scattered across it and the spaces in
between.
Possible themes for paper proposals included but are not limited to the
following:
* German expeditions to the Pacific
* German missionaries in the Pacific
* German migrations to and from the Pacific
* German merchants and entrepreneurs in the Pacific
* German immigrant communities in the Pacific
* Economic relations between Germany and the Pacific
* German colonialism in the Pacific
* Germany¹s relationship with the Pacific as a postcolonial space
* Pacific as an area of German imperial interest and expansion
* The Pacific as part of Germany¹s Cold War
* Pacific life worlds as a subject of academic disciplines
* Knowledge transfer between the Pacific and Germany
Pending the approval of several funding requests, the conference
organizers hope to cover travel expenses, accommodation, and some meals
for the conference participants. Please send a proposal of no more than
500 words and a short CV to fabricius@ghi-dc.org
DEADLINE for submissions: MARCH 1, 2014
UB Graduate Group for German & Austrian Studies 