Call for Papers: GradNet thirteenth annual postgraduate conference

by | Mar 10, 2020 | Calls for paper | 0 comments

Friday 22 May 2020, University of Southampton, Avenue Campus

Communication, Connectivity, and Convergence

Throughout history, humans have sought connection, through shared language, art, music and culture, through political discourse, and through global expansion. Every facet of our world is dominated by our relationships with the people around us, on a global, national, regional, local, and personal scale. From our daily interactions with our friends, families and peers, to our engagement with politics, the media, and large-scale organisations, our notions of identity, belonging and self are embroiled in our connections with others.

This year’s conference will draw on the themes of communication, connectivity and convergence. As a cross-disciplinary event, the GradNet Conference brings together PGRs from across the Arts and Humanities and allows us to consider our own research within the broader context of those fields. We bring together historians, art historians, literary scholars, linguists, musicians, creative writers, anthropologists, philosophers, social scientists, classicists, and many more sub-disciplines, with an aim to connect and to communicate, and ultimately to converge our areas of study to form a more balanced and nuanced view of the human experience.

We welcome abstracts for papers along the following themes (or on any other theme linked to the idea of communication, connectivity and convergence):

  • Cultural contact, cultural identity, group-consciousness.
  • The role of language in interpersonal connection, from a personal to a global scale.
  • The role of literature, philosophy, art, film and music in communication and connection.
  • Connectivity and convergence through social organisations, be they religious, social justice, corporate, or otherwise.
  • War, destruction and division, the breaking down of human connections.
  • The role of memory, heritage and memorialisation in uniting or dividing communities.
  • Collective memory and the passing down of knowledge and traditions.
  • Connection & division through migration, diaspora, resettlement, border crossing.
  • The lure and the challenges of making mental and spiritual connections.
  • The role of cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research, the future of arts and humanities research, issues of outreach in and communication of arts and humanities research.

We invite submissions from across the Arts and Humanities for 20-minute papers.

Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words, along with a short bio of up to 75 words, to l.brinkley@soton.ac.uk by Friday 17 April 2020. Abstracts and bios should be provided as Word files.

Please direct any enquiries to the conference organisers at the e-mail address noted above.

Speakers may also have the opportunity to submit an expanded version of their paper for publication in the peerreviewed journal, Emergence.

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