Call for Proposals: “Collections and Collaborations”

Call for Proposals: “Collections and Collaborations”
*Extended Deadline*

We are issuing a Call for Proposals for scholarly and creative
submissions for an International Interdisciplinary Graduate Student
Conference entitled “Collections and Collaborations” to be held at
Indiana University – Bloomington from March 24th – 26th, 2011 (hosted
by the graduate students of the IU Department of English).

New media—most notably Web 2.0 (and now 3.0)—have challenged us to
think about our artistic creations, social spaces, and most deeply
cherished beliefs along increasingly decentered, collectivist lines. Do
such technologies push our creative and critical work in more
collaborative directions? And given that ideas of collective fictions
and culture, collaborations, adaptations, and translations exist in
folk traditions, national legends, and the emergence of the bourgeois
public sphere, is there anything new about collectivity or
collaboration?

This conference seeks to investigate the notion of collections and
collaborations from a wide array of angles. We hope to receive papers
from a variety of disciplines, employing any number of methodologies
and considering any time period. Below are some suggestions for
possible topics. This list is by no means exhaustive; rather, we hope
these ideas might inspire some exciting new thoughts related to the
theme:
• Collaborative writing, storytelling, filmmaking, and performance
• Translation, adaptation, remediation
• Intertextuality, particularly across history or genre
• Museums, readings, performances, exhibitions
• The demise (or afterlife?) of the Romantic “genius”
• The death of the author and originality
• Voice and image: multiple voices/images; resonating voices and
mirroring images
• Mass audiences
• New media
• Web 2.0/3.0: “crowdsourcing,” “truthiness,” and “collaboratition”
• Digital possibilities for collaborative scholarship
• Collective aesthetics
• Genre studies
• Oral and folk traditions
• National legends and myths of “national character”
• The position of the individual in relation to the collective
• Subaltern, or other imposed collective identities
• Collaborative or collectives truths and faiths
• Utopianism and futurism
• The academy’s “collective fictions” (both its useful fictions and its
collective delusions)

We encourage proposals for individual papers as well as panel proposals
organized by topic. In the past, this conference has bridged the
“critical” and “creative,” and we intend to host both critical and
creative panels. Please submit (both as an attachment AND in the body
of the email) an abstract of no more than 250 words along with a few
personal details (name, institutional affiliation, degree level, email,
and phone number) by January 31, 2011 to .

Our keynote speakers at this year’s conference will be Jeremy Braddock
from Cornell University and Ellen MacKay from our home department.

Visit our website (http://www.indiana.edu/~engsac/conference/) for more
information!