<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<table bgcolor="#eeeeee" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"
width="90%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="80"><br>
</td>
<td width="10"><img src="cid:part1.00060000.04000704@kulturad.org"
alt="" height="1" width="10"></td>
<td valign="top">
<b>The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere</b>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="right"><b>Location:</b></td>
<td><a
href="http://www.h-net.org/announce/geography.cgi?geography=India">India</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right"><br>
</td>
<td><br>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right"><br>
</td>
<td><br>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right"><br>
</td>
<td><br>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table width="90%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>XIII International Conference<br>
Theme: “The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere”<br>
15-18 December 2010<br>
Venue: Park View Hotel, Chandigarh, India
<p></p>
<p>The thirteenth International Conference of the Forum on
Contemporary
Theory will be held in Chandigarh from the 15th to 18th December 2010
in collaboration with the Department of English, Panjab University.
</p>
<p>Thematic Introduction<br>
Ever since the 1989 publication of
Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in
English, theorists from a wide variety of disciplines have engaged with
the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, its relation to bourgeois
society and class formation in general, its traction with minority
cultures, its conception of gender and its separation of spheres
between the public and the private. An important thesis of Habermas's
text was what he saw as the degeneration of a rationally based mode of
public deliberation into a consumerist society dominated by a mass
media that was itself compromised by its relationship with the State.
His critics, in turn, have argued that such a transformation was not in
fact a degeneration but a marker of a more egalitarian and democratic
public culture. This conference seeks to re-examine the contours of
this debate in the light of the significant transformations in digital
technology and human communication that have taken place over the last
few decades. </p>
<p>The rapid expansion of the internet, along with email
communications,
online forums, social blogging and social connectivity websites have
transformed the ways in which individuals interact and communicate with
each other in fundamental ways. The transformations have not only been
drastic in terms of how internet-connected individuals organize the
daily routines of their personal lives but it has also affected in many
ways their own self-fashioning as private and public individuals. The
rapid changes have also meant fundamental structural changes in the
institutions that have traditionally served as key elements of societal
communication and deliberation. For instance, as more individuals
communicate via email and as more enterprises advertise online, the
U.S. Postal service currently faces a severe shortage in revenue and is
almost certainly positioned to see cutbacks. As more readers choose to
access their latest news coverage online (often at no cost), many local
and indeed national newspapers in the U.S. have found their advertising
and subscriptions revenues dwindle often resulting in bankruptcy. In
the meantime within a decade of its existence, "google" has become a
commonly used verb, "friending" someone has become an (almost)
competitive sport and the blogosphere has shown evidence of layers of
mutually "following" bloggers that can only be described as a
rhizomatic array of mutual enchantments. And if the internet has become
the base for a newly ordered public and commercial sphere (think online
banking and shopping here), corollary devices that use the internet
along with advanced GPS positioning technology (think Smartphones and
particularly the IPhone here), have arguably made their increasingly
dependent users the cyborgs that visionary theorists in the past had
long anticipated.
</p>
<p>We have seen, in short, at least in the world of the
internet-connected, a "virtual" transformation of the public sphere --
a transformation as "real" as "virtual" can get. This conference seeks
to examine the multiple sites of this transformation as well as the
many inequities, challenges and silences that it may conceal. Our aim
is to cast a wide net on a range of issues: how have digital
technologies transformed our engagement with human creativity and
communication? How has, for instance, our increased access to
electronic texts and databases (whether through Project Gutenberg or
Google Books to name only two), affected the ways in which we go about
leading our lives, not only as scholars, but also as lay citizens? How
have such technologies affected our notion of the "literary" and its
genres? To give a specific example: how are our literary theories of
the genre of "autobiography" affected by the proliferation of personal
web pages and tweets? Or, to turn to a different discipline, how have
art historians and other scholars of visual culture reconceptualized
some of the foundational theories and methods of their field in the
flurry of visual dissemination enabled by new media technologies? What,
in short, are the implications and possibilities of the digital
humanities? And, to what extent can digital technologies and the new
media help foreground the centrality of the humanities and art to
public culture and social life?
</p>
<p>Our aim in considering the virtual transformation of the
public
sphere is neither to be uncritically celebratory nor to be unduly
cynical. Rather, we hope to gather scholars from a variety of
disciplinary and intellectual backgrounds who are interested in
reflecting on these transformations and theorizing them in relation to
issues of power, justice, privacy, identity, political deliberation,
civic society and also of aesthetics, consumption, and pleasure.
</p>
<p>The following topics are intended to help those who are
interested in participating in the conference in formulating their
proposals for submission. However, they are only suggestive, and not
exhaustive:
</p>
<p>(a) What are the limits of the public/private divide and how
do the new media inscribe them?<br>
(b)
How are the categories of "literature" or "art" affected by the
dissemination in the new media of a number of mixed genre texts and new
modes of visuality?<br>
(c) How are patterns and habits of "reading" changed when individuals
turn to the new media for access to more conventionally created texts
such as novels?<br>
(d) How are our theories of the "human" revised or modified when human
beings increasingly engage in the virtual sphere? <br>
(e) Do the new media help or hurt the growth of literacy? How does our
understanding of "literacy" change when we consider it in relation to
new media?<br>
(f) What is the nature of "imagined communities" on the internet?<br>
(g) How do issues of anonymity mediate public discourse on the internet?<br>
(h) How do the still-evolving social conventions of email disrupt or
reinforce existing social relations?<br>
(i) What are the social dynamics of "blogging"?<br>
(j) Is there a technological divide of access across different
communities and if so, how are we to best identify it?<br>
(k) How does the global nature of internet discourse radically change
earlier notions of the Public Sphere?<br>
(l) How does active participation in online communities affect the ways
in which contemporary individuals fashion their identities?<br>
(m) What are the potential strengths and drawbacks of new digital
technologies in the research lives of scholars? <br>
(n) How can the new media help in the dissemination of the humanities
and the arts in the world at large?<br>
(o) Can the digital humanities "save" the humanities from their
allegedly slipping hold on the public imagination?
</p>
<p></p>
<p>Special Session<br>
In conformity with our earlier practice, a plenary session on a
regional text will be one of the special features of the conference
schedule. This year’s choice for the panel is Gurdial Singh’s novel
Unhoye (1966), translated into English by Rana Nayar as The Survivors
(New Delhi: Katha India Library, 2005). A distinguished Punjabi writer
of our time, Gurdial Singh has received numerous awards including the
Jnanpith Literary Award for his outstanding contribution to Indian
literature. The Survivors is a novel about how ordinary individuals in
a small town in the Malwa region of Punjab in India strive to maintain
their dignity and self-respect against injustice and oppression
perpetrated by a hierarchical social order that continues to thrive
despite the nation’s independence. By focusing upon the disintegration
of community life under the pressures of the process of modernization,
the novel addresses several connected issues of national importance
such as the persistence of the caste system; the widening gap between
the rich and the poor under globalization; the disintegration of
kinship culture and community life; and the general impact of Western
modernity on social and religious practices. While reflecting, like
Thomas Hardy and R. K. Narayan, on the life of a specific region in the
Punjab in post-independence India, the novel tries to capture
stylistically the subtle nuances of the regional dialect in a poetic
manner. This could be an indicator of a new direction in Indian
literature which pays more attention to the invocation of a culture
through its linguistic resources than to the negotiation of grand
themes under the influence of world literature. It is in the creative
exploitation of the poetics of the local that the strength of The
Survivors lies. </p>
<p>Submission Deadline<br>
500-word abstract or proposal is due by August 30, 2010. The abstract
should have a title for the presentation along with the name and
institutional affiliation of the presenter and should be mailed as an
email attachment to Gaurav Desai, the Convener of the Conference
(<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:gaurav@tulane.edu">gaurav@tulane.edu</a>). Complete papers should be limited to 12 pages
(approximately 20 minutes of reading time). A longer version may be
submitted for possible publication in the Journal of Contemporary
Thought or in the conference volume brought out by the Forum. The
completed paper should reach the Convener of the Conference by November
15, 2010.
</p>
<p>Conference Volume<br>
Select papers from the conference and
from those submitted in response to the “Call for Papers” will be
included in the conference volume, which will be ready for formal
release at the 2011 conference of the Forum. Completed papers should
reach the Conference Convener as email attachments by May 1, 2011. </p>
<p>Registration Deadline<br>
The last date for receiving the registration fee is September 15, 2010.
The fee may be paid through a bank draft drawn in favor of Forum on
Contemporary Theory on a Bank in Baroda. Overseas participants may pay
the fee through checks drawn in favor of Forum on Contemporary Theory.
The amount should be sent to the address of Forum on Contemporary
Theory mentioned on this leaflet. We encourage participants to register
early so that their accommodation at the Park View Hotel is assured.
All participants need to be pre-registered. The registration fee is
non-refundable. Each participant will be sharing his/her room with
another participant, as there are no rooms with single beds in the
hotel. </p>
<p>1. Participant from India (member of the Forum) Rs.5000/<br>
2. Participant from India (non-member) Rs.6000/<br>
3. Overseas Participant (non-SAARC countries) US $400/<br>
4. Overseas Participant (SAARC countries) US $150/<br>
5. Local Participant (member of the Forum) Rs.1500/<br>
6. Local Participant (non-member) Rs.3000/<br>
7. Student Participant (from Panjab University) Rs.500/ </p>
<p>The registration fee from the outstation participant will
cover room
rent and breakfast and lunch from 15th December to the afternoon of
18th December, and cost of the conference volume dedicated to the
twelfth international conference held in Trivandrum. The fee from the
local participant will cover lunch, conference tea and the cost of the
conference volume. The participants should arrive on December 15th and
stay on until the afternoon of December 18. The conference will begin
at about 9 am on the 16th and will be over with lunch on the 18th
December. 15th December is reserved for local sight seeing for which an
additional fee will be charged.
</p>
<p>Keynote Speaker<br>
Nicholas D. Mirzoeff, Professor in the
Department of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University
will deliver the keynote address on the topic “Global Visualities in
Crisis.” He has taught at State University of New York at Stony Brook,
University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Texas at Austin,
University of California at Irvine, and University of Warwick, England.
His publications include The Right to Look: A Counter-History of
Visuality (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2010-11); Watching
Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (Routledge, 2005);
An Introduction to Visual Culture (Routledge,1999); Silent Poetry:
Deafness, Sign and Visual Culture in Modern France (Princeton
University Press, 1995); Bodyscape: Art, Modernity, and the Ideal
Figure (Routledge, 1995). He has edited The Visual Culture Reader
(Routledge, 1998) and Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing
Africans and Jews (Routledge, 2000). His research articles have
appeared in such journals as Culture, Theory and Society; PMLA; Social
Text; October; The Journal of Visual Culture; Radical History Review;
Eighteenth Century Studies and as chapters in several critical
anthologies.
</p>
<p>For further information any of the following may be contacted:
</p>
<p>Prafulla C. Kar<br>
Convener, Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda<br>
Tel: 0265-2338067 ®; (0265) 2320870 (O)<br>
Email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:prafullakar@gmail.com">prafullakar@gmail.com</a>
</p>
<p>Gaurav Desai<br>
Convener of the Conference<br>
Department of English<br>
Tulane University, New Orleans, USA<br>
Email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:gaurav@tulane.edu">gaurav@tulane.edu</a>
</p>
<p>Rana Nayar<br>
Local Convener<br>
Head, Department of English<br>
Panjab University, Chandigarh<br>
Email: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:rananayar@gmail.com">rananayar@gmail.com</a>
</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table bgcolor="#eeeeee" border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0"
width="90%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#330066" valign="top" width="1"><img
src="cid:part1.00060000.04000704@kulturad.org" alt="" height="1"
width="1"></td>
<td width="100%">
Prafulla Kar
<br>
Forum on Contemporary Theory
<br>
Baroda, India
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:prafullakar@gmail.com">prafullakar@gmail.com</a><br>
Email: <a href="mailto:prafullakar@gmail.com">prafullakar@gmail.com</a><br>
Visit the website at <a href="http://www.fctworld.org">http://www.fctworld.org</a></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</body>
</html>