[Discussion] UPDATE: Home: A Visual Studies Conference (1/20/05; 3/4/05-3/5/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Abstract due date extended.
Keynote and film screening information added.

HOME: A Visual Studies Conference

Hosted by the Graduate Program in Visual Studies, University of
California, Irvine, March 4-5, 2005.

One page abstracts due: January 20, 2005

After decades of culture wars and political struggle, and in a
contemporary situation riven by the aggressive return of the topos
=E2=80=9Chomeland,=E2=80=9D questions of =E2=80=9Chome=E2=80=9D call urge=
ntly for analysis, both
in terms of their contemporary centrality and historical provenance.

=E2=80=9CHOME: A Visual Studies Conference,=E2=80=9D will provide a forum=
 for a
critical interrogation of "home" as concept, ideology, physical
structure, and object of representation.  Our hope is to bring together
scholars from a variety of disciplines to query how "home" structures
public and private processes of meaning formation, self-fashioning, and
political contestation.

Keynote address: Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Gray Jr. Professor Emeritus of
English and American Studies, Yale University.  Recently awarded an
Emeritus Fellowship by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for ongoing work
on Wright Morris, Trachtenberg's scholarly work has focused on 19th and
20th century American cultural history. His books include Reading
American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans;
Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol; and The Incorporation of America:
Culture and Society in the Gilded Age.  His most recent book, Shades of
Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1890-1930, will appear in
October 2004. Trachtenberg has also edited or contributed to a number of
other books, including The American Image and Classic Essays on
Photography, and Documenting America, 1935-1943.  His honors include the
International Center of Photography's Writing Award for 1991 and
fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation and the
Guggenheim Foundation.

Film screenings and director discussions: Im Kwon-Taek, "Father of New
Korean Cinema" and winner of numerous international awards including
Best Director at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, will present his 1993
classic, Sopyonje, and Britta Sjogren, an independent American filmmaker
and winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film at the 1996
Sundance Festival, will preview her new feature, In This Short Life.

Panels may move between such diverse topics as Jacques Derrida's
interrogation of hospitality and the foreigner, Lynn Spigel's inquiry
into domestic ideology and technology, Griselda Pollock's analyses of
the gendered spaces of modernism, Lucy Lippard's work on the "lure of
the local,2 and Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman's critique of the politics
of Israeli settlement, to name but a few.

We encourage creative and theoretical submissions that investigate
=E2=80=9Chome=E2=80=9D in historical and international contexts as well a=
s domestic,
contemporary ones. Through such juxtapositions, we hope to highlight the
historical contingency of "home" even as we underscore its ubiquity
and variegated universality.

Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to, the following:

Domesticity, Ideology, and/or Technology: Home as ideology or technology
in diverse international and historical contexts; the Victorian home and
the modern machine home of consumer leisure; domesticity,
representation, and the Defense of Marriage Act; House & Home/Home &
Garden; Martha Stewart Living; IKEA; Home Depot; home movies; HBO; the
public and private of broadcast media and the internet; virtual
communities, both international and local; domesticity, home pages, and
internet spaces; home surveillance; McMansions and trailer parks;

Historical and (Inter)National Representations of Home: Representations
of domesticity and gender, sexuality, family, and/or communal/political
practice in contemporary visual media as well as historical genres; the
gendered spaces of modernism; ideology and community in historical and
international home architectures and communal spaces; modern domestic
design; postmodern representations and conceptions of domesticity;

Home, Hospitality, and the Other: Theorizations of home such as Emmanuel
Levinas=E2=80=99s work on the dwelling or Jacques Derrida=E2=80=99s work =
on
hospitality and the foreigner; the uncanny; liminality and
inside/outside; disciplinarity, =E2=80=9Chome departments,=E2=80=9D and a=
cademia;
nationalism; homeland security; citizenship and civic engagement;

Home, Space, Borders, and Populations: Spatial politics; nomadic and
transitory cultures and populations; nationalism and globality; national
identity and post-coloniality; cosmopolitanism; terrorism and homeland
in/securities; gentrification; town planning; re/settlement;
homelessness; migration, deracination, and hybridity; disequilibrium in
the ghetto and the planned or gated community.

The deadline for submission of 250-500 word abstracts is January 15, 2005=
.

Please include your name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, and
phone number.

Send abstracts to Jonas Leddington (jledding@uci.edu).

For general questions about the conference, contact either Jaime Brunton
(jbrunton@uci.edu) or Jonas Leddington (jledding@uci.edu).



 From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List