[Discussion] CFP: Intersections: Emerging Spaces, Transforming Scapes (grad) (1/20/06; 3/24/06-3/26/06)

[gpultar@cstgroup.org]

From: Peter Ryan <pryan@arts.ryerson.ca>

Please circulate this CFP to all potentially interested graduate scholars.
Thank you and please accept apologies for cross-posting.

Peter Ryan
Intersections 2005 Conference Chair
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EMERGING SPACES, TRANSFORMING SCAPES
Intersections 2006: A Graduate Student Creative Conference
Call For Proposals (CFP)

CFP DEADLINE: Friday, January 20th, 2006

Hosted by the students of the Joint Graduate Programme in
Communication and Culture
York University and Ryerson University
Toronto, Canada
March 24-26, 2006


EMERGING SPACES, TRANSFORMING SCAPES

We invite all interested graduate students to join us for our 5th annual
Intersections weekend Creative Conference. This year we are especially
interested in discussing the significance of both new and established scapes,
and their relationships with and connections to imagined and physical spaces.
Edges, nodes, networks, overflows, streams: the way we imagine our world is
changing. We are at a point where it is important to reflect upon and consider
older connectivities established through non-electronic media, while at the
same time considering the potentials of new media through emerging communication
technologies. Bodies, commodities, ideas, and technologies follow an exploding
number of conduits between the local and the global, around, through, and behind
nations and institutions.

The 2006 Intersections Conference will be the 5th annual event organized by the
York/Ryerson joint Programme in Communication and Culture. After last year's
successful conference concerning themes of HYBRID ENTITIES, which analyzed
haphazard links, mongrel formations, and mutant compositions, we are now
interested in submissions that explore intersections where steps and solutions
can be actively followed in attempts to answer the many questions that arise
when we try to create and influence the direction of Communications and Culture.
 The conference will investigate the following new spaces and modes of movement:
How and by who are these flows, networks, and disjunctures created? By what
paths do we move/think through them? Where is power, and how does it move? Do
borders, edges, and in-between spaces exist? What happens here? Is social change
or even directionality possible within a fluid and shifting environment? What
metaphors and tools can we use to conceptualize the world and the future? What
potential exists for scapes of resistance, or opportunities to challenge present
boundaries and structures? What can we learn from the past? How can we imagine
new social formations, solidarity, and subjects positions in the 21st Century?

Open to all graduate students, this interdisciplinary conference welcomes
submissions that take up these themes either through an academic paper
presentation, an artistic expression, or an activist agenda. Details on
subtopics and submission procedures follow below. We encourage all interested
activists and scholars to participate and to come celebrate the Fifth
Anniversary of the Intersections Conference!!

*******************************
SUBTOPICS AND THEMES

Invited submissions include papers, artwork and activist presentations that
relate to the following broad themes:

1) Media and Culture
Topics could include (but are not limited to) cultural consumption and
production, cultures of cities, space and place, depictions of
ability/disability, media democracy, media studies, popular and visual culture,
subjectivity, representations of class/ethnicity/gender/race/sexualities,
semiotics and linguistics.

2) Technology in Practice
Submissions in this category might address (but are not limited to) questions
regarding technology's emergent role in theoretical and practical debates
surrounding art, authenticity, and aesthetics, negotiations of accessibility and
identity, race and gender, explorations in the concepts of the cyborg, the
post-human, and technoculture. Also, issues of how the Internet and network
society is reconfiguring social formations and subject positions will be
considered as a part of this category.

3) Politics and Policy
Potential areas of focus could include (but are not limited to) accessibility,
citizenship, communication policy, copyright and intellectual property, cultural
policy, deliberations about communication and culture and the public sphere,
globalization, media ownership in Canada, questions of structure, power and
agency, privacy and surveillance, sovereignty, and strategies of resistance.


SUBMISSION FORMAT/DEADLINES

As an expanded event, this year EMERGING SPACES will include the following
formats for disseminating and discussing ideas.

1) Paper presentations
- 15 min. presentation of an academic paper with time for discussion to follow

2) Creative work with artist's talk
- Artwork/media for exhibition, accompanied by artist talk during the conference

3) Poster session (with possible roundtable discussion)
- Presentation of materials in a poster and/or table display with discussant. 
If enough interest, these displays may be followed by a roundtable discussion.

Although these formats are tailored to accommodate academic papers, artwork and
activist contributions respectively, all participants are encouraged to apply
for whatever format is most interesting or appropriate for your submission.

All interested participants are asked to submit a textual abstract or artist's
statement explaining the proposed presentation in light of the conference
themes, and indicate which of the above three formats the presentation would
take.

Abstract or statement should be no more than 250 words (approx. 1 typewritten
page, double spaced) and submitted via email as an attachment in .TXT, .RTF, or
Microsoft Word format.

Name and contact information should not appear on this page. Please include a
separate page with the following information:

1. Title of presentation as it appears on the abstract or statement
2. Name
3. Affiliation (program and university)
4. Level and year of study (ex. Master's, 2nd year)
5. Phone number
6. E-mail address
7. Mailing address
8. A/V requirements (computer/projector, film projector, VCR, stereo,
turntables, etc.)
9. Other requirements (table, easel, hooks, display materials). If you have
exceptional requirements for your work, please contact us to discuss
feasibility.

Artists are also asked to submit a small sample of their work for adjudication,
by either email or post.

If sending creative works by email, please submit up to 10 jpegs sized to
display onscreen or a multimedia clip with cumulative attachment size of 5mb or
less. You may also direct us to an URL. Please number the pieces and put viewing
instructions, comments and titles in your email if applicable.

If submitting creative works by post, please mail the proposal well before the
deadline with a self-addressed, stamped envelope for return to the following
address:

Intersections, c/o Graduate Communication and Culture
3068 TEL Building, York University
4700 Keele St. Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3

You may send a CD, DVD, cued video or other multimedia, the duration of which
does not exceed 10 minutes. Alternatively, you may send up to 10 slides or
printouts of work, illustrations or diagrams. Please include a slide or media
list with title, size, media, and date, and viewing instructions for your work
if applicable. Please do not send original work.

Deadline:  FRIDAY, JANUARY 20th, 2006.

Please e-mail inquiries and submissions to: intersec@ryerson.ca

CFP available online: http://www.yorku.ca/cocugsa/conference.html

Presented by the Communication and Culture Graduate Students
Association (GSA): http://www.yorku.ca/cocugsa

For more information about the Joint Programme in Communication and Culture:
http://www.yorku.ca/comcult/



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