Saturday, April 11, 2009

CFP: Post American City

The New England American Studies Association has extended the CFP for its fall 2009 conference until April 10. The Conference will be Oct. 16-18 i Lowell, MA, on the topic "The Post-American City." The full call is found below.



Taking our cue from Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, the New England American Studies Association invites submissions of individual papers and panels on historic and contemporary understandings of the city in global contexts. Our site in Lowell, Massachusetts, looks back to colonial and early national interactions of an emerging Atlantic World, and to the economic and cultural shifts of the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, our call directs us forward, to the urbanizing and globalizing forces that have brought 21st century immigrants and refugees to Lowell and other cities. This sweeping transnational topic signals our desire to bring together academics from a range of disciplines, including history, literature, economics, political science, environmental studies, urban planning, law, and film and visual cultural studies, as well as community organizers, artists, architects, teachers and policy makers. We hope that Zakaria's argument that the "rise of the rest" has left the United States less dominant provokes dialogue rather than simply agreement. At the same time, we are particularly interested in proposals which connect American urban lives, cultures, economies, policies, and spaces to the rest of the world, and consider the city, past and present, in terms of immigration, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. Questions which guide NEASA's 2009 conference call include:



* How, and to what degree, has a post-American city developed?
* How has globalization changed the city as a site for forming national identity and other kinds of identity?
* How might cities in China, India, South America, or Africa be post-American cities?
* To what extent has the U.S. city always been a hybrid and transnational site?
* How have political and cultural struggles rooted in post-American contexts transformed urban spaces and communities?
* How have shifts in American political and economic power affected particular cities or the idea of the city?
* How is the post-American model different from other models for understanding the city (multicultural, global, cosmopolitan)?
* What are key sites and texts for understanding and shaping the post-American city?
* How have American cities developed individual identities? How have those identities been represented, reified, or challenged?
* In what ways have American cities been distinct from other world metropolises? In what ways have they been similar?

Proposals should include a one page abstract with title, as well as the author's name, address, and institutional or professional affiliation.
For panel proposals please include contact information for all participants, as well as a brief (no more than two page) description of the session. Submit proposals by April 10, 2009 to neasacouncil@gmail.com

Further information is available at our website: http://www.neasa.org


Proposals or queries may also be sent to:
Mary Battenfeld, NEASA
President

Wheelock College, 200 The Riverway
Boston, MA 02215
(617) 879-2369 (mbattenfeld@wheelock.edu)

Friday, April 03, 2009

CFP: Urban Crowds in History (and Beyond)

Urban Crowds in History (and Beyond)

An international and interdisciplinary conference to be held October 15-17, 2009, University of Tours, France.

Crowds, and more specifically urban crowds, have long been a favorite topic for human and social sciences, before fading out from recent research. Is this due to the fact that we have been moving on from an 'age of the masses' to an 'age of the individual'? Indeed, if there is a wealth of studies of crowds at various turning points in history, we lack studies trying to bypass the canonical chronological boundaries and to develop a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue among the social sciences. Crowds are understood here as encompassing political, cultural and religious gatherings, either in a paroxistical form (riots, collective celebration) or in a more subdued, ordinary, form (social networks), as well as collective practices shared by a score of individuals. These collective practices bring crowds to invest the city as its major theatre; crowd action is an addition of individual gestures, postures, behaviors, slogans, cries, screams..., the modalities and temporalities of which deserve a study in their own right.

This conference is aiming at an approach which combines history, sociology, anthropology, social psychology, or literary studies of urban crowds.

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
- theoretical approaches of 'the crowd' from the angle of various social sciences -anthropology, social psychology, political science. - or literary representations;
- when does a crowd become a 'crowd', i.e., when does a gathering of people come to be seen - and whom by ? - as a 'crowd'? Does it change in space and/or time ?
- crowds in urban environments, their means of acting, positioning in, and negociating urban space;
- the various types of crowds : sports crowd, festive crowd, protesting crowd, consumerist crowd (Christmas shopping, the sales.), etc.; their behaviour, with particular attention to chants, speeches, slogans;
- crowd leaders, their means, methods and results;
- the influence of 'populism' on the masses;
- crowd movements relate to social and political passions;
- the means of checking and controlling crowds ;
- the influence of power institutions on gathering crowds and, in return, the influence of gathered crowds on the powers that created them ;

The conference committee will be pleased to welcome 300-word abstracts no later than May 30, 2009. Please include a CV or resume. Selected applicants will be notified by June 30, 2009.

Please send abstracts to
Dr. Christine Bousquet : christinebousquet@gmail.com
Prof. Philippe Chassaigne : philchassaigne@gmail.com
Prof. Stéphane Corbin : stephmagcorbin@wanadoo.fr

A selection of papers presented during the Conference will be published in a special issue of Mana. Revue de sociologie et d'anthropologie (University of Caen, France).


Prof. Philippe Chassaigne
Dept. of History
University of Tours
3 rue des Tanneurs
37000 Tours
France
Email: philchassaigne@gmail.com

Thursday, April 02, 2009

New Book: Coal Mountain Elementary

Coal Mountain Elementary
Poems by Mark Nowak
photographs by Ian Teh and Mark Nowak

“Coal Mountain Elementary is an imaginative and shocking reminder of what it means, in the most human and poignant terms, to be a miner, whether in this country or in China, or for that matter anywhere in the industrial world. It is also a tribute to miners and working people everywhere. It manages, in photos and in words, to portray an entire culture. And it is a stunning educational tool.”—Howard Zinn

“Mark Nowak’s vital poetry cleaves to the hard surfaces of working lives. There is an epic quality to the voices that cannot be dismissed by corporations or the state. Coal Mountain Elementary will move readers to indignation and action.”—Aihwa Ong

A singular, genre-defying treatise from one of America’s most innovative political poets, Coal Mountain Elementary remixes verbatim testimony from the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners and rescue teams, the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren, and newspaper accounts of mining disasters in China with photographs of Chinese miners taken by renowned photojournalist Ian Teh.