Call for Papers: Surveillance Societies Conference

Surveillance Societies: What Price Security?
April 24-26, 2009
Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York

Papers and roundtable discussions are being accepted for a conference focusing on the tensions between systems of security within and between societies and systems of surveillance over members of those societies.

"Possible panel topics: historical considerations, zones of surveillance, scopic economies, religious and juridical apparatuses, networked societies, reconsiderations of Orwell and Foucault, surveillance, security, and emotion, nationalism and security, militarization, literature and film"

Call for Papers: Thinking Gender 2009 (UCLA)

THINKING GENDER, Annual Graduate Student Research Conference
Friday, Feb. 6, 2009
UCLA Faculty Center

Thinking Gender is a public conference highlighting graduate student research on women, sexuality and gender across all disciplines and historical periods. Submission for individual papers and panels are being accepted until Oct. 22, 2008. Topics are encouraged on the following:

• women and media
• local feminist issues and concerns in Southern California
• women and the environment (e.g., ecofeminism, the built environment, urban planning, architecture)
• women and political activism (e.g., women in government, women and war/peace)
• embodiment (e.g., disability, genetics)
• women in sports

Additional information can be found here.

Call for Papers: AAUP Conference

American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
Globalization, Shared Governance and Academic Freedom: An International Conference
June 12-13, 2009
Washington, DC

Among the questions the conference intends to explore are:

• What is the state of academic freedom around the world and what challenges does it currently face in the United States?
• Can scholarship survive in an era of secrecy and censorship?
• Who is making decisions in the corporate university? What ever happened to shared governance?
• What are the implications of the excessive use of contingent faculty and how do we address the issue?
• How are public policy decisions at the national and state levels affecting higher education?
• What are the personal, professional and institutional responsibilities of faculty and how can conflicting responsibilities be resolved?
• How can faculty communicate the intricacies and subtleties of their disciplines to a broad, non-specialist audience?

Conference strands are not limited to the above topics. Presenters are invited to propose a wide range of issues related to academic freedom, governance, faculty work life, rights and responsibilities. The goal of the conference is to provide a faculty perspective on critical issues in higher education presented in a format accessible to the general public.

For more information, please click here.

Call for Papers: AIDS in Culture IV

Aids in Culture IV: Explorations in the Cultural History of AIDS
México City
December 9-13, 2008
Abstract Submission Deadline: September 25, 2008 (deadline extended)

AIDS is not simply an illness or a biomedical phenomenon. The conference cycle "AIDS in Culture" organised by Enkidu Magazine in Mexico City and the International Society for Cultural History and Cultural Studies (CHiCS) in cooperation with CNDH (The National Human Rights Commission in Mexico) seeks to examine cultural responses to AIDS in different cultures and societies across a wide range of perspectives.

The conference will explore the processes by which AIDS is constructed as a cultural phenomenon and how different societies in their encounters with AIDS attempt to create meaning in health, illness and disease. The conference aims at bringing together academics working in all relevant disciplines as well as activists, artists and other professionals, and promoting innovative multidisciplinary and multicultural exchange and dialogue.

Among the themes of interest are the following:

• AIDS and Cultural Texts: Power and Representation.
• Representations of AIDS in art, movies, music, poetry, religion and literature from the 1980s until today.
• Silences and taboos in discourses on HIV/AIDS.
• Aesthetic responses to the challenge. Rituals, customs, and fetishism.
• Cultural practices that influence the spread of HIV/AIDS
• AIDS and collective and individual identities: Race, Class, Gender etc
• AIDS and Politics, Lobbying and Activism: Power, Representation and Activism.
• Constructions and reconstructions of AIDS in political, faith and ideology based discourse, legal issues and policy making throughout the world: Who has the authority to speak and who is silenced?
• AIDS and theory: Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Religious Studies, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Literary Studies and all related disciplines. How do we theorize and analyse experiences and the meaning of illness?
• The ,significance' of AIDS for individuals and communities; the cultural factors influencing our perceptions of health and illness experiences.
• AIDS and psychosocial affects and effects. Cultures of silence.
• Indigenous knowledge and responses to AIDS
• Stories and Histories about AIDS
• AIDS and Oral History
  

Papers will be considered on related themes and topics from a wide range of perspectives. Interdisciplinary perspectives are especially welcome since all these topics in themselves stretch across several disciplines: history, literary studies, linguistics, psychology, political sciences, pedagogy, ethnology, anthropology, sociology...

Graduate and postgraduate students are encouraged to attend and present papers. Selected papers from the conference will also this year be published in book form.

Submission guidelines can be found here.

Open Source Conference

The Director of National Intelligence 2008 Open Source Conference will be held September 11-12, 2008 in Washington, DC. Last year’s conference featured panels on the social sciences and human terrain, academic outreach, and academic-open source connections. The conference should prove interesting to those who are seeking a better understanding of the intelligence community and how some segments of this community view and employ the social sciences. Registration is free, but all attendees must register in advance.

IUAES Conference Postponed

Members of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences were disappointed to hear that the upcoming conference in Kunming was postponed by Chinese authorities. The Chronicle for Higher Education reported that the People's Republic is concerned about a conference that addresses sensitive topics, such as ethnic diversity and conflict, so close to the start of the Olympics.

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