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Questions regarding this conference should be directed to the program Administrator Mr. Mangok Bol at mbol@brandeis.edu or Program director Prof. Mark Auslander at mausland@brandeis.edu

Graduate Student Conference 2010


Call for Papers

An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference on

Troubling Reality: (Re)Imagining Realms of the Real

Hosted by
Brandeis University's Interdisciplinary M.A. Program in Cultural Production

March 12-13, 2010
At Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Conference Topic:
The "real" and the realm(s) in which it exists cannot be understood as fixed entities, but rather as an imagined reality that produces the formations and functions of "reality," a (re)presentation, which, paradoxically, makes "reality" unstable and fragmented.

We invite proposals for academic papers, posters, videos, installations, multimedia works, and performance pieces, exploring the following questions:

  • How do formations of the real and unreal help constitute social bodies, social consciousnesses, and social forms?
  • In what ways can the contentious interspace between real and real, signifier and signified, be understood as liminal or interstitial phenomena?
  • How are implicit assertions of reality embedded within taken for granted bodily, spatial, and temporal experience? W
  • What are the roles and possibilities of human imagination in the naturalization and interrogation of the conventionally perceived textures of the real?

Keynote Speaker:
SARAJEVO ROSES: THE BOSNIAN WAR AND THE SPACES IN BETWEEN" Dr. Amila Buturovic. (Associate Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, York University)

Keynote address in the Cultural Production graduate student conference, "Troubling Reality: (Re)Imagining Realms of the Real"
Saturday, March 13, 2010 at 1:15 p.m. Slosberg Music Recital Hall, Brandeis University (Waltham, Massachusetts)

ABSTRACT:  Contemporary Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzogovenia,  is marked by the traces of wartime bomb blasts, etched in the stone of pavement and walls. Dubbed by locals, "Sarajevo Roses," this sites have come to function as uncanny shrines to losses and experiences that transcend conventional language and structures of remembrance. Sometimes colored in with shades of red by neighborhood residents, the Roses resist distillation to overarching nationalist narratives or standard forms of closure; they exist suspended, in uneasy and troublesome ways, between past and present, loss and recovery, pain and longing.  They seem to epitomize a sensibility of the liminal, long prominent in Bosnian Sufi thought, which holds that "spaces in between" conventional frameworks of reality are highly generative and life-giving.  In the tangible presence of the Roses and other quiet reminders of traumatic loss, fissures are opened up in the normal texture of the real, signaling new possibilities for unruly imaginations

Please submit an abstract of 250 words by January 15, 2010 to reimagining.reality@gmail.com. Format your abstract for blind review by a committee of graduate students in the Cultural Production program, by attaching a cover page with the author's name, title of abstract, institution and contact information. Please include only the title of the abstract on all other pages. Notifications of selected papers will be sent out by February 1, 2010.
 

Please find here a pdf flyer of this event.

have a link to the description of the 2009 conference.