|
The Texas Tech Graduate English Society welcomes print or electronic graduate student proposals (250-word abstracts) addressing this year's theme (Past and Future Perspectives: Negotiating our Changing Field) or any topic of interest to English scholars. The 2002 conference will include sessions on a range of subjects within the following general sub-fields: Literature, Composition & Rhetoric, Creative Writing, Linguistics, Technical Communication, Writing Centers, Graduate Concerns, and Teaching and Pedagogy.
The 7th Annual GES Conference will be held February 22-23, 2002, at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The theme of this year's conference, "Past and Future Perspectives: Negotiating our Changing Field," addresses our changing field from the graduate scholar's perspective. The palindrome of the year suggests that we examine ways that our past can help us deal with our future regarding issues arising from new theories, cultural shifts, evolving technologies, and recent discoveries.
PROCEDURES AND DEADLINES
Proposals:
Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2001
Email proposals strongly encouraged (address: Ida.Rodgers@ttu.edu)
Hard copies should be mailed to "GES Conference" at the English Department address (above).
Proposal information must include: your name, email address, mailing address, telephone number, institutional affiliation, program (e.g., British Literature), technology requests (not guaranteed), presentation title, and 250-word abstract. If you would like your home web page or a web page having to do with your presentation linked to your name on the conference web site, include the URL.
Acceptance procedures:
Acceptance notices will be emailed by November 20th.
You must reply with your confirmation of attendance by December 1st.
Conference packets will be mailed in early January, and the registration deadline is Feb. 1st.
Participants are limited to two presentations (including panels).
Conference proceedings:
Accepted and confirmed presenters are invited to submit their papers for publication in the conference proceedings.
Instructions and a style guide for the conference proceedings will be published on the conference website.
Proceedings preferred format: email attachment in .rtf format (hard copy can be mailed with registration)
Proceedings deadline: February 1, 2002
Questions?
If you have questions about the conference or would like to submit an electronic proposal, please contact either Will Brannon (wbrannon@ttacs.ttu.edu) or Ida Rodgers (Ida.Rodgers@ttu.edu).
THEME SESSION
Year 2002: The Challenge of the Palindrome for a Changing Scholarly Field
This special session, right before the luncheon and key note speaker, addresses the conference theme. It will examine appropriate graduate student approaches to the struggle English departments face with fundamental questions of mission and character. These questions are raised in a current and raging national discussion that includes a continuum of opinions ranging from community-of-culture to commercial viability. Such soul searching stems from pressures on university administrators. They face difficult fiscal choices, pressure to provide objective measures, and the fact that students often select courses based on vocational viability. In this context departments are generating new vision statements and restructuring their programs. Where departments can no longer support broad coverage of large areas like literature or linguistics, some are thinking in terms of narrow but deep coverage. Specialization seems to provide an answer, so niches of interest are beginning to form (more so than before) which will limit student choices (the downside) and provide more faculty for the specialty (the upside).
Graduate students may locate some comfort and certain challenge in the words of Gerard A. Hauser when he states, "Cultural memory places one inside a tradition in which past and present are constantly fused. A sense of history provides continuity of customs and traditions, of laws and accomplishments which fill temporal distance . . . It also provides models with which to respond to the present and to shape the future." Hauser and others claim that when a community fractures individuals "find the meaning of their individual lives impoverished." Thus the kinds of seismic changes being discussed require graduate student response and test our mettle. Will we fight change or will we respond productively by actively helping to shape our future? For graduate students hoping to enter the ranks of the academy as decision makers, ours is the challenge of the palindrome: to look both forward and back so as to identify theoretically grounded praxis that best serve our field.
For this special session we will consider proposals that specifically address the issue of change to the traditional field of English and discuss thoughtful, scholarly responses. The intention of this session is to create a dialogue on the general topic through the ideas introduced by the presenters. Presentations will be short (about 10 minutes) to allow time for discussion.
|
