CALL FOR PAPERS
York University's Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought presents Strategies of Critique XVII
MANIFESTOS: FROM PRAYER TO REVOLUTION
April 11 and 12, 2003
Toronto, Ontario

This conference seeks to explore the Manifesto as a document that stands liminally between theory and practice as it imagines a journey from dystopic past to utopian future. Contained in the Manifesto is a specific writing of history that simultaneously textualizes and contextualizes a visionary demand for a potential and ever after. The Manifesto evokes and reproduces the urgency of an ever-present present moment; a forever point of departure from which to act and re-act in transformative solidarity. Further, this conference seeks to explore the conditions under which the Manifesto is manifested and what happens when it is then embodied to manifest itself.

As a tool of corporate culture, political bodies, art movements, the avant-garde, the masses, the solitary and the oppressed, the Manifesto spans the conservative to the radical, evoking questions of form and content, identity and difference, memorialization and legacy, social movement, the agency of language, and the potential to create a universally applicable call to action.

Possible topics can include, but aren't limited to:

• African American Politics and Manifestos
• Colonialism, Globalization and Manifestos
• Religion and Manifestos
• Feminism and Manifestos
• Revolution and Manifestos
• Corporate Manifestos
• Personal Manifestos and Mass Movements
• The Aesthetics of Political Manifestos and the Politics of Art Manifestos
• The Relationship Between Language and Action
• The Question of Form and Content
• Dreams, Visions the Irrational and the Imaginary

Strategies of Critique is an annual graduate conference organized for students by students. New to this year's conference will be an alumnae pannel speaking on academic proletariat labour within the university as part of an advisory forum designed to facilitate the transition from newly graduated to tenure track in the age of marketized higher education.

We invite papers, case studies, performances, art installations or video presentations that push the boundaries of contempary critical theory and interdisciplinarity. Presentations should be approximately 20 minutes. All papers will be considered for publication. Graduate students are requested to submit a 250 word proposal by February 15th, 2003 via email, fax or post to: