"Self and Subject: African and Asian Perspectives"

Date: 20 - 23 September 2005 @ Heriot Watt University, Scotland

Call for papers for an International Conference on The Study of African and Asian Cultures in the 21st Century.

There are few areas of research that have attracted so much interest in the arts and humanities as the constitution and representation of the self, whether as a unit of literary and philosophical reflection, or as embodied entity or as product and producer of cultural life. Yet with the increasing movement of people, goods and ideas within and beyond national boundaries, it is not only the identity and status of the individual subject that has been called into question but also many of the assumptions and methodologies that once characterised different disciplinary approaches to the self.

This conference invites a double questioning of the subject. It seeks to foreground recent innovative reflections on the status of the individual subject through a questioning of different disciplinary approaches. It asks how the recognition that individual lives are formed in increasingly complex “multi-cultural” and “trans-national” contexts demands new methodologies for re-thinking the subject within and across disciplinary boundaries.

Further information on these, and other, events is available from our website at www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ferguson-centre.