A spring interdisciplinary conference hosted by The New School Graduate Faculty Department of Liberal Studies is seeking paper presentations, videos, visual art, and/or performance pieces that confront the topic of “Words, Images, and the Framing of Social Reality.”

Words and images are the conceptual tools used to “frame” our understanding of social reality. Oftentimes, these words and images unify our understandings of a concept to be classified as “truth”. Nevertheless, there are also instances when this “truth” is not objective, but merely a veiled fantasy incapable of fully describing the complexity of the situation it attempts to define. Thus, simulated and psuedo-concrete imagery such as extreme religiosity, political propaganda, mass media, nationalism, etc. are perhaps only manageable, yet illusory attempts of filling this conceptual void. Are we then slaves to the fantasy and seduction of words and images, or, subjects vying to redefine them? This interdisciplinary (and hopefully multi-media) conference will explore the relationship and tension between imagery, metaphor, and rhetoric in creating, maintaining, and framing social reality(s). Please submit paper abstracts or presentation proposals to the e-mail address provided below by February 25th 2005.

Some possible topics could be (but are, of course, not limited to…)

• Image and Sexuality
• Racism and War: Debasing the Other
• Terrorist as Auteur
• Pop Culture as Social Control
• Spin Cycle: The Framing of Politics
• Art as resistance
• Coding War: just vs. unjust violence
• Willful Amnesia: Choosing to ignore and/or forget