The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is seeking submissions for a two-day graduate student conference focusing on the theme "Archival Bodies" to be held on February 10-11, 2006, in conjunction with the Center for 21st Century Studies and its 2005-06 research theme "States of Autonomy."

The theme "Archival Bodies" draws its language from the work of keynote speaker Walid Raad, the founder of The Atlas Group, a project established "to locate, preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary and other artifacts that shed light on the contemporary history of Lebanon." Raad will draw on this work in his mixed media presentation "The Loudest Muttering Is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive."

The terms "archive" and "body" present opportunities for a wide range of interpretations of the phrase "archival bodies." While we anticipate diverse responses to the conference theme, we are particularly interested in the possible intersections and collisions of two major, or perhaps dominant, readings: specifically, (1) a collection, or corpus, of texts, and (2) the living body in its capacity as an on-going and history-preserving repository of events, responses, and cultural signifiers.

The conference seeks to engage such topics as:

-Autonomy written in and out of the body
-Bodily sites of memory and resistance
-Embodied histories and geographies
-Identity and its markers
-Race, gender, class, nation, sexuality as archival bodies
-The historical archive in the (pre-)digital age
-Roles of researcher, librarian, archivist
-Strategies of hierarchy, order, classification
-Canonical inclusions and exclusions
-Communities and collections
-Marked bodies and body modification
-Representing, reproducing, fictionalizing the body
-New media and film archives
-Archival residues of performance and everyday life
-Politics of preservation
-Bodily knowledge and structures of feeling

We encourage submissions that address ways of conceiving and critiquing the uses of archives in contemporary scholarship, particularly in relation to issues of the digital, the new media, film, and performance, as well as the reams of paper filling university libraries and private collections. More provocatively, though, we are interested in the ways the human body functions both as an archive and in archival spaces. Taking up post-Cartesian conceptions of the body, recent scholarship in the humanities and the human sciences has expressed an interest in and concern with questions of bodies and embodiment, suggesting that embodied social and cultural signifiers--both the outward markings of race, sex, and age and the concealed traces of geography, class, education, sexuality--might provide significant locations for intellectual and political research. We are interested, then, in collections of "texts," in the broadest possible sense of that term, whether they are located in a library or in a human body. This conference seeks submissions that broaden our understanding of how we act on archives and how they act on us.

In order to facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to the theme of "Archival Bodies," we look forward to submissions from within the disciplines of Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Communications, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, English, Film, Geography, History, Linguistics, Performance Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Theater, Urban Studies, Visual Culture, and other relevant fields of study.

Extended Deadline for Submissions: November 1, 2005

Please submit a 250-word abstract, with title, for a 15-20 minute presentation as an MS Word file attachment to: gradconference@uwm.edu

For more information, visit the conference website at:
http://pw.english.uwm.edu/~migc