1st Global Conference
Persons, Intimacy and Love: Probing the Boundaries
Tuesday 20th March - Thursday 22nd March 2007,br>
Salzburg, Austria
Call for Papers
(Please cross post where appropriate)
This research conference seeks to explore issues of intimacy and love within the context of persons and interpersonal relationships and across a range of critical, contextual and cultural perspectives. Seeking to encourage innovative inter, multi and post disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand what it is to be a person and what it means for persons to stand in individual, social and national relationships of intimacy, love, desire and friendship.
In particular papers, workshops and presentations are invited on any of the following themes:
1. Public and Private Contexts of Intimate Relationships
How and where to locate intimacy?
Should we re-think the idea of intimacy?
Modern and postmodern intimacies
Identity and belonging; the local, social, national and international
Structures, institutions and systems; economics and intimacy; work and intimacy
Acts and interactions; representations and symbols; space and time
2. Love, Desire, Lust and Sex
Persons and the search for meaning
Norms that rule the intimacies of our lives
The death or killing of love, desire, lust or sex
Commitment and obligation; choice and respect; loyalty and trust
The secular and the religious; the heretical and the sacred
Personhood and identity without love, desire, lust or sex
3. Bonds of Care, Friendship and Love
Persons and family: blood, heritage, choice and happenstance
Who is a friend?
Historical, social and symbolic shifting grounds
Meaning, obligation, identity and belonging
Loving and caring for children, siblings and parents
Hospitality and bonds of care
4. When Relationships End or Fail
Norms, agreements and expectations
Betrayal, cheating and infidelity
The loss of intimacy; the destruction of trust
Isolation, alienation, loneliness and estrangement
Conflict, breakdown, crisis and the demise of relationships
Separation, mourning and bereavement; unlinking and unloving
5. Caring for Others
Persons, acquaintances, others and the needs of strangers
Intimacies between strangers
Why should we care about others and distant others?
Dislocated persons; homeless persons; uprooted persons
Selfishness and selflessness; expecting and giving
Aloofness, estrangement and disconnected persons
6. Caring for Self
Selfhood intimacies and pleasures of the self
Soul, emotions, ideas and the inner-self
Dreams, fantasies and desire; symbols, meaning and the unconscious
Time, space, solitude and the recognition of self and the inner-self
Body rituals: aesthetics, playfulness, health and functions
Alienation, madness, crisis of the self, despair and suicide
7. The Politics of Intimacy
Inequality, power relations and intimacy
Normativity and normalisation; difference and dissidence
Productivity, efficiency and the dwindling of free time
Homogeneity, identity and intimacy
The democratisation of intimate relations
Freedom, personhood, resistance and rebellion
Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 17th November 2006. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 2nd March 2007.
300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, PDF or RTF formats.
Joint Organising Chairs
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
University of Mary Washington,
Fredericksburg, VA, USA
E-Mail: acervant@umw.edu
Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom
E-Mail: pil1@inter-disciplinary.net
The conference is part of the ‘Probing the Boundaries’ programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.
For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/persons/pil/pil.html
For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/persons/pil/pil1/cfp.html
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