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Unexpected Agents: Considering agency and subjectivity beyond the boundaries of the human (1800 — the Present)
| Location: | United Kingdom |
| Call for Papers Date: | 2011-04-01 (Archive) |
| Date Submitted: |
2011-03-23 |
| Announcement ID: |
184089 |
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* One-day postgraduate symposium at the University of Birmingham0
* Friday 24 June 2011
* Keynote Speaker: Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)
‘Anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor - or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant’
(Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 2005)
Whilst questions of human subjectivity and/or identity remain a persistent focus in literary and cultural studies, this one-day postgraduate symposium aims to consider how we might explore and account for agency from unexpected sources. Papers, plenaries and discussions at this symposium will place the non-human, the object, the supposedly ‘lifeless’ at the centre, with a view to casting new light on and rethinking definitions of human agency and identity from an unconventional, askance perspective.
This symposium aims to acknowledge and yet exceed Latour’s and others’ focus upon the agency of objects to envision how authors, theorists and cultural producers have imagined and re-imagined the potential agencies of a wide range of entities, to which and to whom access to power is conventionally seen as foreclosed. It will explore how this over-looked but fascinating trope persists across genres and historical boundaries, from Romanticism to Science Fiction, and from 1800 to the present day.
Possible conference paper topics may include (but are not limited to) a focus on the following kinds of ‘unexpected agent’:
* Objects (art objects, artefacts, antiques)
* Spaces/ Landscapes
* Ghosts and the deceased
* Mediums and the hypnotised
* Babies/ Infants
* Animals
* Technology (radio, machines, scientific apparatus)
* Nature
* Words themselves
The organisers invite 200 word proposals from postgraduate research students for 20 minute papers, by Friday 1 April 2011.
Please send your proposals to: Paul Horn (PMH487@bham.ac.uk), Sarah Parker (SLP883@bham.ac.uk) and Holly Prescott (HXP823@bham.ac.uk).
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