EXTENDED DEADLINE TO SUBMIT PROPOSALS: SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2011

As scholars, we can conceive of debt and dependence not only in economic terms, but also in broader social, cultural, political and methodological terms. For instance, notions of debt and dependence help define the interactions between individuals and the physical environments that surround them, and the desire and/or need to consume in both pre-capitalist and capitalist times. They also influence individuals’ efforts - whether in pre-modern or modern societies – to impose or contest unequal power relationships underpinned by gender, class, racial, and religious dynamics. And finally, they allow us to explain the intellectual debts that we as scholars have incurred in developing our fields and shed light on our dependence on print, visual and oral sources to study the past.

How can we reflect on debt and dependence in history? With the different forms of debt we incur, how do we manage and repay them? What debts do we, as scholars, owe to the subjects of our research and sources, especially when studying memory and/or living sources? How do we deal with the power imbalance between dominant and dependent discourses? As scholars, how do we decide who gets to speak?

The graduate students of the Department of History at the University of Toronto are pleased to accept paper and panel proposals for the Eighth Annual Graduate History Symposium (AGHS), to be held February 3-4, 2012. The organizing committee encourages paper and panel submissions on, but not restricted to, the following topics:

- Consumerism and its consequences
- Cultural contacts
- Debt, dependence and violence
- Environmental changes and long term costs
- Food resources and survival
- Gender and sexuality
- Justice and the law
- Modernity, technology and development
- Oral history, as well as other print and visual sources
- Patronage and clientage

Please submit a 250-word proposal and a short biographical sketch to aghs@utoronto.ca by Sunday, December 11, 2011. Successful submissions will be notified by mid-December.

For more information, please visit:
http://groups.chass.utoronto.ca/gradhistsymp/AGHS8/index.html http://www.facebook.com/AGHS8