Lives & Letters Mailing: July 2015
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness Project Updates
The ‘Leap second’ and Letters
Researching and Engaging with the Past
2. Announcement of the Forum for Life Writing Research, University of Muenster
3. 2016 C19 Conference: Call for Papers
4. “Telling Systemic Stories through Research”
5. Caste and Life Narratives: Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly: Call-for-Papers
6. Texts and Contexts: The Cultural Legacies of Ada Lovelace
7. Love Letters: 3rd Global Meeting of the Letters and Letter Writing Project
Call for Participation 2016
8. ‘Facts and Fictions’ – First Workshop of ‘The Art of Identification’ Network, University of Birmingham, Tuesday 13 October 2015
——————
1. Whites Writing Whiteness Project Update
There are two items of project news we would like to share:
The ‘Leap Second’ and Letters
One second was added to the last day in June, owing to the earth’s irregular rotation. This is fascinating for two main reasons. Firstly, will this additional second ever register in the everyday lives of people? Secondly the idea of a leap second encourages re/thinking of letters and their circulation, when earlier it was an extra year or span of months that made a difference. For more on this, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/leap-seconds/
What Is It That We ‘Do’ With the Past?
How (in the non-literal sense) does one go about understanding the past? That is, what are the assumptions that underpin the practical methodological things we do in carrying out historical sociological research, the foundations that make this activity possible and plausible? There are some stretching issues here that require careful contemplation, as well as teasing out what these assumptions are and how they hang together. These ideas are developed further in a tripartite blog series, with the third instalment appearing at the end of this week. Please visit the blog to read and also mull over a working set of such foundational assumptions and how to work with them: Pt 1. http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/what-do-we-do-about-the-past/ , Pt 2. http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-nowpast/
2. Announcement of the Forum for Life Writing Research, University of Muenster
Forum for Life Writing Research
Forum für Autobiographieforschung
Forum voor Autobiografie onderzoek
Initiated by scholars from German Studies, Dutch Studies, and American Studies and bringing together autobiography researchers from several disciplines and across languages, the trilingual Forum for Life Writing Research was launched at the University of Muenster on July 1, 2015.
The Forum of Life Writing Research aims at creating a space for intensive investigations and explorations of autobiographical texts and materials, as well as for systematic theoretical reflections on the genre itself. The activities of the forum include lectures, workshops, and conferences, as well as co-taught seminars and cross-disciplinary publications. A lecture series entitled “Autobiography and Autofiction: Current Research Perspectives” starting in the winter term of 2015 /16 will be the first scheduled event series.
Further information can be found at
www.uni-muenster.de/AutobiographieForum/
* * *
IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
——————
3. 2016 C19 Conference: Call for Papers
Announcement published by Nicholas Rinehart on Thursday, June 25, 2015
Type: Call for Papers
Date: August 15, 2015
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Subject Fields: African American History / Studies, American History / Studies, Anthropology, Black History / Studies, Communication, Composition, Literature, Humanities
This proposed panel seeks to present new and challenging perspectives on the history of the slave narrative genre. Recent studies have sought to recontextualize and/or reconsider the generic contours of the Anglo-American slave narrative. For example, Daphne Brooks has suggested the development of a “sonic slave narrative”; Nicole Aljoe and Ian Finseth have drawn attention to the “journeys” of the form in the early Americas; Deborah Jenson has highlighted popular sources from the Haitian Revolutionary period; John MacKay has written comparatively about the autobiographical writings of American slaves and Russian serfs.
Taking its cue from these and other developments in the field, paper proposals might reconsider the slave narrative tradition from the standpoint of multilingualism (e.g. Omar ibn Said), transnationalism (e.g. Juan Francisco Manzano or Mohammah Baquaqua), periodization or chronology (e.g. postbellum narratives), canonicity (e.g. obscure or understudied texts), and various other critical perspectives.
Please submit an abstract (300-500 words) and short CV to ntrinehart@gmail.com by August 15, 2015. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions or concerns!
The biennial C19 conference will take place on March 17-20, 2016 at Penn State University. For more information on the conference theme of “Unsettling,” visit: http://www.c19conference.org/
Contact Info:
Nicholas Rinehart
Department of English
Harvard University
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Contact Email:
ntrinehart@gmail.com
URL:
http://www.ntrinehart.com/
—
* * *
IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
——————
4. “Telling Systemic Stories through Research”
The Postgraduate Centre, Luton Campus, University of Bedfordshire
17th & 18th September 2015
This postgraduate research conference is hosted by the two research doctorate programmes in systemic research, one at the Tavistock Clinic and one at the University of Bedfordshire, and the Family Therapy and Systemic Research Centre, and is supported by AFT.
We have a very interesting programme shaping up but do still have some places available for people who would like to present their postgraduate research.
We have therefore decided to extend a final call for presentations until July 31st. (please find BELOW)
Don’t let your recent research dissertation or thesis just sit on the shelf!
Or if you are in process with your postgraduate research and think it would be useful and interesting to present a particular aspect of your research to a wider audience do think to put in an abstract.
We welcome submissions of research-in-progress, research reports and methodological innovation and ethical challenges
This conference is about supporting systemic research and researchers and inspiring others.
Best wishes Charlotte, Reenee and Astrid
Family Therapy and Systemic Research Centre
http://www.uel-ftsrc.org/aims.htm
Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust
120 Belsize Lane,
London NW3 5BA
020 7435 7111
http://tavistockandportman.uk/
Final Call for Presentations
Systemic Post-Graduate Research Conference
“Telling Systemic Stories through Research”
17th & 18th September 2015
The Postgraduate Centre, Luton Campus, University of Bedfordshire
· Final Date for submissions – 31st July 2015
· You will be notified if your presentation has been accepted as soon as possible.
· This is open to people living in the UK and outside of the UK.
We welcome submissions of research-in-progress, research reports and methodological innovation and ethical challenges. Presenters might, for example, present one aspect of their research or report on their entire research project; some may invite the participants to discuss the research or initiate a collaborative inquiry or activity; a presentation may be subject oriented, or on ethical or methodological challenges. When preparing your presentation, think about what you have to offer the audience and what they have to offer you. Where feasible, please aim your presentation at practitioners from a range of systemic professional backgrounds and explain your use of all systemic and methodological terms.
Professional Streams
Presentations will be arranged in the following groupings. Please indicate in which stream your presentation should be placed.
A. Organisational, Leadership and Management Studies
B. Therapy, Supervision and Community
C. Training and Pedagogy
Forms of presentations
Workshops. 60 minutes. Please design your workshop to enable extended participation in and discussion of the research theme(s) to be presented and discussed. Workshops must be research based and need to engage the audience in systemic ways of talking, inquiring and reflecting. Please provide hand-outs with information and references connected to your methodology and/or subject area.
Papers. Presentation of 20 minutes and 20 minutes for discussion. We are inviting papers on methodological innovation or research reports. This can be done in a number of ways – from notes, from memory, read from a paper (only works with live intonation), performance, slides (no more than 15-20). Please provide hand-outs with information and references connected to your methodology and/or research.
Poster sessions. 1 minute introduction at start of day plus 15 minutes. It is exciting to develop an informative, visual narrative through creating a large poster! Please present your poster in a way which is innovative, coherent with your subject matter and with systemic practices of dialogical or collaborative ways of talking. For useful hints on preparing posters:
· http://clt.lse.ac.uk/poster-design/
· http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/posterdesign
·http://www.ga.lsu.edu/Effective%20Poster%20Design%20for%20Academic%20Conferences.pdf
You need to provide hand-outs with information and references connected to your methodology and/or research.
Symposia of 3 – 4 presenters. 90 minutes. This session is for presentations with a clear link between them. If you would like to present with other people who are researching similar content or methodology, it might be worth considering doing this together. You need to provide an abstract for each presentation and another describing the whole symposium. Please provide hand-outs with information and references connected to your methodology and/or subject area.
Submissions involving multiple presenters
The lead presenter accepts responsibility for informing all presenters in the symposium of the contents of the submission. All correspondence will be via the lead presenter. Abstracts will carry the contact information of the lead presenter, if more than one presenter is listed. Each presenter must submit an abstract for their presentation. There must be an additional abstract describing the overall symposium as a coherent whole, creating a narrative of connections between presentations and/or showing evidence of collaboration/dialogue between different researchers
Firm commitment to attend
Following the review process, acceptance of an invitation to present is a firm commitment to attend and participate at the conference. If you are unable to present having accepted the invitation, please let us know as soon as possible so we can offer the slot to another presenter.
Criteria for assessment for each format of presentation
You should consider the following criteria when writing your abstract; this is the criteria that reviewers will use when assessing your abstract.
· Topic is relevant to audience and to the conference
· Research topic and/or methodological focus is clear
· Implications for systemic research and practice are discussed
· There is critical and reflexive discussion
· Presentations point to original contribution
· Workshop includes interactivity appropriate to workshop topic and systemic practices
· Symposium and presentations form a coherent whole and are linked or show evidence of collaboration/dialogue between different researchers
SUBMISSION PROCESS
1. Prepare an abstract of no more than 250 words which will go into the Conference Programme.
2. Abstracts must be in Arial 12 point font in a Word document.
3. Email details below to both CBurck@tavi-port.nhs.uk<mailto:CBurck@tavi-port.nhs.uk> and Gail.Simon@beds.ac.uk<mailto:Gail.Simon@beds.ac.uk>
4. You must register for the conference at https://systemicresearch.eventbrite.co.uk<https://systemicresearch.eventbrite.co.uk/>>.
This email has been scanned for email related threats and delivered safely by Mimecast.
For more information please visit http://www.mimecast.com
——————
5. Caste and Life Narratives: Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly: Call-for-Papers
Guest Editors: Dr. S. Shankar, Department of English, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, USA, and Dr. Charu Gupta, Department of History, University of Delhi, India.
Submit: 400-word abstracts to S. Shankar (subraman@hawaii.edu) and Charu Gupta (charu7@hotmail.com) by September 15, 2015
Life Narratives (biographies, autobiographies, Facebook posts, legal testimonials, personal essays, memoirs, blogs, confessional poetry—the possibilities are many) are an important site for the construction as well as dismantling of identities. This special issue of the journal Biography explores the linkages between caste identities and representations of a life in diverse modes and languages.
Caste—a social category based on hierarchy, heredity and ideologies of contamination and exclusion—is often associated with South Asia and more particularly India. The recent political as well as intellectual mobilization of Dalits in India provides an important impetus for this special issue. The critiques of caste offered by Ambedkar, Periyar and other anti-caste crusaders are at the heart of this special issue. However, the special issue does not restrict itself to Dalit or similar life narratives but rather is concerned with caste in general. Just as contending with racism should not fall only to those groups oppressed by race but is illuminated in crucial ways by their perspectives, so too caste is not the burden of Dalits alone even as Dalit critiques offer crucial perspectives on caste.
Accordingly, the special issue sets out to offer theoretical and critical examinations of a variety of narrations of lives lived under structures of caste but is motivated throughout by Dalit and other insights critical of caste. Some sample questions (meant only to suggest the breadth of possible topics and approaches):
· How have autobiographical forms such as testimonio been important in testifying to the breadth and ferocity of caste oppression?
· Why have autobiographies played such an important role in the recent boom in Dalit writing in Marathi, Hindi, and Tamil?
· What is the role of caste in biographies of Indian nationalist leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru?
· Can the visual representations of B. R. Ambedkar, ubiquitous in certain urban spaces of India, be read as forms of life narrative, and if so, what do they narrate?
· In what ways are the lives of “low caste” people narrated in folk forms (for example, the songs of Gadar)?
· How is caste (mis)represented in biopics (Periyar, The Dirty Picture, Bandit Queen)?
· How have social media, websites and blogs enabled or otherwise distorted the representation of lives marked by caste?
· What is the role of caste in literary autobiographies by writers in English such as Nirad C. Chaudhuri and R. K. Narayan?
· How do life narratives reveal or veil the intersections of caste and other social categories such as gender and sexuality?
· How do diasporic life narratives represent or ignore caste?
· Given the strong association of caste with Hinduism, how is caste represented in a Christian or Muslim life narrative (for example in the work of Tamil writer Bama)?
· Are life narratives of women different from men, and what happens when they intersect with narrativizations of caste?
· Are life narratives by Dalits as much about the individual as the community?
· When do narratives of pain and suffering come to constitute the cultural capital of Dalit life testimonies? How does quotidian and routine caste violence, through which stigma is perpetuated in, on and through Dalit bodies, undergird life narratives of Dalits?
· Can one discern shifts or divergent strands in life narratives about caste, whereby stigmatization has given way to a “positive” ethical assertion of life?
Although caste has come to be associated almost exclusively with India or South Asia, it is not unique to that part of the world. This special issue is open to work that explores representations of caste in life narratives from other parts of the world; and also to comparative studies that might, for example, juxtapose representations of caste and race in life narratives.
Please note that Biography will arrange for contributors to present drafts of their papers at the University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu at the end of August 2015.
—
* * *
IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
——————
6. Texts and Contexts: The Cultural Legacies of Ada Lovelace
“That brain of mine is more than merely mortal; as time will show.”
A workshop for graduate students and early career researchers
Tuesday 8th December 2015
Mathematics Institute and St Anne’s College, Oxford
The mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), daughter of poet Lord Byron, is
celebrated as a pioneer of computer science. The notes she added to her
translation of Luigi Menabrea’s paper on Charles Babbage’s analytical engine
(1843) are considered to contain a prototype computer program. During her
short life, Lovelace not only contributed original ideas to the plans for
this early computer; she also imagined wider possibilities for the engine,
such as its application to music, and meditated on its limitations. Lovelace
leaves a legacy not just as a computer scientist, but also as a muse for
literary writers, a model to help us understand the role of women in science
in the nineteenth century, and an inspiration for neo-Victorian and
steampunk traditions.
As part of the University of Oxford’s celebrations to mark the 200th
anniversary of Lovelace’s birth, this one-day workshop will bring together
graduates and early career researchers to discuss the varied cultural
legacies of this extraordinary mathematician. The day will feature an expert
panel including graphic novelist Sydney Padua and biographer Richard Holmes.
The day will conclude with a reception and buffet when there will be
opportunities to meet with speakers from the Ada Lovelace 200 Symposium,
which will also take place in the Mathematics Institute on the following two
days (9th-10th December). Researchers from all disciplines are invited to
submit proposals for papers on the influences of Lovelace’s work, on topics
including, but not limited to, literature, history, mathematics, music,
visual art, and computer science. This might include:
* Lovelace’s place in the study of the history of science.
* Lovelace and women in science in the nineteenth century
* Early nineteenth-century scientific networks, including Lovelace’s
relationship with such individuals as Charles Babbage and Mary Somerville.
* Lovelace and discussions about the role of the imagination in
scientific practice in the nineteenth century.
* Lovelace as translator and commentator.
* Mathematics and music, and the musical possibilities Lovelace
envisaged for Babbage’s engine.
* Lovelace’s own textual legacies, such as her correspondence,
childhood exercises and mathematical notes held in the Bodleian.
* Lovelace’s technological legacies, from her seminal work on
Babbage’s Analytical Engine to her impact on computer programming today.
* Lovelace’s role in the steampunk tradition, from Gibson and
Sterling’s The Difference Engine to Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures
of Lovelace and Babbage, and neo-Victorian fashion.
* Efforts and activities to commemorate and memorialise Lovelace, from
the recent Google Doodle to the annual Ada Lovelace Day.
Proposals, not exceeding 250 words, for 15-minute papers should be submitted
to adalovelaceworkshop@ell.ox.ac.uk by 5pm, Friday 28th August 2015.
Those who are accepted to speak at this graduate workshop will also be offered
free registration for the Ada Lovelace 200 Symposium taking place on the
following two days. For more information, please visit
https://adalovelaceworkshop.wordpress.com.
—————
7. Love Letters: 3rd Global Meeting of the Letters and Letter Writing Project
Call for Participation 2016
Thursday 21st January – Saturday 23rd January 2016
London, United Kingdom
This is not a love letter
“I read over your letters again and again, and am continually taking them up as if I had just received them; but alas! They only serve to make me more strongly regret your absence: for how amiable must her conversation be, whose letters have so many charms?” Pliny the Younger, Epistulae, 6.7 [Translation William Melmoth 1915]
Is this a love letter? Or is it something else entirely?
It might have started out as a communication from Pliny to his young wife Calpurnia. However, he included it in a collection destined for public consumption. How much did he rewrite the letter for his new audience? And did he give a public reading of this letter as was common at this time, before circulating it? Was this letter ever delivered to Calpurnia in person, or only publicly, as a new literary genre?
What is and does a love letter? Are there any essential elements, or do the defining characteristics of amorous correspondence change from generation to generation, and from one culture to another? Is a song, the words of which adopt the conventions of epistolary communication, a letter? Or a love poem in an envelope? Or a greeting card?
This conference provides a rare opportunity for a global community to come together and discuss both traditional and alternative love letters. This community could be made up of those in the creative arts, writers, academics or non-academics, in other words anybody with an interest in this area that is willing to share and participate. This conference forms part of a specific focus research stream and continues dialogues started as part of the Letters and Letter Writing project that began two years ago. Its aim is to enrich current research, inspire new ideas and approaches and take this discussion farther both in terms of creating new networks and encouraging cross disciplinary projects that could find their form in either events or publications. It might interest those in the fields of literature, history, film studies, gender studies, political science, linguistics, musicology, creative writing, life-writing to name just a few.
The Advisory Group welcomes the submission of proposals for short workshops, practitioner-based activities, performances, papers and pre-formed panels. We particularly welcome short film screenings; photographic essays; installations; interactive talks and alternative presentation styles that encourage engagement. Submissions should be no more than 300 words and are invited on these or cognate themes for any historical period or geographical location;
~ Breakup letters
~ Love poems in letters
~ Letters leading to betrothal or marriage
~ The role of scribes in writing love letters or expressing intimacy and love (platonic, erotic or otherwise)
~ Love letters in the visual arts
~ Love letters in fiction, poetry, biography (including fiction and poetry written as love letters)
~ The valentine industry and its effects on personal relations, including between children
~ Expressions of love in valentines or other greeting cards, from standard to bizarre
~ Artists’ valentines
~ Between gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual partners
~ Platonic friendship expressed in epistolary form
~ Parental love expressed in epistolary form
~ Love of church, god, country and nature in epistolary form
~ Lack of love where it was expected/love letters and stalking
~ Discussion of love in letters between writers, philosophers or thinkers
~ Love letters sent from or to prison, POW camps or mental health institutes
~ Love letters in opera, country and western songs, and other musical genres
~ The past, present and future of the love letter, and the factors that have shaped changing social attitudes toward this mode of communication
~ How love / affection / desire is expressed (vocabulary, explicitness, symbolism, imagery)
~ Etiquette and ‘art’ of letter writing
~ Love letters as political communication
~ Letters of admiration to a famous dead person
~ Online love letters
~ Love letters as historical/genealogical documents (issues of reliability, archiving/preservation)
~ Influence of gender on the writing and reception of love letters
~ Clinical perspectives on the impulse to write and the pleasures associated with writing and receiving love letters
~ Multicultural perspectives on love letters
~ Critical strategies for analysing love letters as a writing genre
Call for Cross-Over Presentations
The Love Letters project will be meeting at the same time as two other projects: Exploring Sexuality and Spirituality and Exploring The Erotic. All three groups will share at least one creative workshop in common led by a poetess who writes sensual and erotic poetry. In addition we welcome submissions which cross the divide between two or even all three project areas. If you would like to be considered for a cross project session, please mark your submission “Crossover Submission”.
Workshop
As part of the conference, there will be an opportunity for those who wish to participate in an afternoon workshop focusing on “Reading Erotic Poetry“. The workshop is an ongoing project within the Exploring the Erotic project. You will explore the ways in which poems can accommodate the erotic, moving from subtle erotic love expressions over blunt eroticism to hard pornographic features in erotic poetry. The workshop will address other forms of writing, including letters and letter writing.
Further details and information can be found here:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/education/letters-and…
What to Send
300 word abstracts, proposals and other forms of contribution should be submitted by Friday 14th August 2015.
All submissions be minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team and the Advisory Board. In practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted, it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.
You will be notified of the panel’s decision by Friday 28th August 2015.
If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution should be submitted by Friday 11th December 2015.
Abstracts may be in Word, RTF or Notepad formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Love Letters Abstract Submission
Where to Send
Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs:
Organising Chairs:
Linda McGuire: linda.mcguire@escdijon.eu
Rob Fisher: loveletters@inter-disciplinary.net
This event is part of a new emerging inclusive interdisciplinary research and publishing project which overlaps projects working in the areas of Writing, Letters, Graphic Novel, Storytelling. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.
It is anticipated that a number of publishing options will arise from the work of the project generally and from the meeting of the Love Letters stream in particular. Minimally there will be a digital eBook resulting from the conference meeting. Other options, some of which might include digital publications, paperbacks and a journal will be explored during the meeting itself.
Ethos
Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation. Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
—
* * *
IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
—————
8. ‘Facts and Fictions’ – First Workshop of ‘The Art of Identification’ Network, University of Birmingham, Tuesday 13 October 2015
The Art of Identification
theartofidentification@gmail.com
The Art of Identification network, funded by a networking grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) intends to bring together a range of academics and practitioners in order to explore the interconnections between practical techniques of human identification and the artistic representation of personal identity. The methods by which people have proved, or been assigned, their identities have varied over time – from Early Modern insignia to the contemporary strobe light of a retinal scanner – and the term ‘identification’ can also be taken to mean a number of things, including the determination of individual personhood via paperwork, bodily examination, verbal testimony, and digital recording. This subject has been of recent interest in historical and social scientific scholarship and has been developed via work by, amongst others, Caplan & Torpey (2001), Cole (2002), Groebner (2007), Higgs (2011), Breckenridge and Szreter (2012), About, Brown and Lonergan (2013) and Gowland and Thompson (2013). At the same time an emerging field of interdisciplinary study in the cultural implications of various forms of information gathering and forensic sciences has arisen. Particular examples of this can be found in the work of Chu (2006), Littlefield (2011) and Burney and Pemberton (2013). The Art of Identification network asserts that both these areas of research (history of identification and cultures of forensics/information) can most fruitfully be developed through the interdisciplinary sharing of their methodologies – particularly their contrasting approaches to the significance of ‘representation’ (artistic or otherwise) in the generation of knowledge. The focus on human identification potentially opens new ways of considering the representation of personal identity that move beyond the identity politics model which foregrounds class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality towards a more individuated, ‘forensic’, form. This approach has been so far overlooked in humanities research: put simply, the question of who we are, in the practical sense of identifying individuals via their documents and bodies, has remained curiously absent from the question of who we are in terms of our intimate portrayals of subjectivity.
The Art of Identification Network will be advanced through four interlinked workshops, the first of which will take place on Tuesday 13 October 2015 at the University of Birmingham. This workshop, entitled ‘Facts and Fictions’ will interrogate the boundaries between fact and fiction that are brought out by the profiling of criminal identities by forensic psychologists and the depiction of character (criminal or otherwise) in contemporary fiction, film and TV and should prompt careful reflection on the boundaries between positivistic disciplines, creative processes and critical practices. Modern forensic psychology utilizes an array of information in the production of detailed criminal profiles while contemporary fiction and screen media borrows from these techniques in its depiction of character. Central to this workshop is the question of how factual such fictional representation thus becomes and, conversely, how imaginative are the models of identity created by forensic profilers in the first place.
A number of participants have already been confirmed for this workshop but interested parties are welcome. The topic is particularly relevant for literary scholars, film and new media academics, creative writers and those with an interest in forensic psychology but we are keen to hear from any academics or practitioners who feel their work is appropriate. If you would like to attend please email theartofidentification@gmail.com to confirm your place.
There will be a limited number of places available for those who wish to propose a presentation too. The adopted format is 20-minute papers designed to appeal to academics and practitioners from a range of disciplines. 300 word abstracts and a recent CV should be sent to theartofidentification@gmail.com by Friday 14 August 2015.
Full details of the network can be found at http://artofidentification.com.
—
* * *
IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
—————
Last updated: 14 August 2015
