Keele’s Humanities and Social Sciences

Postgraduate Symposium 2019

CFP: Borders - interrogating categories, labels, and boundaries across disciplines

‘Interdisciplinary approaches often draw attention, either implicitly or explicitly, to the fact
that what is studied and taught within universities is always a political question’ (Moran,
2002).

Keele’s annual interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, hosted this year by the Faculty
of Social Sciences Wednesday 12th June, invites paper, poster and panel proposals on
the theme of ‘Borders’. The conference, in its interdisciplinary fashion, itself challenges the
concept of boundaries. In doing so, we aim to interrogate notions of labelling and defining
across the humanities and social sciences.

Demonstrating the subversion of such labels, categories, or borders, it looks towards

intersectionality, diversity, individuality, and celebrating acceptance, whilst offering a
chance to scrutinise the divisive structures often credited with the dissemination of
prejudice throughout society. This conference aims to foreground the instances in which
such taxonomies are uniquely troublesome and/or troubled in individual avenues of
research. Conversely, it recognises the purpose and presence of such ‘pigeon-holes’, and
the ways in which avenues of research may be predicated on their existence. To classify is
to bring together elements of culture into conversation with one another within a principle
of organisation, thus making sense of the world. The notion of freedom is invariably reliant
upon the boundaries that it betrays, even as such betrayal is accompanied by the risk of
being labelled as ‘Other’, misfit, ostracized and anomalous. This conference is interested
in reconciling this double-edged sword – how can we promote equality in a world built
upon value-judgements and hierarchies?

Proposals are invited for 20-minute individual papers, parallel panel workshops (1 hour),
readings (up to 5 minutes each) on the broad theme of ‘Borders’, drawn from a range of
disciplinary fields and may or may not include the following topics:

" National boundaries; nationality, patriotism, statehood, power to provide and/or

deny freedom, globalisation

" Epochal boundaries and generic boundaries; i.e. what does it mean to be
‘Medieval’, or ‘Victorian’, ‘Epic’ or ‘Modernist’ how might these categories merge,
what is their purpose, why blur them, what about the category of today?

" What exactly constitutes a group's 'voice' or its meaningful social position/interests
as well as the ethics and praxis of mediation

" Class and gender; ‘high’ and ‘low’ brow, imposter syndrome; trans, cross-dressing,
drag, gender neutrality, performative gender, what exists between ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’, all in relation to disciplinary epistemes.

" Medium/form; novels vs. poems, merged forms e.g. ‘prose poetry’, autobiography
vs. fiction, realism vs. reality, adaptations/appropriations

" The interdisciplinarity; literature as historical symptom, poetic science,

psychogeography and disciplinary hauntology; the politics of music, sociology and
visual or written cultures ; experiences of interdisciplinary study

Abstracts for individual papers and posters should be no more than 250 words, with a
biography stating your course, research interests and level of study (PGT or PGR),
maximum 50 words.

We are also looking to hold a 3 Minute Thesis round, where PGRs summarise their
research as part of HUMSS’ 3MT competition. In addition we would like to give PGTs the
chance to present their research in this format. The Symposium committee therefore
welcomes competitive entries from PGRs and expressions of interest from PGTs.

Please send abstracts to:humsspgsymposium2019@gmail.com

The deadline for proposals is 13th May