ACCUTE Conference 2010

Call for Papers: General, Member-Organized, and Joint Sessions

Before submitting to any call listed below, please consult the Policies Governing the Submissions of Proposals to the ACCUTE Conference.

General Call
Member-Organized Sessions
Joint Sessions
Christianity and Literature Study Group

General Call for Papers

ACCUTE invites submissions on a wide variety of themes, topics, and theoretical inclinations for its "general" sessions at the 2010 conference. The only restrictions are that submissions should fall within the mandate of the organization and be of potential interest to our conference audience. In addition to consulting the ACCUTE website for specific information on how to submit a paper to the general CFP, you might also find it helpful to consult the 2009 conference program for examples of past papers.

While all manner of topics pertaining to the study of English literatures are welcome, we especially solicit papers and proposals that deal with under-represented areas and earlier time periods.

Following the instructions on this website for the general CFP, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word bio-graphical statement, and the submitter information form to accute@accute.ca by November 15th.

Member-Organized Sessions

If you are submitting a paper or proposal for a member-organized session, remember to check the the guidelines to ensure that your proposal/paper satisfies the criteria for inclusion, and that you have provided the necessary information.

The deadline for submission to all member-organized sessions is NOVEMBER 15.

All submitters must be members in good standing of ACCUTE.

Writing Work, Writing Koot
Organizers: Gregory Betts (Brock) and Robert Stacey (Ottawa)

For over 25 years the Kootenay School of Writing has explored the intersections between avant-garde aesthetics and radical politics in Canada. A central preoccupation of the group has been the changing nature of work and value in the age of global capitalism and the search for an appropriate and politically effective literary response to these transformations. This panel will explore the various ways in which the subject of work and/or labour has been taken up by KSW writers. We are particularly interested in papers seeking to connect the KSW’s exploration of work as subject or theme with its innovations and experiments in poetic form and language. The broadest range of approaches to this topic will be considered.

Following the instructions on this website for member-organized sessions, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to gbetts@brocku.ca or rstacey@uottawa.ca by November 15th.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Writers at Work
Organizer: Sarah Brouillette (Carleton)

Proposals are invited for a session on writers’ labour. How have writers’ working conditions shaped their texts? How have writers’ other jobs (including writing jobs) intersected with and informed their literary work? How, when and why have images of writers at work circulated within popular culture? How has the history of writers’ work shaped divisions between manual and mental labour? When and how have writers been treated in labour studies? What theoretical approaches to labour might help us to understand writers’ work? Research in any period of literary history will be welcome.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Sedgwick’s Futures
Organizer: Steven Bruhm (Western Ontario)

The death of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on 12 April 2009 invited many of us to return to her work with renewed sense of urgency regarding questions of temporality, affect, and reading practice. This member-organized session will speculate not on Sedgwick’s influence on queer studies in the last twenty years but on how her work inflects ideas of the future—and the futurity of reading queerly. Some topics that might be considered:

Reparative reading and questions of the temporal. What futures might we imagine for the reading subject, and what futures might we discard? What futures—if any—are there for the queer subject, or for the subject of queerness?
The role of affect in queer studies. The role of queer affect in situating queer theory within or apart from other kinds of affective inquiry.
Engagements with the textual as a precise site for theorizing. How might the rhetorics of temporality in readings of textual (as opposed to more broadly cultural) works create points of engagement we might call queer? What might Sedgwick’s work on modernism create for a queerly post-postmodernism?

As in Sedgwick’s corpus itself, I invite close readings of particular texts that might illuminate these or other problems in the field of queer theory and futurity. However, I am particularly interested in fully developed theoretical stances that will appeal to a broad range of people in the audience, and that engage with questions beyond those of a particular text.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

The Queer Child
Organizer: Steven Bruhm (Western Ontario)

What is it? What isn’t it? What might it be? What can’t it be? Where might we find it? Who is the “we” who is doing the looking and how do we (pre) determine the field of inquiry? Does geography and nation matter, or do queer children transgress such notions of border?
When was the queer child? When might it be? What definitions of queerness might apply and how have these definitions shifted historically? How might they be shifting at the present moment? How do questions of futurity matter? Who will have been, or might be, a queer child?
In what fields of vision might be detect the queer child? How might the textual or verbal queer child resonate with or differ from the specular or visual queer child? In a world of prime-time or commodity queerness, can there be a queer child? Who cares? And how?

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

The Legacy of Steve McCaffery
Organizer: Clint Burnham (Simon Fraser)

Arguably one of the most influential avant-garde poets in Canadian writing, Steve McCaffery’s work spans many schools, practices, media, and theoretic impulses. His visual and concrete poetry of the 1960s and 1970s (such as Carnival [1967-75]) and sound poetry with the Four Horsemen on the Toronto scene; theoretical work with bpNichol as the Toronto Research Group; a string of groundbreaking volumes from Dr. Sadhu’s Muffins (1974) to The Black Debt (1989) and the more recent compilation Seven Pages Missing (2000); and his key role in the North American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement have all left an indelible mark on Canadian and international literary practice. How do we evaluate and critique and continue McCaffery’s legacy in our digital, neoliberal, post-literary epoch, when poetic manifestos are constrained by the 140 character limit of twitter and mainstream literary culture is mired in prize-giving and headline-ready advances? Proposals are welcome for papers exploring Steve McCaffery’s work and its contexts, his peers, influences and epigones, from a variety of critical approaches.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Critical Literary Regionalisms
Organizer: Susie DeCoste (Waterloo)

Frank Davey has argued that regionalist ideology tends toward environmental determinism, resulting in certain assumptions about what effects place should have on a person. Within this set of assumptions, any identification with “other possible grounds of identity,” such as race or gender, is less important. More recently, in Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (2007) Douglas Powell contends that “region” is rhetorical: it is just as much a persuasion as a description. In light of these observations, it may appear that regionalist literatures are as limited as the geographical space they intend to depict. On the other hand, regional literatures perhaps require sustained critical exploration of the relationships between region and race, and region and gender. This panel can gesture toward a criticism of regionalist literatures which explores the construction of region and its effects on subjectivity. This panel welcomes papers on any aspect of the relationship between criticism and regional literature from any disciplinary perspective and any time period. Papers may focus on a specific text(s), or may address theoretical concerns for the study of regional literatures.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session

Reconciliation and the Humanities
Organizer: Dave Gaertner (Simon Fraser)

Since South Africa’s highly publicized Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), reconciliation has played an integral role in the constitution of a nation’s law. In the last three years we have witnessed reconciliation events in Australia (National Sorry Day), Canada (Indian Residential Schools Agreement) and Chile (Valech Report); and with the arrival of the Obama administration, there have been heightened talks about the possibility of an American TRC that would deal with U.S. sponsored torture in Iraq and elsewhere. Of course, the increase of reconciliation in political and social spheres has been met with an increase in research from the academy. However, the majority of this work has thus far come from social scientists and lawyers, which, as Robert Skloot suggests, sometimes “result in trends and statistics replacing the human image” (Theatre of Genocide; 9). This panel will critically examine the role the humanities and the arts can play in the burgeoning field of reconciliation studies. We are interested in papers that ask what literature, film, theatre and art contribute to reconciliation. Creative approaches / analytic material are encouraged.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Beyond Emily Montague: Encountering Canada in the Eighteenth Century
Organizer: Susan Paterson Glover (Laurentian)

Canadian fiction such as Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique, and John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, has imagined “Canada’s” eighteenth century. Restoration and eighteenth-century writers also imagined, and experienced, the space we now identify as Canada. The digitization of early texts and historical documents from the period has transformed access to archival material for research and teaching. This panel invites papers that search out and explore a broad range of those texts—imaginative works, non-fiction prose, documentary sources—that offer representations of northern North America prior to the Treaty of Paris in 1763 up to the early nineteenth century.
Possibilities might include, in addition to English literary works of the period: English encounters with New France; captivity narratives; the great Cascadia earthquake of 1700; the experience of war; spiritual life and memoir; logs, letters and diaries; mission reports, including les Relations des Jésuites; First Nations histories, oral and recorded; documents related to slavery and abolition; the Royal Proclamation of 1763; treaty documents; immigration/migration; early reading practices

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

The E-Book Wars
Organizer: Brian Greenspan (Carleton)

Owners of Amazon’s Kindle reader were recently shocked to learn that their purchased copies of Orwell’s 1984 had, ironically enough, been remotely erased following a copyright dispute. Meanwhile, Google and the Authors Guild reached a settlement allowing the Internet giant to scan entire university libraries, with more and more publishers choosing to launch new titles in Second Life. Electronic books have aroused critical fascination and anxiety for decades; with the recent explosion of e-book formats and devices, however, scholars find themselves competing with media conglomerates and sophisticated reading publics to define and, in some cases, contain these innovative technologies.
This panel will explore the utopian promises and dystopian fears generated by new literary media. Papers are invited that address the notion and nature of literature in the era of electronic books. How are authors, publishers and critics responding to the challenges of new literary objects and networks? Do e-books enable new reading and writing practices, or merely remediate conventional notions of the book?
Topics might include: e-book controversies; representations of digital books in other media; critical readings of native digital texts; digital rights management and copyright reform; transmedial, procedural or machinistic writing; new analytical tools and methods.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Canadian Ecocriticisms: Diverse Directions and Untold Stories
Organizers: Paul Huebener (McMaster) and Lisa Szabo (Alberta)

While ecocritical analyses of Canadian literature have often focused on canonical writings about nature or broad concepts such as survival and wilderness, many stories remain to be told as the field continues to take shape. We invite submissions that address topics and questions including, but not limited to:
ecocritical approaches to experimental or conceptual poets, natural history, borders and bioregions, minor environmental literatures, texts that are not normally considered environmental, visual art and other cultural forms; heoretical approaches involving postmodern ecology, deterritorialization, cosmopolitanism, globalization, and canonicity; which Canadian works lend themselves well to ecocritical readings but have been largely overlooked?; how do bioregional boundaries disrupt national or provincial boundaries, and vice versa?; is contemporary Canadian literature permeated with what Simon C. Estok calls ecophobia?; does it make more sense to speak of Canadian ecocriticism, or Canadian ecocriticisms?

Following the instructions on this website for member-organized sessions, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to huebenph@mcmaster.ca or lszabo@ualberta.ca by November 15th.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

The Writer as Radical Economist in Anglo-American Modernism and After
Organizers: Matt Kavanagh (Okanagan) and David N. Wright (Douglas)

During the Depression, one response to financial crisis was to put ‘nonproductive’ sectors of the economy to work. Even literature was pressed into service. Through programs like the WPA, the American writer was caught up in new institutional circuits where patronage was tied to recovery, broadly conceived. As well, expatriate American writers were often compelled to comment on the policies of the New Deal as they intersected--and clashed--with established modernist political and creative philosophies.
This panel examines the imbrication of modernist literary practice and economic theory. We are particularly interested in Anglo-American writers who self-consciously positioned themselves at the intersection of the two. How do their dialogues with the policies of the New Deal reflect--or disengage from--the tenets of modernist literary practice? And how might ‘recovery’ be figured in literary as well as economic terms?
Beyond Anglo-American modernism, we also welcome proposals that forge connections between the above and contemporary literary responses to, and representations of, the current financial crisis. If the former led to, as Michael Szalay suggets, “New Deal Modernism”, then what might constitute the poetics of the great neoliberal bailout of 2008?

Following the instructions on this website for member-organized sessions, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to mkavanagh@okanagan.bc.ca or wrightd@douglas.bc.ca by November 15th.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Nature vs. Nurture: Cultural Inheritance in Canadian Literature
Organizer: Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre (Worcester/Prince Edward Island)

I invite proposals for papers that focus on questions of cultural inheritance in Canadian texts, particularly as they come up against the binary nature/nurture. To what extent are cultural traditions (including ancestry, ritual, festival, language, religion, food, clothing, etc.) expressed or experienced as either “natural” components of the body or as acts and behaviours nurtured by cultural citizens? In the process of inheriting culture, are nature and nurture complementary or contradictory processes? How dotexts published in or about Canada negotiate this binary, and what visions of the nation do these tensions produce?
Proposals about texts from all regions, communities, and periods are welcome, as are all critical/theoretical approaches and methods. Possible topics include: the performance of cultural inheritance; racialized, gendered, classed, regionalized, and politicized bodies, families, and communities; trans-, hybridized, queer, questioning, two-spirited and/vs. heteronormative identities and inheritances; adulthood and/vs. childhood; the production, reproduction, and counterproduction of cultural memory.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

What is a Canadian Literary Urbanism?
Organizer: Brandon McFarlane (Toronto)

Since the mid 1990s writers and scholars have been calling for a Canadian literary urbanism. Authors like Zsuzsi Gartner, Hal Niedzviecki, Andrew Pyper, and Russell Smith contextualized their urban writing as a challenge to ‘obsolete’ notions of Canadian identity: ‘the Great White North’, the small town, and survival.
“Justin D. Edwards’s and Douglas Ivison’s Downtown Canada begins with a polemical asserting the centrality of the city and the urban within the Canadian spatial and cultural imaginaries” (4). Having recognized the city’s importance within Canadian culture, it now seems necessary to ask: What is a Canadian literary urbanism? This panel invites papers investigating what an urban consciousness allows one to do with Canadian literature. Potential approaches may investigate how urbanism affects on-going debates (trans-nationalism; native vs. cosmopolitanism; multiculturalism; ethnic studies; thematic criticism; environmental literature; diaspora studies; etc). Others may re-visit previous justifications of an urban approach (the need for national-referential writing; the rise of spatial theory; the arrival of ‘Generation-X’; nationalism; etc). Others may wish to theorize how relevant existing interdisciplinary urban models or theories are to a Canadian context.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Canadian (dis)Content
Oganizer: Karen Macfarlane (Mount Saint Vincent)

Not so long ago I was asked why we can’t seem to discuss a Canadian writer or work without focusing on his/her/its Canadian-ness. I’m throwing the question out to you by inviting proposals that consider Canadian literature outside of/beyond/and ideally without reference to Canadian content. Contributors are invited to consider ways in which we can discuss works by Canadian writers without explicit reference to Canadian national identity and related topics. Papers that focus on authors or works that are usually left out of discussions of canonical Canadian literature and those that address possible theoretical approaches to this topic are especially welcome.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

The Materiality of Texts
Organizer: Eli MacLaren (Queen’s)

There is more to a text than meets the casual reader’s eye. The specific forms in which it is received govern its significance, which we cannot fully grasp without enumerating and explaining these forms. An eighteenth-century novel reflects the class for whose consumption it was created; a twentieth-century novel foresees its own adaptation to film; a twenty-first century novel enshrines the ideology of the granting council that funded it. The “materiality of texts” is one label for the shaping impact of social and economic factors on language and literature, and it has emerged as a major point of convergence in literary studies, bibliography, and post-Marxist theory.

Papers are invited on any aspect of the materiality of texts, such as; the monied text and the players: incentive, rewards, careers, publication, performance, exchange—what are the human motivations behind textual production?; the mirror and the private reader: far from critical hierarchies, individuals turn to texts of all sorts and discover themselves. What and how can we learn about the value of texts to specific readers other than ourselves?; the fluid text and the scholarly editor: How do variants affect the significance of a work? How should one represent and organize the different incarnations of a text?; intersections in method: bibliography and cultural studies both take the “materiality of texts” as a starting point but trace noticeably different trajectories. How might these different fields of contemporary scholarship fruitfully learn from one another?

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

New Approaches to Creative Writing Pedagogy
Organizer: Robert McGill (Toronto)

As university creative writing courses have proliferated, the development of pedagogy has not kept pace. This session will address the imbalance by reconsidering such courses’ goals and methods. For instance, although workshops remain the default mode for teaching creative writing, there are many ways to run them. There are also entirely different modes of teaching. Papers in this session will address such questions as: to what extent might creative writing classes draw on pedagogy established for literary studies? What skill-sets and bodies of knowledge should instructors seek to teach? What place should there be for directed reading, literary theory, and writing exercises? How should students be assessed? What attention should there be to professional matters such as publishing and working with agents? What role should peer criticism play in providing feedback on students’ work, and how can the skills involved in peer criticism best be developed? What different strategies are demanded by the teaching of different literary forms (e.g., poetry, non-fiction, fiction, playwriting, screenwriting)—not least when more than one form is being taught in a course? And what ethical questions might arise in creative writing classes? Papers that draw on classroom experience are welcome.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Genocide and Testimony: The Dilemma of Memory
Organizers: Mark Olyan (McGill) and Fred Ribkoff (Kwantlen)

Of his seminal work, Shoah, the French filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, has said that far more than history, his film serves as an “incarnation” or “resurrection.” The witness testimonies that make up the bulk of Lanzmann’s documentary have an astonishing power not generally found in history texts. The witnesses are permitted to tell their own stories—to show where the individual account intersects with history.

From the time of Thucydides, witness testimony has been employed to enhance our appreciation of events at the limits of our understanding. The words of someone who was “actually there” cannot be undervalued. First-hand testimony to genocide, in either written, oral or visual form, permits survivors to communicate their own stories while subject to the limits of language, narrative, memory, and context.
What does such testimony communicate and how? How has it been used or abused? Is it history? Is it doomed by the flawed and fragile nature of human memory? Is it unverifiable and untestable? Or does it represent a larger and more important truth? Is it our last and best method for describing the indescribable?

Following the instructions on this website for member-organized sessions, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to olyan@sympatico.ca and/or Fred.Ribkoff@kwantlen.ca by November 15th.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Radical Modernist Pedagogy in Canada
Organizers: Karis Shearer (McGill) and Dean Irvine (Dalhousie)

Canada boasts a great number of teachers and professors amongst its writers. For many, teaching presents an opportunity to shape the values of both readers and writers of literature. Modernist writers such as A.J.M. Smith worked to legitimize Canadian literature as an academic field within Canadian universities, while Earle Birney helped to institute Canada’s first creative writing MFA in 1963. But pedagogy is not, of course, limited to the university classroom: Ezra Pound’s famous “Ez-university” was akin to a correspondence course in which writers exchanged letters with the American poet, receiving in return a literary education that included enclosed pamphlets and recommended-reading lists. Contemporary scholars and teachers continue individually and collectively to push the boundaries of pedagogy: the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project (www.editingmodernism.ca), for example, includes within its mandate experiential-learning pedagogies to train students and new scholars, as well as web-based pedagogies to “appeal to communities of readers beyond postsecondary institutions.” Might experimental modernist pedagogical strategies offer new ways of thinking about our contemporary practice as teachers of modernist literature?

Papers on radical modernist pedagogy in Canada might explore but are not limited to the following questions:
In what locations, venues, or media did radical modernist pedagogy take place? (i.e. living rooms, public parks, CBC radio, etc.)
What form(s) did women’s radical pedagogy take?
What is the relationship between teaching and writing?
Did technological advances offer new pedagogical possibilities?
How has radical modernist pedagogy been documented?

Following the instructions on this website for member-organized sessions, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to karis.shearer@mcgill.ca or dean.irvine@dal.ca by November 15th.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

The Lacanian Neighbour in Space
Organizers: Jason Starnes and Dave Gaertner (Simon Fraser), with the Vancouver Lacan Salon

In Civilization and its Discontents (1929), Sigmund Freud began to develop what was to be a significant element of psychoanalytic criticism: the neighbour. Freud’s speculations arose from his objection to the biblical commandment to “love thy neighbour as thyself,” an imperative he saw as distasteful, if not horrifying. In Seminar VII (1959), Jacques Lacan would go on to develop Freud’s ideas on the neighbour, linking it to the idea of jouissance and the death of God (see chapters XIV and XV). The most contemporary text, Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard’s The Neighbour (2006), uses political, philosophical and theological approaches to further develop the idea of the Other amidst current trends in critical theory. However, while Zizek et al provide nuanced criticism on the biblical trope of the neighbour, they seem to ignore what Lacan calls the “neighbour’s space as such” (197): the very literal borders that delineate self and other. This panel will critically explore these spaces from a variety of perspectives, examining for instance the ways physical space creates the other as such, and the consequences of real, imaginary, or porous borders between self and other.

Following the instructions on this website for member-organized sessions, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to jstarnes@sfu.ca and/or drg3@sfu.ca by November 15th.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Shakespeare and the Creation of Community
Organizer: Paul Stevens (Toronto)

In her classic study, Shakespeare’s Comic Commonwealths, the late Camille Wells Slights draws attention to Shakespeare’s preoccupation with community, to his interest in its construction, maintenance, and dissolution. The purpose of this panel session is to continue her seminal work on Shakespeare and community. By community we mean what Slights calls “social association” in its most inclusive sense, anything from the imagined communities articulated in the plays and poems to the local, business, and theatrical communities within which Shakespeare actually lived to the large scale social, cultural, and national communities he influenced both in his own day and in ours. We propose to build our discussion around questions of language, performance, social interaction, and history – for example, (1) how exactly are communities invented in language? how are their continuities maintained and their ruptures repaired? (2) What is the role of play, performance or the aesthetic? (3) What room do community imperatives and boundaries allow for individual agency, privacy, or difference? (4) To what extent are the mechanisms of community evident in Shakespeare specific to his time and to what extent transhistorical? How does his representation of community evolve or become co-opted?

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

Joint Sessions

If you are submitting a paper or proposal for a joint-organized session, remember to check the the guidelines to ensure that your proposal/paper satisfies the criteria for inclusion, and that you have provided the necessary information.

The deadline for submission to all joint-organized sessions is NOVEMBER 15.

All submitters must be members in good standing either of the co-sponsoring organization, or of ACCUTE.

Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP)

The Child and the City
Organizer: Mavis Reimer (Winnipeg)

Close to 80% of citizens live in urban spaces in Canada, just one of many nations and regions where urbanization is a primary fact of young people's lives and where many young people's identities are defined by their experience of living in cities. With its complex social networks and its ethnic and cultural diversity, the city invites multiple possibilities for self-invention or refashioning. The urban environment shapes how young people, from infants to adolescents, are able to express particular identities, participate in peer culture, and engage with their families. This session aims to address questions of how young people negotiate and create urban spaces and, conversely, how urban spaces accommodate young people.

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to): representations of the urban child; the criminalization of youth cultures; the surveillance of young people; media literacies of the urban child; social identities and youth; children’s play and public space; childhood, youth, and urban lifestyles; urban schools; postcolonial cities and urban youth; cities, globalization and young people; young people’s engagement with new technologies in the urban environments; GBLT as urban identities; homeless youth.

Following the instructions on this website for joint association sessions, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to arcyp-admin@uwinnipeg.ca by November 15th.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member or a member of ARCYP to submit to this session.

Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP)

Hope and Change?: Young People's Cultures and Social Justice
Organizer: Mavis Reimer (Winnipeg)

It is often claimed that young people are our future. “Hope and change” have long been associated with young people, but they have also become shimmering catchphrases in political discourses promising some brighter future. To what extent do current ideas, representations, and/or realities concerning youth and youth cultures offer possibilities for re-imagining current local and global struggles for equality, inclusion, alterity, and progress?
Some possible topics may include: rhetorics of reconciliation, multiculturalism, hybridity, and/or recognition; children's rights; alternative literacies and/or critical pedagogies; discourses of nationhood, progress, security, war and/or terrorism; struggles for human/civil rights (disability, gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.); transnationalism and families; mobility, space, displacement, and/or homelessness; environmental issues; DIY, culture jamming, youth culture and subcultures.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member or a member of ARCYP to submit to this session.

Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP)

Eco-Childhood: The Child, Ecology, and Eco-criticism
Organizer: Mavis Reimer (Winnipeg)

In the new environmental movement there is a great deal of discourse around saving the environment for children. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is now a picture book intended to teach young readers about the dangers of global warming. Many environmental groups have created educational programs designed to warn children of our destructive lifestyles. This is not the first time or place in history that the child has been taught about preserving nature, nor is it the first time that a social cause has been justified in terms of an adult duty of care towards children. This panel invites papers that deal with the relationships between the concepts of "the child" and "ecology," or papers that analyze children’s texts and culture from an eco-critical perspective.
Potential topics include:the role of the study of children’s' texts and culture for eco-critics; “the child” as an important critical term for ecological criticism; the role that assumptions about “the child” play in justifying an adult duty of care towards the environment; the ethical implications of the teachings of eco-friendly attitudes to children and youth; environmentalism as imagined in youth culture; young people as eco-activists.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member or a member of ARCYP to submit to this session.

Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS)

Healing America: Representing Health in American Culture
Organizers: Jason Haslam (Dalhousie) and Dana Medoro (Manitoba)

With the town halls surrounding Health Care reform becoming ever more vexed affairs, the cultural representation of health, healing, and health care takes on new resonance in U.S. political life and cultural self-image. This panel welcomes papers on literary, artistic, cinematic, online, or other cultural representations of these topics, whether fictional or non-fictional, and from any period. Possible topics could include: representing the (un)healthy body; health care and the disciplined subject; mental health; the “health” of the body politic; disability and health; the environment and health; illness and labour; pandemics and fear; and any other related topic.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member or a member of CAAS to submit to this session.

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)

Romanticism and Print Culture
Organizers: Michael Eberle-Sinatra (Montréal) and John Sachs (Concordia)

Print culture, as Paul Keen suggests, “evokes a society whose self-understanding was fundamentally determined by the prominence of…practices of reading and writing within it.” Indeed, much recent scholarly work has underscored the importance of material practices associated with print culture in the constitution of Romanticism itself. Accordingly, proposals are invited that address any aspect of the relationship between print and Romantic self-understanding, including but not limited to: conservatism, radicalism, revolution, literary fashion, the periodical press, publicity, changes in print technology, bibliomania, the Romantic library, etc. This call is especially broad because this
session is intended as a conversation and a reflection on trends in recent print culture scholarship and Romantic studies.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member or a member of NASSR to submit to this session.

North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA)

Victorian Literature and/of Education
Organizer: Jason Camlot (Concordia)
The Victorian period saw the development of a wide range of new curricula, new modes of pedagogy, and the establishment of new educational institutions. The 1836 royal charter that granted the University of London the right to confer university degrees, the founding of the first Women’s colleges in the late 1840s, the 1870 Education Act, are just a few historical results of the intense thought, effort and innovation of numerous individual educators, politicians, writers and thinkers. With such development and reform came a rich expository, philosophical and creative literature that engaged with important questions about the scope and function of education, and the role of educational methods and institutions for the development of the individual. This call invites proposals for individual or collaborative papers on the theme of "Victorian Literature and/of Education.” Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to: Art Education, Autodidacticism, Classical Humanism, Educational Reform, Education and the Victorian bildungsroman, Education of the Laboring Classes, Examinations, Literature curricula, Physical Education, Public Schools, Religious and Secular Education, University Poetry Prizes, Utilitarianism and Education, Victorian Pedagogy, Women and Education.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member or a member of NAVSA to submit to this session.

Society for Digital Humanities (SDH)

'Digging into Data' and English Studies
Organizer: Michael Eberle-Sinatra (Montréal)

The recent competition 'Digging into Data Challenge' (sponsored by SSHRC-NEH-NSF-JISC) states: "The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question 'what do you do with a million books?' Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research?". This special session invites proposals from editors of print and electronic editions, and users of small-scale and large-scale SSH electronic projects, to discuss the impact of recent technological changes on the way research and teaching are done in Canada and beyond.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member or a member of SDH to submit to this session.
Note: SDH has some additional funds available to encourage graduate student participation.

Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (VSAO)

Victorian Systems and Standardization
Organizers: Fiona Coll (Toronto) & Connie Crompton (York/Ryerson)

From the factory to the railway, the telegraph to the postal service, the growth of empire to the establishment of national educational curricula, the nineteenth century was marked by large-scale impositions of system, and by a concurrent emphasis on the standardization of objects, concepts, and people. This panel seeks to explore the imbrications of system and standardization throughout the Victorian era, and to examine how the concept of rationalized organization was imagined and understood by Victorians. How did the generalized abstraction inherent in the process of standardization shape the lived experience of individuals? What supra-individual needs were anticipated in the construction of various kinds of system? To what extent did the Victorians envisage a connection between systematization and knowledge production?

Papers may focus on any occurrence of system or standardization during the Victorian period, such as:
genre as artistic standardization; disciplines (scientific and otherwise); domestic conventions; bodies in systems; heterodox and orthodox belief systems; formal and informal economies; the aesthetics of system.

We are also interested in events and ideas that were explicitly figured as resistances to system, such as:
Works of genius or inspiration; Free love; Anarchy; Mutiny.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member or a member of VSAO to submit to this session.

Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada

Victorians on the Web
Organizers: Kristen Guest (Northern British Columbia)

In recent years, nineteenth-century scholarship has become increasingly invested in using new technologies for scholarship, teaching, publishing and networking. Today, large scale, diverse projects such as NINES, Orlando, British Women Writers, the Victorian Web and the Rossetti Archive, among many others, have significantly reshaped the field of Victorian studies. This session aims to explore and assess recent developments in online scholarship of the Victorian era.
Possible topics might include: innovations in teaching made possible by web-based materials; possibilities raised by the availability of rare texts and resources; changes or shifts in the discipline as a result of web-based resources; the scholarship of open access projects; networking and "Victoria"; theoretical, practical, or technical implications of web-based scholarship.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member or a member of VSAWC to submit to this session.

Christianity and Literature Study Group

Topics: Various

Organizers: David Kent (Centennial) and Margo Swiss (York)

The Christianity and Literature Study Group (an Allied Association now in its 23rd year) invites proposals or papers on any aspect of religion and literature, including pedagogy and critical theory, for its annual Conference at the 2010 Congress at Concordia University. We also welcome suggestions for member-organized sessions.

Note: While the Christianity and Literature Group has an annual CFP, please be aware that (because this is a “study group,” and because the submissions are not sent for external assessment) presenters at these sessions are not eligible for the ACCUTE conference travel funds provided by SSHRC.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

ACCUTE Conference 2010

Call for Papers: General, Member-Organized, and Joint Sessions

General Call Member-Organized Sessions Joint Sessions Christianity and Literature Study Group

General Call for Papers

Member-Organized Sessions

Joint Sessions

General Call
Member-Organized Sessions
Joint Sessions
Christianity and Literature Study Group