CONFERENCES
2013-14
Friday, May 23, 10:30 am to 12:00 pm
Hart House, main venue
Margaret Randall
Radical Texts & Political Acts: Forty Years of Reading Margaret Randall
Co-sponsored by the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, and the JHI Working Group: Gender and Global Scholarship, University of Toronto.
This event is part of "History on the Edge," the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. For information on how to register for this conference, please visit the website at: http://berks2014.com/2013/10/04/registration/.
November 9 and 10, 2013
Munk School of Global Affairs
Conference:
Toronto Political Behaviour
Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto; and the Department of Political Science, Ryerson University.
This is a private conference, by invitation only.
October 26, 9:30 am to 5 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
Conference:
Photography and the Optical Unconscious
Organized by the Toronto Photography Seminar
Speakers include: Andrés Zervigón (Rutgers University), Ulrich Baer (New York University), Mary Bergstein (RISD), Jonathan Fardy (University of Western Ontario), Thy Phu (University of Western Ontario), Gabrielle Moser (York University), Mark Reinhardt (Williams University), and Laura Wexler (Yale University).
For additional information, please go to the Toronto Photography Seminar website at: http://www.torontophotographyseminar.org/, or email: info@torontophotographyseminar.org.
October 11 and 12, 9 am to 5 pm
York University
Founders College, Senior Commons Room
Conference:
New Directions in US Studies: Re-imagining the 1950s and 1960s
Co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto
This conference brings together some of the most exciting recent scholarship on the US in the 1950s and 1960s. The seven panels present thoughtful, cutting-edge research from the fields of history, political science, sociology, and literature, as well as from art, music, and film. A highlight of the conference is the keynote address by Professor Paul Buhle from Brown University. His talk, entitled "Culture as Politics: How Vernacular Arts Opened up US Studies...and why it needed opening so badly," discusses the rise of graphic novels and other non-traditional literature, fiction and non-fiction. Buhle, an activist since his teen years, established a new left journal in the 1960s and a journal on popular culture in the 1970s. He has edited or written more than 40 books, including a three volume study of Jews and popular culture, an authorized biography of C.L.R. James, as well as graphic histories of the IWW, SDS, and Emma Goldman.
The conference helps launch York University’s new US Studies Program and showcases, along with the contributions of other distinguished scholars, York’s excellence in “American” studies.
For additional information and to register for this conference, please go to the website at:
http://www.yorku.ca/uhistory/USConference/index
or contact Professor Marc Egnal, York University, at: megnal@yorku.ca.
2012-13
November 9-10, 9 am-6 pm
Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place
Editing Early African American Literature
Organized by the Department of English, University of Toronto Mississauga
The objective of this conference is to assemble an international group of scholars to address and evaluate editorial approaches to early African American Literature. Examining recent methods used to recover and rethink works by Olaudah Equiano, Frances E.W. Harper, Harriet Wilson, Hannah Crafts, and Julia Collins, we hope to understand the complex relation between race and editorial practices during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Important topics will include: Sutton E. Griggs and the black-owned publishing industry, white editor/black author, oral culture vs. print culture, and digitizing dialect.
For additional information and to register for this conference, please contact Tess Chakkalakal at: tchakkal@bowdoin.edu.
October 25-27, 9 am to 6 pm
Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place, Toronto
Geographies of Promise and Betrayal: Land and Place in US Studies
Co-organized by the Canadian Association of American Studies, York University, and the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto
American mythologies and narratives are traditionally reliant upon the presumed availability of space (the frontier thesis) and American identity typically defined through the occupation, subjugation, conquest, or mastery of space. In Critical Regionalism (2007), Douglas Reichert Powell points out that “‘senses’ of place and region are not so much essential qualities, imparted by singular events, practices, or topographical features, as they are ongoing debates and discourses that coalesce around particular geographical spaces.” How is land/earth/terrain understood and used? What are the distinct debates, discourses, and spatial practices that have defined American culture and society in the past, and how might they be changing today? For registration information and a list of topics/themes please visit the CAAS website: http://www.yorku.ca/laps/en/CAAS2012.html
Registrations made prior to midnight September 15, 2012:
Regular Scholars: $175 CDN
Students: $90 CDN
(Registration fees include $80 membership fee (including a one year subscription to the Canadian Review of American Studies)
Registrations made from September 16, 2012 onwards :
Regular Scholars: $220 CDN
Students: $170
(Registration fees include $45 membership fee (including a one year subscription to the Canadian Review of American Studies)
Electronic Registration is available HERE
September 21-22, 2012
Munk School of Global Affairs
1 Devonshire Place, Toronto
The Photographic Situation Project:
Works-in-Progress Workshop
Organized by the Toronto Photography Seminar; Hosted by the Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS), University of Toronto.
This two-day workshop invites a group of international photography scholars to workshop papers on topics related to “the photographic situation,” an emerging conceptual framework that defines photography as much more than a technology for producing pictures. As Ariella Azoulay has made forcefully evident, photography should be understood as an event that mediates relationships between people. Its ontology is, therefore, political. With the aim of developing new questions, case studies, and methodologies for understanding the photographic situation, fourteen speakers will present works-in-progress in a series of seven themed sessions and discuss their work with respondents and the audience.
Speakers include:
Elspeth Brown, David Campbell, Stephen Mayes, Gabrielle Moser, Andrea Noble, Thy Phu, Sharon Sliwinski, Shawn Michelle Smith, Dot Tuer, Edward Welch, Kelly Wood, Carol Zemel and Andres Zervigon, with responses by Sarah Bassnett, Matthew Brower, Deepali Dewan, Sarah Parsons, Mark Reinhardt and Linda Steer.
Workshop papers will be pre-circulated to all attendees before the event through a password-protected website. Attendees are expected to read all the workshop papers and to participate in the discussion of them. Each session will feature two authors and one respondent: the respondent will speak to the two papers, concluding with some questions linking the papers for the audience to consider and opening the discussion to include both the authors and the audience. The sessions will be followed by a summary discussion on the second day.
The workshop is by the Toronto Photography Seminar, in partnership with the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies, and the Developing Room, Rutgers University, on a three-year SSHRC Partnership Development Grant on the topic of “the photographic situation.”
We welcome attendance by scholars, curators, and others who are not presenting papers to join us as audience members and discussants. However, we ask that you read the papers ahead of time. We understand that not everyone will be able to attend the full two days; we simply ask that you commit to reading the papers and participating in the sessions that interest you. A draft schedule will be posted to the Toronto Photography Seminar website by August 31, 2012. That URL is: http://www.torontophotographyseminar.org/
However, to gain access to the papers and to the event, we will need you to register. To register for the workshop, please email your name and your institutional affiliation to info@torontophotographyseminar.org by Friday, September 7, 2012.
2010
DIY Citizenship Critical Making and
Social Media
November 12–14, 2010
Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States. Co-sponsored by: Munk School of Global Affairs, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Knowledge Media Design Institute; and Cooler Solutions.
Conference organizers: Prof. Megan Boler, University of Toronto; Prof. Matt Ratto, University of Toronto.
A renewed emphasis on participatory forms of digitally-mediated production is transforming our social landscape. ‘Making’ has become the dominant metaphor for a variety of digital and digitally-mediated practices. The web is exploding with independently produced digital ‘content’ such as video diaries, conversations, stories, software, music, video games—all of which are further transformed and morphed by “modders,” “hackers,” artists and activists who redeploy and repurpose corporately-produced content. Equally, communities of self-organized crafters, hackers, and enthusiasts are increasingly to be found online exchanging sewing and knitting patterns, technical guides, circuit layouts, detailed electronics tutorials and other forms of instruction and support. Many of these individuals and collaborators understand their work to be socially interventionist. Through practices of design, development, and exchange they challenge traditional divides between production and consumption and to redress the power differentials built into technologically-mediated societies.
“DIY Citizenship” invokes the participatory nature of these diverse “do-it-yourself” modes of engagement, community, networks, and tools—all of which arguably replace traditional with remediated notions of citizenship. The term “critical making” refers to the increasing role ‘making’ plays in critical forms of social reflection and engagement.
This interactive conference seeks to extend conversations about new modes of engaged DIY citizenship and politics evidenced by the exponential increase of DIY media, “user-generators”, “prosumers,” “hacktivists,” tactical media interventionists, and other ‘maker’ identities. We invite scholars, activists, artists, designers, programmers and others interested in the social and participatory dimensions of digitally-mediated practices, to engage in dialogue across disciplinary and professional divides. All methodological and theoretical approaches are welcomed. Submissions may include paper proposals, works of art and/or design, short video or audio segments, performances, video games, digital media, or other genres and forms. Potential topics include: the relation between social media and the ‘making’ of new forms of citizenship engagement—thus, for example, making movements; making community; making news; making play; making bodies; making health; making public; making education; making networks.
Plenary speakers include:
Anne Balsamo, Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communications in the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Southern California, co-founder of Onomy Labs, Inc. a Silicon Valley technology design and fabrication company that builds cultural technologies.
Suzanne de Castell, Professor (media, educational technologies) Faculty of Education Simon Fraser University, Vancouver: educational media theory, research, design and development, Founded Canadian Game Studies Association, co-editor of Loading…
Ron Deibert, Professor (Political Science), University of Toronto, Director of the Citizen Lab; a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor projects; co-founder and VP of global policy and outreach for Psiphon Inc.
Paul Dourish, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, co-conspirator in the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction, and author of Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, MIT Press.
Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. Blogger, henryjenkins.org. Author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Currently doing research for MacArthur Foundation on youth, new media, and the public sphere.
Jennifer Jenson, Professor of Pedagogy and Technology, York University, Toronto: video game designer, co-editor of Loading…: The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association.
Natalie Jeremijenko, artist whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. Jeremijenko’s projects which explore socio-technical change have been exhibited by several museums and galleries, including the MASSMoCA, the Whitney, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt. Jeremijenko is the director of the environmental health clinic at NYU, assistant professor in Art, and affiliated with the Computer Science Department.
Steve Mann, professor of Applied Engineering, and Arts and Sciences, University of Toronto, proliferate inventor including wearable computing, hydraulophone, and concept of 'sousveillance': "the effects a surveillance device has on others."
Trebor Scholz, Professor of Culture and Media Study, The New School, New York: media activist, writer, and artist, founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity. In the fall of 2009, Dr. Scholz convened The Internet as Playground and Factory conference.
The following is the link to the DIY Website:
http://diycitizenship.com/
2009