8th Biennial MESEA Conference
The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas 13–16 June 2012
Blanquerna School of Communication, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain
Call for Papers Media and Mediated Performances of Ethnicity

“A decade into the twenty-first century, media culture has become a prime driving force in politics, culture, society, and everyday life. We can argue that the media—readily accessible to everyone—provide models for cultural perspectives and positions, and new forms of identity. In many ways the media have become today’s dominant culture, with visual, aural/oral, and digital forms of media culture increasingly replacing book culture among large sectors of the world’s urban population, requiring a fundamental revision of the notion of literacy. Media have also become prime constituents of socialization, with social-networking sites, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and other similar vehicles shaping our lives in significant ways” (Davis, Fischer- Hornung and Kardux, 1).

This argument, put forth in the introduction to the MESEA volume Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music and Art (Routledge 2010), points to the current need to heighten our critical engagement with media in its multiple forms. [Read more…] about CFP: Mediated Performances of Identity, Barcelona, June 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS:  Crossing Boundaries in the Americas:Dynamics of Change in Politics, Culture, and Media
Guadalajara, Mexico, September 25 – 27, 2012
Second Bi-Annual Conference of the International Association of Inter-American Studies

Mass migration, accelerated urbanization, and the processes of transnational economic integration are profoundly challenging the social and cultural constitution of the Americas in the New Millennium. In view of these dynamics of change, it has been argued that the sovereignty of the “nation-state” is an outdated concept. The gradual decline of the geopolitical hegemony of the U.S. is also changing the ways in which influence is negotiated regionally, as new global players from the South—such as Brazil—are gaining power. [Read more…] about CFP: Crossing Boundaries in the Americas, Mexico, September 2012

26th Annual MELUS Conference and 6th Conference of the United States Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies
April 19-22, 2012
Santa Clara University, California
THEME: Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Bill Ashcroft, Wlad Godzic, Francisco Jimenez, David Marriott

As an ongoing and vital process through which societies and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communications, economics, and politics, globalization addresses the transnational circulation of ideas and languages. Its impact on literature is manifold, with both positive and negative associations, wherein cultures receiving outside influences ignore some, adopt others as they are, and then immediately start to transform others. Certain aspects of globalization – such as hybridity and multi-rootedness – are increasingly present in literary texts as we witness ways in which they shape new literary forms, interrogate existing canons, and explore the emergence of ethnic canons. [Read more…] about CFP: MELUS, Multiethnic Literatures, April 2012

WOMEN WHO ROCK: MAKING SCENES, BUILDING COMMUNITIES
“VIBRATIONS OF LOVE”
Meeting and Film Festival
Call for Workshop Facilitators, Call for Film Submissions
Submission Deadline:  November 15, 2011
Meeting: March 2-3, 2012 at Washington Hall, Seattle, WA

THE INVITATION
We invite activists, scholars, musicians, filmmakers, and artists to submit proposals for topic-focused open workshops that will promote dialogue about women, music, and social justice, taking into account issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality. Inspired by the influence of gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe and punk pioneer Alice Bag, we encourage workshops that explore the ways that Chicana and Black feminist thought have expanded “who” counts as women and “what” counts as rock.

[Read more…] about CFP: Women Who Rock, Nov 15 deadline, Seattle WA

Call for Papers:  Empire and the Revolutionary Matrix
Deadline: March 1, 2012
Norma Alarcón and Ellie D. Hernández, Editors

Recent decades have given rise to an extremist white nativism [Huntington] that in fact is not new to the Angloeuropean nation-state. The making of the nation has been punctuated by such violent “nativist” display for more than two centuries. Can we imagine a society that is multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual bringing together a diversity of peoples into a new “imagined community” *Anderson+ that heals the rifts and renegotiates the boundaries of exclusion that have only served to scar and produce interminable differences between and among the population? [Read more…] about CFP: Empire & the Revolutionary Matrix