Venue: University of Sussex

Date: Friday 5th – Saturday 6th July 2013

What is the business of oral history? What is the relationship between oral history and business? Why have institutions and businesses wanted to record their histories? And how have they used their oral history?

This conference opens up our traditional focus on community and domestic lives to explore the hidden histories of private companies and business, public institutions, hospitals, universities, museums, public utilities, local and national governmental, campaigning bodies and charities. We would like to hear about what interviews with those who work in institutions and organisations tell us about organisational history and memory, the institutional or educational community, and more.

This conference would bring into dialogue historians of business, education and health with oral historians who have been commissioned to work with and within institutions to create and document their oral history. We would like to hear from those, too, who work in public history, scholars of business memoir or biography, and, ideally, institutional commissioners or archivists, and interviewees themselves. We also invite honest and practical sharing of experiences of negotiating with private sector funders or large institutions, and of working with those with high public profiles. The conference will additionally encourage discussion of how these experiences relate to working with the media and the general public, which are often part of the package of an institutionally-framed oral history.

We invite proposals for oral history-based contributions, including papers, panels, presentations, workshops, posters and displays on the following topics:

Personal Voices:
* The face of a business: managing directors, exemplary employees, disgruntled employees, minorities, majorities;
* Customer or service user perspectives;
* Interviewee perspectives – current employees, retirees, or leavers;
* Living with or growing up with a corporate employee in the household

Institutional voices:
* Public, private and voluntary sectors;
* The international and global institution;
* Corporate museums and oral history

Organisational memory and oral history:
* Corporate memories and inheritance stories;
* Myth in the workplace
* Big birthday – commemorations, anniversaries and oral history;
* Family business and friends reunited

The organisational community and change:
* Transition from public body to private corporation;
* Impact of rapid decline and/or growth;
* Place, space and communities of identity

Role and use of oral history in business settings:
* Marketing and branding;
* Dealing with critical perspectives of organisations or businesses;
* Institutional history as public history

Commissioning oral history:
* Funding and ethics;
* Negotiating control of corporate sponsored projects or with elite interviewees;
* Franchising oral history

Archiving:
* Archivist perspectives – creating an oral history archive of an organisation or business;
* The future life of an institutional oral history collection;
* Business records and oral history

PROPOSALS
The deadline for submission of proposals is 1st December 2012. Each proposal should include: a title, an abstract of between 250-300 words, your name (and the names of any co-presenters, panelists etc), your institution or organisation, your email address, and a note of any particular requirements. Most importantly your abstract should demonstrate the use
of oral history or personal testimony and be directly related to the history or development of aspects of organisational or corporate history.

Proposals should be emailed to the Corporate Voices Conference Administrator, Belinda Waterman, at belinda.
They will be assessed anonymously by the conference organisers, and presenters will be contacted early in 2013.

ORGANISING GROUP
OHS: Kate Melvin, Rob Perks, Mary Stewart, Juliana Vandegrift, Hilary Young.
Sussex: Sam Carroll, Fiona Courage, Margaretta Jolly, Jo Palache, Ben Rogaly, Dorothy Sheridan.

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/cfp-corporate-voices-institutional-and-organisational-oral-histories/

Proposals for panels and papers are invited for a conference entitled “Captivity Writing Unbound,” to be hosted by the University of South Alabama’s Department of English and held at its Baldwin County campus, which is set in the heart of the quaint artist community of Fairhope, overlooking scenic Mobile Bay. As conference organizers, we envision a relatively concentrated event in which select scholars working in various disciplines and historical periods will present new ideas about the general area of writing and captivity. We are particularly interested in papers that explore and extend the traditional boundaries of the study of captivity writing, whether these are conceived generically, geographically, historically, or in disciplinary terms.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
• Literary and Filmic Representations of Captivity (Prometheus Bound, Exodus, The Odyssey, etc.)
• Captivity and Nationality
• Defining and/or Theorizing Captivity

• Animals and Captivity
• Fashion and Captivity (the corset, footbinding, etc.)
• Nature and Captivity
• Captivity and the Unearthly (alien abduction, etc.)
• The Erotics of Captivity
• Psychology and Captivity (phobias, eating disorders, addiction, body identity disorder)

• Captivity and Theory (Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage, Georges Poulet’s phenomenology of reading, etc.)
• Paradoxes of Captivity (illusory notions of escape and freedom, willing captives, S M practices)

• Antidotes to Captivity (Existentialism, death, meditation, transcendentalism)
• Captivity as Metaphor
• Gender, Race, and Class as Forms of Captivity
• Genre as Captivity
• Pedagogy and Captivity
• The Captive Audience

• Narrative as Captivity
• History as Captivity
• Captivity and the Body (especially the obese, the diagnosed and/or medicated body)
• Captivity and the Carceral
• Captivity and Technology
• Transhistorical Captivities

• Captivity Narrative’s Others (narratives of assimilation, captor narratives)

As much as we trust that this conference will generate exciting new scholarship, we also hope to foster a substantial exchange of ideas and perspectives among participants not only during scheduled sessions but also between and after. To this end, panels will meet sequentially rather than concurrently so that all participants will be able to attend all panels, and we strongly encourage participants to stay for the duration of the conference. We believe that much good work will come from the conference, and we intend to assemble a collection of essays in the months following the conference in order to share that good work with the widest possible audience. Kicking off the conference will be a keynote address by Michelle Burnham, Early American scholar and author of Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861. As early as 1997, Burnham was already thinking beyond the usual confines of the captivity narrative, and thus we are particularly happy to have her on hand as we talk, think, and write about new ways in which to conceive the captivity narrative.

Please submit proposals of 350-500 words either by email to pcesarini and bmclaugh or by snail mail to Pat Cesarini or Becky McLaughlin, Department of English, University of South Alabama, 5991 USA Drive, N., Room 240, Mobile, AL 36688.

Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2012.

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/captivity-writing-unbound-5152012-1011-132012-usa/

Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2012

International conference organized by D2I (VALE: EA 4085)

The symposium will be dedicated to writers’ biographies, biofictions and family biographies in the Anglophone world from the modernist period until now. Since the renewal of the genre initiated by the English “New Biographers” (see Virginia Woolf’s famous essays “The New Biography” and “The Art of Biography”, 1927), the tradition of writers’ biographies has been through many reinterpretations, notably those proposed by Anthony Burgess (Nothing like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life, 1964), Peter Ackroyd (The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, 1983; Chatterton, 1987), Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot, 1984; Arthur and George, 2007), Michael Cunningham (The Hours, 1999), or Lila Azam Zanganeh (The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, 2011). Writers’ tributes to other writers have also been voiced in more traditional biographies, such as Nicolai Gogol (1944) by Vladimir Nabokov, Shakespeare: The Biography (2005) by Peter Ackroyd, or Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson (2005) by Jonathan Coe. Writers’ family biographies, such as My Ear at his Heart (2004) by Hanif Kureishi and Alfred and Emily (2007) by Doris Lessing, are yet another mode of constructing one’s authorial identity by exploring one’s biological filiation. Through its abundant and polymorphous expressions, literary biography enables writers to explore and experiment with countless new configurations and forms.

The symposium will focus on three main problems:
1) Formal hybridity: what are the different uses of fiction in biographical writing?

2) Intertextuality and interaction of two authorial images: what aesthetic and/or cultural heritage links the biographer to the biographee? To what extent can the aesthetics of each writer merge with, or come in conflict with, the other’s?

3) Simultaneous (de)/(re)construction of several authorships: what are the potential encounters (between two epochs, two regional, national, or (post)colonial spaces, two sexual identities…) in the dual configuration of biographical writing?

Abstracts (300-500 words) written in English or French should be sent to Aude Haffen and Lucie Guiheneuf at the following address: writersbiographies, along with a title and a short CV before June 30th, 2012. Notification for acceptance will be communicated to scholars by July 30th, 2012.

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/writers-biographies-hybridities-combinations-and-metamorphoses/

This panel seeks papers on the enduring legacy and plasticity of the German fairy tale. From the Tin Drum through the poetic journalism of Peter Schneider and on to Lola rennt, the Märchen continually reemerges from the past as metaphor, model, clue and whetting stone for the production of new critical and social thought and the creation of new post(?)-modern narratives through which we tell ourselves the story of our present and possible future. The panel particularly welcomes projects that reveal the hybridity and follow interdisciplinary threads of the Fairy Tale as it emerges in art, politics and contemporary culture.

Abstracts: 250 words to Dr. William Crooke (williamcrooke), accompanied by 2-page CV, by May 31, 2012.

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/marchen-as-memoir-the-return-of-the-german-fairy-tale-in-the-20th-and-21st-centuries/

Scholarly work in the field of auto/biography studies over the past thirty years or so has acknowledged how individual identities are constructed and performed through auto/biographical practice. For example, in the early 1990s, prominent life writing scholar Paul John Eakin noted the shift ‘from a documentary view of autobiography as a record of referential fact to a performative view of autobiography centered on the act of composition.’

In an era when authenticity is a valued commodity, it is now more important than ever to scrutinise how authors, artists, and producers perform identities in life narrative texts. What is at stake in such performances? This special edition of LiNQ, entitled ‘Performing Lives’, will focus on continuing and furthering this investigation.

We call for scholarly articles, creative fiction and non-fiction, essays, poems and book reviews that explore this theme of ‘Performing Lives’. We invite work that engages with the idea of performance both in a literal, embodied sense – for example in the theatre, in performance art, in reality TV, and on film – but also in a more metaphorical, literary sense such as in memoir, autobiography, biography, and multimodal forms such as online and graphic lives.

For creative writing submissions, we particularly welcome polished pieces that address these questions in forms including creative non-fiction, prose fiction and poetry (for further guidelines, refer to ‘What we’re looking for’ at the Creative Nonfiction journal website: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/submittocnf.htm).

Articles must be no longer than 6000 words. Include a brief abstract of the article or creative
submission (no more than 75 words) and a 50-word biographical note. Reviews are also welcome. Follow MLA citation style and format. All contributions should be submitted as a Microsoft Word file, double-spaced in 12 point font. All images must be used by permission only.

SUBMISSIONS CLOSE 31 August 2012 for Issue 39 December 2012.

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/life-writing-special-issue-of-linq-submissions-due-31-august-2012/

The rapid changes currently experienced in the different spheres of contemporary life are loosely addressed by the term “globalization.”

How do we theorize these changes? And perhaps more importantly, while these changes are often considered a global phenomenon, are they not also shaped by a set of discourses? This calls for a reconsideration of key terms such as “domination” and “hegemony”, as well as of the various intellectual/cultural positions associated with them. In particular, we aim to reconsider the cultural sphere as a globalized phenomenon in which cultural products circulate on a worldwide scale, and as a sphere where “global” experiences are articulated.

The conference will attempt to explore some of the many aspects of this globalized view of culture, as well as other aspects of global lives, economical, political or other. We seek to engage scholars from a wide range of disciplines to bring together the different theories and perspectives of globalization in order to articulate the diverse experiences of living in a globalized world.

Topics include but are not limited to:
- Transnational cinema and global film industry
- New media and transnational communication networks
- Mass media and global culture industry
- Transnational literature(s)
- Colonialism and postcolonial theory (empire, diaspora, exile, migration)
- Neoliberalism
- Emerging discourses of globalization, academic and popular
- Globalization as historical process
- Global material culture
- Circulation of capital, goods, and people
- Labor and work life on a global scale
- Travel and tourism
- Cultural Geography and Cartography
- Educational Responses to a Global Culture
- Popular movements and the various shapes of resistance
- Ecology on a worldwide scale
- National identities
- Military, defense, homeland security and warfare studies

Submission and acceptance to the conference is based on blind peer review of a 250-300 word abstract. Panels and non-traditional presentations will also be considered. Graduate students interested in submitting should email an abstract, paper title, 2-3 sentence bio, affiliation and contact information to catgradconf by June 1, 2012. Presenters will be informed by August 1, 2012.

Conference Website:
http://www.catgradconf.com

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/global-lives/

Please see the CFP below for PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association). The deadline is May 13, and the topic has been broadened since our previous call.

EXTENDED DEADLINE:
The Southern California Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SCSSAWW) is looking for one more paper to complete their panel, “INTER-EXAMINATIONS OF CAPTIVITY AND SLAVE NARRATIVES.”

This is a confirmed panel which will be presented at the 2012 PAMLA conference in Seattle on October 19-21. The panel description is as follows:

This panel requests proposals describing current examinations of dynamics, resonances and dissonances between captivity and slave narratives from all temporal periods and geographic locations. We have particular interest in narratives by women, narratives of experiences/events occurring in the American West and Pacific Rim, and/or narratives from racial and/or ethnic groups not commonly associated with these genres. Proposals of 250–300 words should be submitted via the PAMLA website at http://www.pamla.org/2012/session-topics by MAY 13, 2012. This panel is sponsored by the Southern California Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Please contact Denise MacNeil at
denise_macneil if you have questions.

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/inter-examinations-of-captivity-and-slave-narratives/

The Visual Rhetoric session is a regular session of SAMLA (South Atlantic MLA), and we invite submissions that engage with the theme of this year’s conference as well as engaging with other issues and topics that represent the field of visual
rhetoric.

SAMLA’s special focus this year is Text as Memoir: Tales of Travel, Immigration, and Exile, and this Call for Papers invites submissions that interrogate the various ways that visual images are used to connect, connect to, and connect with memoirs.

In the genre of memoir, visual artifacts may

- act as a theme, *connecting the parts* of a whole, or
- they may connect images and visual artifacts *to* memoir, and
- such artifacts often connect audiences *with* the memoir’s composer.

The visual – encompassing as it does the full range of things seen, from architecture and art to logos and typefaces – is an integral part of memoir. Papers may explore how visual artifacts appear and are composed or presented in travel, immigration, or exile memoirs. Additionally, we encounter memoir in the form of movies or documentaries, thus this CFP invites papers that explore the form or medium of memoir as well as its text.

Please send abstracts of 500 words or less to Alice Myatt, amyatt1, no later than June 15, 2012, and include with your abstract any audio / visual needs you have. All presenters must be members of SAMLA at the time of presentation. People whose abstracts are accepted will be notified no later than July 15, 2012.

This year (2012), the SAMLA conference will be held from November 9 – 11 at Research Triangle Park in Durham, North Carolina 27709. For more information, visit the SAMLA website at http://samla.gsu.edu/convention/convention.htm.

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/visual-connections-the-role-of-the-visual-in-memoir-compositions-samla-regular-session/

CFP: Staging Women’s Lives in Academia (Literature and Language Workplaces)

We are putting together an edited collection, tentatively titled Staging Women’s Lives in Academia. The subtitle, yet to be figured out, will indicate that our focus is upon women in literature and languages. The book, under serious consideration at Rutgers University Press for its new Higher Education Studies series, will focus upon nodal points of professional (graduate school, pre- and post- tenure, mid- and later- career, and retirement) and personal life for women in academia. We have two key premises: that choosing not to continue down the traditional path of academic life stages is as significant as following it, and that the usual conflation of academic and age-specific life stages is deeply gendered.

Our design for the collection outlines professional life stages. These range from:

• finishing the degree (who chooses to write or not write the dissertation);
• seeking academic or other employment post-Ph.D.;
• beginning and then remaining in the profession (publishing, promotions, moving into administration or not);
• leaving academia once employed (whether in a full-time or part-time, pre-tenure or post-tenure position);
• deciding to retire or to continue working.

We welcome essays from women who have followed a traditional career path, but also from those who’ve travelled other roads. We can readily see a graduate student writing about the decision to get the Ph.D. but not pursue academic employment, for example, an adjunct writing about mid-career parenting decisions, an administrator writing about being “stuck,” an associate professor talking about the decision not to seek promotion to full professor, etc. Parenting, elder-care issues, and general assessment of “professionalization” values can also lead to priorities other than those usually counseled through professional advice venues.

Although we of course want contributors to draw upon personal experience, we will be asking that they both theorize and concretize their essays. As you think about this call, we’d like to ask that you also think about some very basic questions that could help others, such as: “Do/did you discover that your experience was typical, but nonetheless didn’t expect it?” “What would you point out as the key features of this stage to a colleague just beginning it?” “How do you think your experiences were shaped by the kind of school you worked at and where your school was situated?” and, everyone’s favorite, “What would you do differently if you had it to do again?”

Besides these basic questions, there are many others that you might consider, such as: What is gendered about your career path, your career experience? How did race/ethnicity, age, class, sexuality, and culture affect your academic experience at each stage? How did your academic work feed into, enhance, or distract from other parts of your life? Or how much of your personal life intersects with or clashes with your work life? Has your work changed over time? Have you changed over time in terms of your enthusiasm for, and interest in, your work?

We want contributors to be frank, but we also want these essays to encourage “best practice” discussion and also to serve as references for other women. Because responding fully to some of these topics may be difficult, we are willing to accept proposals or essays by authors writing under a pseudonym or anonymously. We also invite proposals written by several people in dialogue with each other.

Please consider sending in a proposal for this collection, but also think about students and colleagues who fall under the “did not choose to” rubrics who may not be receiving notes such as this. Please forward this call to them. We would like to receive proposals by June 1, 2012. Proposal packets should include a 500-word abstract (or a full essay, if appropriate) and a brief c.v. Final essays should be around 6250 words, including notes and Works Cited, although we will consider shorter pieces. They should be sent to both of us:

Michelle Massé at mmasse
Nan Bauer-Maglin at nbauer-maglin

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/staging-womens-lives-612012-edited-collection/

REPRESENTATIONS OF AGE

Papers are sought for this Working Session of the annual conference of the American Society for Theatre Research, taking place in Nashville November 1-4.

The rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of Age and Aging Studies opens onto gerontology, sociology, bioethics, anthropology, and a wide range of approaches springing from the humanities and arts, especially in Europe. However, as reflected at the recent European Network in Age Studies (ENAS) conference, the theatrical representation of Age and Aging has just begun to emerge as a major subject of critical inquiry.

The proposed Working Session seeks a wide range of papers exploring representations, from classic to contemporary, of Age and Aging in dramatic, theatrical, and cultural performance. Short performances and videos will also be considered. Building on the pathbreaking work of Kathleen Woodward, Anne Basting, Thomas Cole, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Stephen Katz, Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, Valerie Lipscomb, and Leni Marshall, as well as work in several European languages, the session will raise questions and seek perspectives:
Is there a dramaturgy of Age?
What are the performative differences between the spectacle of age and the experience of age? What emotions and what bodies (and what emotions about the bodies) are associated with Age and Aging?
Why has the youth/age binary been absent from the identity debates in theater and performance studies on race, gender, disability, and other bio-markers of the past decades?
In what ways are ageism and stereotyping factors in theatrical representations of aging?

By May 31, 2012, please send 300-word abstracts or two-minute performance links to elinor.fuchs . Final papers should be no longer than 2500 words.

http://www.astr.org/conference

Article source: http://iabalistserv.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/representations-of-age-31-may-2012-astrtla-nashville-1-4-nov-2012/