We are pleased to announce the first Digital Media and Learning Conference, an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice. Henry Jenkins is the Chair of the Digital Media and Learning Conference and our Keynote Speakers will be Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins.Details

The Cultural Studies Association (U.S.) invites participation in its Eighth Annual Meeting seminars. Those interested in participating in a seminar should consult the list of seminars and the instructions for signing up for them.

This conference will bring together academics, advocates, artists, and other cultural workers to examine the intersecting fields of archive and everyday life theory. From Simmel through Mass Observation to contemporary Cultural Studies theorists, the objective of everyday life theory has been, as Ben Highmore writes, to “rescue the everyday from conventional habits of the mind…to attempt to register the everyday in all its complexities and contradictions.” Archive theory provides a means to explore these structures by “making the unfamiliar familiar,” hence opening the possibility of generating “new forms of critical practice.” The question of a politics of the archive is critical to the burgeoning field of archive theory. How do we begin to theorize the archive as a political apparatus? Can its effective democratization be measured by the participation of those who engage with both its constitution and its interpretation? Details

The 2010 CHCI Annual Meeting will be held at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University, June 14-15, 2010. The title of the meeting, Whose Global Humanities? is designed to spur a collective interrogation of the idea of globalism in the context of academic research, publishing, programmatic activity, networking, and institution/organization-building. The two confirmed plenary speakers are economist/environmentalist Rajendra K. Pachauri and filmmaker/cultural theorist Mieke Bal. Workshops are being planned on the topics of designing and implementing programs involving arts organizations and artists, along with a special workshop centered on funding and finance in the currently challenging economic climate. Details

The Diversity Conference has a history of bringing together scholarly, government and practice-based participants with an interest in the issues of diversity and community. The Conference examines the concept of diversity as a positive aspect of a global world and globalised society. Diversity is in many ways reflective of our present world order, but there are ways of taking this further without necessary engendering its alternatives: racism, conflict, discrimination and inequity. Diversity as a mode of social existence can be projected in ways that deepen the range of human experience. The Conference will seek to explore the full range of what diversity means and explore modes of diversity in real-life situations of living together in community. The Conference supports a move away from simple affirmations that ‘diversity is good’ to a much more nuanced account of the effects and uses of diversity on differently situated communities in the context of our current epoch of globalisation. Details

The Simpson Center invites proposals from UW faculty, graduate students, and staff for projects in the area of American popular music, broadly understood, including such cultural forms and vernacular traditions as rock and roll and jazz as well as emerging hybrid forms that that draw on influences across the Americas and the globe. Details

The National Emerging Engagement Scholars Workshop will be held in conjunction with the National Outreach Scholarship Conference, Oct 4-6 in Raleigh, NC. This intensive professional development program provides advanced doctoral students and early career faculty with background literature, facilitated discussion, mentoring, and presentations designed to increase their knowledge and enhance their practice of community-engaged scholarship. Participation is limited and interested applicants must be nominated to be part of this workshop. Applicants for this program should be graduate students or junior faculty members with an interest in community engagement and engaged scholarship, and involved or interested in research that contributes to their discipline while making a positive impact on external stakeholders. Details

Through history, cities and their inhabitants are locations of encounters between peoples, the trade of goods and services, the evolution of various forms of urban space, and the production of culture and technology. Cities continue to reproduce a series of familiar “common places,” each a site of shared memory: centers of government and other public buildings; places of worship and other sacred spaces; neighborhoods and other residential areas; markets and other commercial zones; and public spaces such as squares, monuments, and parks. Throughout history, many cities are located at oceans and the conference’s theme of the city and migration is understood in relation to the ocean. With the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a new set of global megacities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has emerged to challenge the primacy of European and North American metropolitan centers. This expanded landscape of the city and urbanities — here in relation to cities located at the ocean — suggests to both re-imagine and to re-member the city where memory functions to organize aspects of the city in its now increased pluralistic globalized cultural context. With the movements and flux of (im)migrants, exiles and refugees, climate refugees, ethnic and racial minorities, alternative or countercultural groupings, etc. continue to contest and complicate the ways in which cities articulate their pluralized identities and societies through literature, history, architecture, social function, and various forms of artistic and cultural production. Papers in the conference examine the problematics of urban identities in cities at the ocean in the context of memory, (im)migration, and imagination in order to offer interpretations on the multiple and parallel versions of the city today. Details

‘Most assumptions have outlived their uselessness.’ — Marshall McLuhan

‘Uselessness’ explores conceptions of utility and value as they have been theorized and deployed within the domains of art, science, and the everyday. What is the useless? Is it that which lacks utilitarian value: the deficient and thus superfluous? Or is it that which discards utilitarian value: the invaluably valuable that transcends? To what type of ‘use’ does the discourse of utility refer, and how does the useless operate in social, political, and everyday experience? Encompassing topics from a wide range of disciplines, ‘uselessness’ presents a broad problematic of life, work, meaning, and value. We invite proposals for 15-20 minute presentations that address these issues through any medium, from any discipline. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to icls.abstracts.2010@gmail.com. Details

What would it mean to create a “dangerous liaison” between the feminist and the queer? What are some of the experiments and pursuits made towards interrogating how the theatre and media influences the production and reception of race, sex, class, and gender in feminist and queer performances? This call for papers asks for the contestation and explicative representations of how feminist and queer performance intersects with race, sexuality, class, and gender to perform/critique the “dangerous liaisons.” Details

Imagining America invites university affiliates (faculty, students, staff, and administrators) and community partners (individuals and organizations) to participate in our eleventh annual national conference, 23-25 September 2010, hosted by the University of Washington. The theme of this year’s conference, Convergence Zones: Public Cultures and Translocal Practices, signals an exploration of how public scholarship creates new connections among disciplines, communities, and sectors. As our work shuttles across institutional, geographical, and professional boundaries, our projects become zones of convergence where social interests, cultural practices, and new and old media intersect. Animated by hybrid modes of participation and circulation, these convergence zones reshape our research, teaching, and engagement activities as they foster new projects, knowledge, and publics.Details

The Collaborative Research Grants in the Humanities program provides support of up to $50,400 for U.S. scholars conducting humanities research in any country of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. This is a program of American Councils for International Education in cooperation with The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Countries Eligible for Research: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine. Details

This summer school course has two main aims. First, it will investigate the significant transformations taking place in the sphere of cultural consumption and production in the context of globalization. In doing so, the course will go beyond an assessment of the consequences and repercussions of intensified cultural transfers that have occurred as a result of globalization and consider a more serious and as yet under-explored transformations of the very character of the cultural sphere. Second, it will consider the links between various cultural practices and democracy, and consider the implications of the contemporary transformations of the cultural sphere for democratic futures on both the local and global levels. The course will consider these issues in both their contemporary manifestations and in historical perspective. We are interested in participants who are pursuing comparative, interdisciplinary research on topics and themes in contemporary culture, globalization, social and cultural theory, and the arts and media. Students in a wide-range of courses in the humanities and social sciences will find this course to be productive, including those studying in Anthropology, Archive and Museum Studies, Communications Studies, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, History, History of Art, Media Studies, Philosophy, Political Science and Sociology. Details