Borderlands and Meeting Points
The 6th Annual Brown University Graduate Student Conference
Key Note Speaker: Professor Timothy Snyder, Yale University
Brown University, Providence, RI
April 8-9, 2011
Borderlands and meeting points represent sites of exchange, mediation, cooperation, and conflict. As “in-between” areas, borderlands foster interactions between individuals, communities, and nations. Similarly, meeting points facilitate both ideological and physical contact. Such contact may involve not only political, economic, social and religious dynamics, but also evolving conceptions of self and other. Thus, whether real or imagined, borderlands and meeting points affect the way identities are variously constructed, perceived, negotiated, and performed.
This conference seeks to generate new interdisciplinary perspectives about borderlands and meeting points, putting into conversation fields such as history, literature, anthropology, political science, geography, law, and art. Through these conversations, we will consider the strategies – particularly cultural ones – that are employed at such sites both to pursue particular interests and to engender or resist change. The study of borderlands and meeting points presents us with a methodological and theoretical challenge: to find creative means of giving expression to people and interactions often shaped by charged political and ethnic concerns.
Potential paper topics include, but are not limited to, historical and/or theoretical explorations of the following:
-Urban, regional, and national space and identity
-Ethnic conflict or concord
-Cross-cultural interactions
-Circulation of ideas and materials
-Translation and interpreters
-Trade and commerce
-Religion, missionaries, and conversion
-Gender and sexuality
-Movement, migration and diaspora
Submission Guidelines:
Interested graduate students should submit a 250-word abstract by November 15, 2010. Each proposal should clearly state its relevancy to the conference theme. Candidates proposing full panels should also include a 150-word abstract on the organizing theme of the proposed panel. Successful candidates will be notified by early January and should submit final papers by March 14, 2010.
Email proposals to: BrownHGSAConference@gmail.com. Questions should be directed toward Laura Perille (Laura_Perille@Brown.edu) or Ania Borejsza-Wysocka (Anna_Borejsza-Wysocka@Brown.edu).
