Competitions I. CALL FOR PAPERS - 5th Annual Graduate Student Conference The planning committee of the MRG Graduate student conference is pleased to announce an interdisciplinary conference with keynote speaker Greg Mullins May 19, 2006
Despite repeated proclamations of “never again,” war and genocide still haunt collective realities and shape imaginations. Human rights remains a pressing topic that affects disciplines from history to the performing arts and from literature to sociology. If, as Susan Sontag claims, narratives can incite us to "translate" compassion into action, then literature can be read as a form of human rights work. Breaches of human rights in literature are evidenced in works ranging from Holocaust narratives, such as Imre Kertész’s Fateless, to stories of civil war and torture; from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy to Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker. Of course, literature is not the only form of representation that allows for this process of translating compassion: the visual arts and social sciences from history to public policy have similar effects. In a general sense, this conference proposes to bring literature and the arts into dialogue with the social sciences in order to confront the ethics of representation in the context of an increasingly globalized and violent world. Taking human rights as our central focus, we will consider the following questions: How do literature and the arts re-imagine complex social realities such as genocide, war, and systematized discrimination? How do these forms of representation differ from and/or complement the work of scholars in public health, history, sociology or development? Finally, how can the humanities and social sciences work together to fight for human rights? Our speaker Greg Mullins is an Associate Professor of English at Evergreen College. His book Colonial Affairs (2002) is a study of sexuality and colonialism as represented in American and Moroccan literature written in Tangier from 1945-1970. He is currently writing a book on the discursive and cultural politics of human rights. We welcome 250-word abstracts for papers related to the topic of representing human rights. Conference presentations should be twenty minutes in length and may address the topic from any period or discipline: literature, sociology, history, cultural studies, gender studies, film, theater, the performing arts, political science, public policy, etc. Please submit 250-word abstracts by email attachment no later than January 27, 2006 to Amy Marczewski, conference chair, at mrgconf@humnet.ucla.edu. Possible paper topics may include but are not limited to: • Representing human rights: historiography of human rights, theater/the novel/visual arts as social commentary, performing human rights
Financial assistance will be available to cover lodging costs in Los Angeles. For more information, please see our website at http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/transnation.
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