Notices: Conferences, Calls for Papers, Submissions 

Volume 12, Number 3
May, 2002 

Conferences, Calls for Papers, Submissions

• University of South Carolina's 5th Annual Comparative Literature Conference: The Desire of the Analysts

  13 February 2003, Columbia, South Carolina, United States

  Keynote Speaker: Slavoj Zizek (Ljubjana)

  Plenary Speakers:

  Julia Kristeva (Paris VII)
  Toril Moi (Duke)
  Kaja Silverman (Berkeley)
  

  Why do we continue to desire psychoanalysis? What is the nature of that desire? What can psychoanalysis teach us about the social arrangements of our increasingly globalized world and, especially, about the psychic origins of our most pressing social problems (racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalistic violence, terrorism, genocide)? Do psychoanalytic theories have anything to say about the highly dispersed identities of new information technologies?

  Presentations should be broadly interdisciplinary. The conference will end with a roundtable in which we try collectively to pull together the threads of our discussion--and to assess where our desires have led us. We plan to publish selected papers from the conference in a collection of essays with a major university press.

  Please send abstracts of 20-minute papers by 30 September 2002 to: Paul Allen Miller, Chair, Comparative Literature Program, Humanities Building, Columbia, SC 29208.

  Sponsored by the University of South Carolina College of Liberal Arts, Program in Comparative Literature, Department of English and associated departments and programs.

  E-mail enquiries to pamiller@sc.edu.

• 8th Qualitative Methods Conference: Something for Nothing

  5-6 September 2002, Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa

  The annual interdisciplinary qualitative methods conferences are not only about methodology, but also about encouraging a broader debate about knowledge politics in and around academia.

  This year's conference foregrounds the micro and macro transactions that sustain the new world order. Timed to follow the Global Summit on Sustainable Development (which is also being held in Gauteng, South Africa), the conference theme is "Something for Nothing: Subjectivity and Society in the New Economy." The intention is to focus on issues such as poverty, globalization, and the ambiguities of "development," but also on other kinds of economies, such as libidinal economies, textual economies, and the give-and-take of everyday transactions.

  We welcome analyses of popular cultural forms that promise to liberate people from the daily grind (the lottery, pyramid schemes) or to offer some form of "salvation in a box" (televangelism, self-help books). We are interested both in explicit social and economic policies and more pervasive cultural forms based on the idea of equal exchange (e.g., the increasing commercialization of friendship). We also welcome submissions related to any other aspect of the conference theme or, more broadly, to theories, methods, and politics of knowledge production.

  Confirmed keynote speakers: Peter McLaren (author of Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture and numerous other publications on critical pedagogy, revolutionary multiculturalism, and critical ethnography) and Patrick Bond (author of Against Global Apartheid and numerous other publications on globalization, critical political economics, and sustainable development).

  The conference will take the form of a virtual event from 1 May to 30 September 2002, and a physical event on 5 and 6 September 2002. To present at the physical event, begin by posting an abstract on the virtual conference website (<http://www.criticalmethods.org>). Participation in the virtual conference allows for successive drafts of papers to be posted and commented on.

  The deadline for submissions for the physical conference is 30 June 2002, while submissions to the virtual conference will be accepted until 30 September 2002.

  The conference is hosted by the Centre for Applied Psychology (University of South Africa) and organized by the Critical Methods Society.

  Send email inquiries to Patricia Oosthuizen at oosthpt@unisa.ac.za

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