www.amerikanistik-uni-muenchen.de/ptf 

The highly diverse field of Video Game Studies has firmly established
itself on the academic scene in the last decades as a truly interdisciplinary
conglomerate that draws on the discourses of media studies, design, programming, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and numerous other disciplines without fusing them
into a singular streamlined approach. American Studies, an equally diverse discipline in itself, has provided a crucial (if not unproblematic) context in the constitution of Video Game Studies, and while the latter has certainly emancipated itself from any particular dependency, the two fields have now entered a productive dialogue in which they influence
and speak to each other rather than struggle for hegemony of
interpretation over a particular cultural field. This relationship is both budding and tenuous, as American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games even though the medium has grown in the last few decades from a niche phenomenon to a cultural industry that is
arguably the most important force in American popular culture today. Yet
research on this crucial topic in the institutional framework of American Studies is often either local or even personal, with no substantial wider network for scholars to participate and collaborate in.
This conference sets out to change that and provide the first opportunity
for scholars in American Studies working on video games to connect, share their research results, workshop their projects, and start building a network that so far exists in separate clusters at best. At the same time, the conference also sets out to discuss the particular perspectives that American Studies with its highly diverse toolbox of theoretical and
practical approaches may bring to the analysis of video games, and how in turn other approaches to video games (and the games themselves) affect and change these established theories and methods. Papers may draw on the rich repertoire of American Studies ‘ ranging from strategies of close reading to queer theory, from feminist analyses to ecocritical
approaches, from myths and symbols to postnationalism and may re-read this repertoire as it is modified by Video Game Studies and its unique approaches to notions such as performativity, embodiment, intermediality, narrativity, interaction, and many more.

Scholars are therefore invited to submit proposals that critically explore
these interconnections. This may occur on an entirely theoretical level or
through a detailed analysis of a single game, from a historical perspective or a political or economic one, focusing on gameplay mechanics, narrative immersion or their respective subversion; considering the global video game market or local contexts of production, reception and criticism; delving into the frameworks of technology and coding; interrogating the
production of virtual and real spaces and places; highlighting the
interplay of image, music, sound, touch, movement, and text; inquiring into notions of community and dissent among gamers; tracing the impact of video games as high, popular, and unpopular cultures; or describing the pedagogical use of video games or the socio-political controversies
around them. Anything is fair game: hardware and software and wetware; casual and hardcore; e-sports and streaming; mobile and stationary; PC and console; retro and contemporary; AAA and indie; achievements and high scores; gamification and metagaming;
cheating and modding; WASD and controller; VR and flatscreen; and anything in between. It’s dangerous to go alone, so let’s explore together how video games can play the field of American Studies.

If you would like to present a paper at the conference, please submit a
proposal of no more than 300 words. If you would like to discuss your work in progress in a small-group workshop at the conference, please submit a proposal of no more than 500 words.

The deadline for all submissions is August 1, 2017. Please send your
proposal along with a brief biographical statement to Sascha Pöhlmann at poehlmann@lmu.de.

This CfP for the 5th Biennial Conference of the International Association
of Inter-American Studies is available in English
(http://www.interamericanstudies.net/’p=6481), Spanish
(http://www.interamericanstudies.net/’p=6472), and Portuguese
(http://www.interamericanstudies.net/’p=6461).
*************

The struggle over social issues and the resistance to ruling elites have a long history in the colonies and nations of the Americas. They range from
wars of independence and slave uprisings to conventions for women’s
rights, workers’ and peasants’ rebellions, indigenous movements, and
protests against U.S. wars in Vietnam or in Iraq. Since World War II new
forms of international and national inequalities and new dynamics in
societies and in the media have increased our awareness of the many ways in which the social keeps being re-negotiated from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
Recent decades have been characterized by new approaches to time- and
space-binding and mediational and relational webs of the social; the
invention, invocation, and narration of tradition, history, and heritage
serve as key elements in the creation of new social bonds with earlier
generations; since the turn of the millennium formerly excluded social
groups have been prominent in reshaping the scope and the normativity of the social; a diminishing civil society has opened space to the influence
of extremisms; unemployed young people, deprived of prospects for the
future, attempt new forms of expression and intervention; the disenfranchised take to the streets and to the Internet; social media open
up new channels and formats for expression; literature raises consciousness for just causes; artists in every realm translate and give
form to many of these thoughts and feelings; sociologists and political
scientists bring up new interpretations of and theories on the social.

Whereas Justin Trudeau named the most diverse government in Canada’s
history, the Indigenous president Evo Morales in Bolivia and the African-American former president of the U.S.A., Barack Obama, promoted
multi- and pluricultural imaginaries and questioned social relations based
on coloniality, while the ongoing discussion of Indigenous concepts such
as ‘Buen vivir’ revives and reveals more balanced relations between nature and society. Even if the hegemony of the U.S.A. in the Americas has been waning, the election of Donald Trump and his nostalgic vision of ‘Make America Great Again’ will have global impacts, specifically on the
Americas. In focus are also issues of immigration and the targeting of
difference be it racial, ethnic, religious, or gender, the border wall
with Mexico, immigration reform policies, the treatment of Muslim
inhabitants, and the hosting of refugees, mostly from the Middle East, as
well as feminist issues, environmental policies, and human rights in
general.

The 2008 financial crisis in the U.S.A., followed by worldwide economic
recession, has reinforced the gap between North and South, caused a
shrinking of the middle-class, deprived the working-class, brought the
right wing back to power in many regions, and increased the tension
between right- and left-wing parties. The neoliberal far right is also
rising in many other countries in the Americas, such as Argentina and
Brazil. Along with economic problems and negative effects of globalization
on labor, political ineffectiveness in solving them, pervasive corruption
at the highest levels, and social intolerance against immigrants and
refugees have inspired new Nationalisms and new Fascisms, and have
severely shaken democracy.

Cultural producers often have a seismographic function in revealing social
frictions and fissures, while social movements connect discontent in daily
life with political expression, the media create and circulate ideas and
imaginaries, and academia reflects upon and theorizes changes in the
social. Bearing in mind conceptualizations of the community by
theoreticians such as Jacques Derrida (‘community under erasure’),
Jean-Luc Nancy (‘the inoperative community’), Giorgio Agamben (‘the coming community’), Bruno Latour (‘reassembling the social’), as well as the sociological imagination of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (‘epistemologies of the south,’ ‘ecology of knowledges’), we would like to encourage a lively discussion of ideas of the social in its old and new configurations.

But the social is also created in the think tanks of social technology as
well as by rumors, jokes, and whispers; a plurality of new social
formations, always in transition and process, resist fixation and
uniformity, whereas their heterogeneous, and perhaps contradictory, needs, aspirations, and motivations claim our attention. We intend to follow along these lines of inquiry, taking as case studies past or recent
theories on the definition of the social and how they may apply to the
context of the Americas, to past or recent social crises and struggles
together with the different responses and narratives they have
generated be they creative and emancipatory, or conservative and
reactionary.

Our purpose is therefore to explore past and present forms of
intervention, relation, knowledge, translation, negotiation, solidarity,
or alliance that promote the emancipation of those usually silenced by
hegemonic formulae and hierarchies. Through the debate and exploration of new ground we aim at contributing to the designing of a new grammar and a new pedagogy of the social from epistemological and practical perspectives on the Americas.

We shall be addressing questions such as:
Which forms have resistance and dissent taken in the Americas over the
centuries and which discourses and narratives have accompanied them?
How do narratives generate and interweave different voices, groups, and
communities’ aspirations about the future as well as the past?
Who are the new protagonists arising in social movements/in the media?
What kind of reactions and transformations have these protagonists been
able to cause and promote?
What are the effects of a reinvention of the social in both the more
traditional media and in artistic expression?
How have the new social formations and movements been acting in the Americas?
What are the new narratives in the social and who is responsible for them?
How do creative responses resist the growing culture of fear and terror
bred by the new security state?
What forms of social and creative expression have emerged, and how are
they being performed?
How do these recent expressions incorporate or retrieve previous colonized or imperial experiences and memories?
How do they relate to the state and to the street?
Which new alliances are in the making?
Which forms of conviviality, solidarity, and imagination do these alliances rely on?
Which realities are absent from the current discourses of the social, and
how are the emerging forms of resistance taking shape?
Which roles can body politics, transnationality, economics, and
cosmopolitanism play?
Which new social movements are emerging as part of a reinvented social?
If we consider all the forces at play in the reinvention of the social, how has integration, assimilation, and cultural appropriation been redefined?
Which space and roles are assigned to the so-called disposable
communities/individuals?
How are communities and cultural producers dealing with an expanding
politics of racial/ethnic/ gender profiling?
How are communities and cultural producers dealing with the politics of
criminalization, incarceration, violence, deportation, denial of asylum?
How are societies and cultural producers dealing with multiple sexual and
gender identities and categorizations?
How are societies and cultural producers dealing with the effects of
deforestation and ecological disruptions?
This cross-disciplinary forum of academic exchange invites contributions
from all academic disciplines concerned with social formations, social
movements, communities, social and cultural expressions, literature, art
and performance in the Americas.

Please send proposals for individual papers (only one proposal per person) or for panels (with a chairperson and 3 or 4 presentations) to
conference@interamericanstudies.net by August 31, 2017. Presentations can be given in English, Spanish, or Portuguese, and should usually be about 20 minutes long.

The participation of doctoral candidates is strongly encouraged.

Please include your name, affiliation, the title of your presentation
and/or panel, an abstract (300-400 words), up to 5 keywords, and email
address(es). You will be notified by the end of October whether your
proposal has been accepted.

More information: http://www.interamericanstudies.net/’page_id=6447.

Host institution: University of Coimbra, Portugal (Faculty of Letters/FLUC
and Center for Social Studies/CES)

Organizing Committee: Isabel Caldeira (FLUC/CES); Maria José Canelo
(FLUC/CES); Silvia Rodrigues Maeso (CES); Elsa Lechner (CES); Susana
Araújo (CEC, FLUL); Gonçalo Cholant (FLUC/CES); In’s Costa (FLUC/CES);
Rita Santos (FLUC/CES); Bego’a Dorronsoro (CES).

Program Committee: Isabel Caldeira (chair, University of Coimbra,
Portugal), Olaf Kaltmeier (Bielefeld University, Germany); María
Herrera-Sobek (UC Santa Barbara, USA); Alexia Schemien (University of
Duisburg-Essen, Germany); Ulla Kriebernegg (University of Graz, Austria).

Eleventh Biennial MESEA Conference
May 30 – June 2, 2018
University of Graz, Austria


“Individuals typically learn their assigned place in hierarchies of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, and social class in their families of origin,” argues Patricia Hill Collins in her study of the intersectionality of “race,” nationhood, and gender in racial/ethnic US American families. Hill Collins’s work shifts the focus from long dominant to less restrictive family models and their representation in literature, film, and other cultural and artistic expressions as well as in legal, economic, and social situations. There are two concurring trends in the study of family and kinship—the challenge to the “traditional” family model from critical race studies, ethnicity studies, queer theory, and feminism and the study of transnational kinship. Globalization—and its resulting mobilization of kinship structures—is a major factor for societal changes that push the limits of family concepts founded in parameters of Whiteness, heterosexuality, patriarchy, ability, and affective individualism. In the same vein, ethnicity as a cultural and social construct has an impact on a sense of belonging which shapes family and kinship patterns and practices of relating to collective memory and cultural heritage. If kinship, according to Linda Stone, is “an ideology of human relationships” which highlights the “cultural ideas about […] the nature and meaning of their biological and moral connections with others” (6), it is also a framework through which to investigate the intersection of other factors such as “race,” religion, gender, sexual orientation, class, language, and geography.

Taken together, queer, feminist, critical race theorist, and transnational revisions have liberated discussions of family and kinship from pressing assumptions about family values. The breadth of scholarship on ethnicity and kinship furthermore centers on present and historical counter-narratives to discursively and ideologically constructed family ideals. In particular, in times of increasing instrumentalization of “the family,” approaching notions of family, community, and difference from interdisciplinary angles facilitates engaging scholarship which focuses both on the way we are not and “the way we never were” (Stephanie Coontz).

The 2018 MESEA conference seeks to explore this diversity of approaches to ethnicity and kinship by inviting paper proposals from all disciplines and perspectives. Potential paper and panel submissions can but are not limited to work around the following topics:
o transnational family and kinship models: thinking and living relations globally
o cultural heritage: (re)negotiations of cultural knowledge, narratives, and intergenerational memory
o intersectional approaches to family: class, gender, “race,” ethnicity, religion, age, and nationality
o representations of family, nation, and community in ethnic and postcolonial cultures
o kinship as sentimental, or conversely emancipatory, political discourse
o family and kinship in literature, film, theatre, series, music, and other artistic and cultural forms of expression
o interracial dating and marriage: discourses of power and privilege in the past and present
o queerness in and beyond the family: LGBTQI families, queer communities in non-family settings, and other phenomena of kinship and gender parameters
o critical motherhood/ fatherhood/ sibling studies
o communicating kinship: the role of new technology and social media for creating, maintaining, shaping, and/or breaking off kinship relations
o social justice and the family: interdisciplinary approaches to the role of the family and kinship in the face of systemic racism and nationalism
o White privilege: reproducing Whiteness and reinforcing power through family and kinship
o transnational families in the New Economy: working parents in the diaspora; kinship and the care economy
o family and political upheaval: forced migration, families in transit, negotiating citizenship through kinship
o family as a site of (physical, psychological, emotional and epistemological) violence and abuse
Proposals should be submitted to our website at www.mesea.org between August 15 and November 15, 2017. Submitters will receive notification of acceptance by January 1, 2018.
Preference will be given to complete panel proposals with an inter/transdisciplinary and/or transnational focus. Panels may not include more than 2 participants from the same institution. Presenters must be members of MESEA or MELUS in 2018.

As in previous years, MESEA will award at least one Young Scholars Excellence Award.

Program Director:
Jopi Nyman, PhD DSocSc
Professor of English
School of Humanities
University of Eastern Finland
P. O. Box 111
FI- 80101 Joensuu
FINLAND
Tel. +358-2944-52143
Email: jopi.nyman@uef.fi
For more information please visit: http://www.mesea.org

Constructing America | Defining Europe
Perceptions of the Transatlantic Other, 1900-2000
Call for Papers: Due Date 12 May 2017
Conference Date: 8-10 November 2017
Location: Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

The first hundred days of Donald Trump's presidency have fuelled the deep
feeling, on both sides, of a profound cultural difference between the
United States and Europe. At the same time, new and unexpected
commonalities have been created with the development of a "populist
international" or an "anti-globalist alliance" on both sides of the
Atlantic, the rise of anti-immigration feeling in both the US and in
Europe, alongside a re-intensification of racial tensions, and questions
about inclusion, exclusion, and ethnicity, in France, the Netherlands,
Eastern Europe, and the US.

The conference Constructing America | Defining Europe invites scholars to
take these developments as a starting point to consider how the mutual
perceptions of "America" and "Europe" have evolved in the twentieth
century. America's political and cultural influence has generated
controversy and resistance as well as inspiring emulation and adaptation.
However, since the late 1990s, the widespread perception of an
"Americanization" of  Europe, to which many scholars subscribed, has been
replaced by a focus on cultural interaction and local appropriation. This
shift in outlook, with its emphasis on the complexity and hybridity of
cultural interaction has opened new areas of study.  This conference
follows this shift and investigates the way cultures on both sides of the
northern Atlantic perceived, represented, interacted with, and changed
each other. It does so by drawing attention to cultural perceptions and to
the overarching patterns, domestic functions, and geopolitical contexts of
those constructions. We also welcome contributions that compare
transatlantic connections with perceptions from other parts of the world,
offering a comparative global perspective.

We invite scholars to examine how understandings of European culture, and
American culture, have been formed, have influenced each other, and how
references to America and Europe have circulated transnationally. How have
groups involved in transatlantic exchanges innovated cultural practices or
identities by adapting or rejecting features attributed to the other? How
have such transnational exchanges and relations created hybrid identities,
cultural objects, structures, institutions? We welcome contributions from
the fields of American studies, cultural history, transatlantic studies,
and interdisciplinary approaches, applying concepts such as reference
cultures, transnationality, entangled history, and cultural transfer.
These examinations will build a richer understanding of the long history
of the relationship(s) between America and Europe in the twentieth
century, and of how that relationship has evolved in a globalized and
globalizing century.

The conference will focus on the following three domains. Proposed papers
and panels should indicate how they connect to one of the following three
domains although the organizers will consider papers that fit the general
theme but do not fit precisely into one of these areas:

*         Mass Media and Popular Culture: From the banning of
German-American newspapers during WWI to the "Jazz invasion" of Europe in
the 1920s and the "British invasion" of the US in the 1960s, popular
culture - and the way it was disseminated - has always been a contentious
field of transatlantic relations. Which role did perceptions of the
transatlantic other play in contemporary debates about popular culture?
How has the development of modern mass media, from tabloid newspapers to
the internet, changed the mutual perceptions of Europe and America? How
did these perceptions influence the development of media technologies
themselves? How did they shape the evolution of formats and genres, such
as soap operas, romantic comedies, news, or reality tv? How have new and
interactive modes of viewing and consumer selection (Netflix, live
tweeting, and binge-watching) become part of a transnational cultural
exchange and how have they shaped perceptions of America and Europe in
popular culture? What are the historical continuities and discontinuities
in these cultural exchanges and developments?

*         Economics and Society: From the beginnings of the modern welfare
state to the neoliberal reconstruction of Eastern Europe after 1989, both
ideal and negative images of "Europe" and "America" have sparked vigorous
debates about economics and society. How did the rise of welfare politics
during the twentieth century influence mutual perceptions on both sides of
the Atlantic? To what extent did America and Europe serve as a utopia or
dystopia in debates about public policy issues such as health care, race,
drugs policy, and social welfare? How did changes in the economy - for
example, periods of high unemployment, stock market fluctuations,
technology booms and busts, and the outsourcing of jobs - interact with
cultural exchanges and perceptions?

*         Politics and Policy: The concept and practice of American
democracy, rooted in European Enlightenment debates but strongly
identified with consumerism and populist appropriation, has simultaneously
been perceived as appealing and fragile. This has resulted in strongly
divergent assessments of its civic culture and political institutions. How
have perceptions of American democratic virtues and pitfalls influenced
debates about democracy and citizenship in Europe? How have they been
perceived, received and transformed in transnational engagements? Which
role did the image of "Europe" play in the development of American
political culture? These questions are all the more pressing in light of
recent political developments, such as the rise of populism, reactions to
the European refugee crisis, and claims of outside interference in
national elections. Scholars are invited to engage with these issues as
they develop their submissions for this conference.

Confirmed keynote speakers include Mary Nolan and Thomas Bender. Limited
funding is available to subsidize the travel and accommodations of those
presenting at the conference. We plan to publish selected papers as an
edited volume or special issue of a journal.

Please send a 300 word abstract and a 2-page CV to
constructingamerica@uu.nl, by 12 May
2017. If you have any questions, please contact Jaap Verheul at
j.verheul@uu.nl, Jochen Hung at
j.b.hung@uu.nl or Rachel Gillett at
r.a.gillett@uu.nl and include "Constructing
America, Defining Europe" in the subject line. Authors of accepted
proposals will be contacted by 1 July 2017.