This is the website for the Feminist and Women's Studies Association 18th Annual Conference, held in Aberdeen on September 9-11th this year. Titled 'Gender and Violence: an interdisciplinary exploration'.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/womens/conference.htm
Deadline for proposals is 30th April.
Hello all.
I'm wondering if anyone is planning on attending the 5th annual Gender and Education conference - Gender, Power and Difference - at Cardiff University on 29-31st March. It certainly looks worthwhile in terms of our broader concerns as a group, and I think it would be useful if at least one of us was to attend and report back to the group if interesting questions are addressed. I am currently investigating whether I can attend on a pay as you go basis given the unpredictable nature of things at the mo.
Anyway, Bev Skeggs is the closing plenary speaker which should be interesting although she does say that she's presenting work already published. The website for information is http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/sexualitiesandgender/gpd/index.html but although a list of abstracts for all parallel sessions was accessible yesterday, it now seems to have disappeared temporarily...
can i be cheeky and suggest that you check out my son's blog
www.bigstimeout.motime.com I think it is fascinating (well I would!) that he actually begins by roleplaying a rather grumpy middleaged person (or so it appears) but gradually you see more evidence of his age and identity creeping in.
Seth and Rune (our Norwegian visiting scholar that was) have been very sweet in posting to the site.
helen
Bristol School of Art, Media and Design
Predicaments in Visual Culture:
Mediated Pleasures in (post)Feminist Contexts
Nine years after October published responses to a questionnaire on the value of Visual Culture as a field of study, its position within the academy remains uncertain. Occupying spaces in between existing disciplinary sites, Visual Culture might usefully be described as a series of tactics enabling cross-disciplinary modes of enquiry and investigation of cultural forms that cuts across more established areas of study. Taking this form of analytic mobility as its starting point, the ‘Predicaments in Visual Culture’ series addresses a number of contemporary cultural concerns and in so doing raises questions about the status of Visual Culture both as a still emerging academic field and as set of strategies to interrogate the complexities of visuality.
Each of the one-day symposia, although adopting different perspectives, share a desire to consider the ways in which contemporary art, media and design practices, industrial production and active modes of consumption together demand a re-evaluation of the nature and place of the central tenets of Visual Culture. By thus shifting the emphasis away from the conception of Visual Culture as yet another mode of reception and reading, it is hoped that a fuller engagement with the production of visual meaning will signal a shift to a mode of theorising that is more responsive to emergent patterns of visuality, creativity and political praxis.
Implicit in this series is a suspicion that the areas of debate which initially gave rise to Visual Culture as a discipline have “stalled” in the last decade. These symposia are an opportunity to re-energise them by moving beyond established arguments and positions, challenging distinctions between theory and practice, re-thinking the nature of interdisciplinarity and re-assessing the possibility of critical and political thinking particularly within the context of recent debates around gender, identity and difference.
Mediated Pleasures in (post)Feminist Contexts
Watershed, Bristol, Saturday 19th March 2005
This symposium will explore the generational relationship between second-wave feminism and contemporary debates about ‘third-wave’ or ‘post-feminist’ identities as they are articulated in visual culture. In particular we are interested in the relationship between popular culture and fine art in terms of female subjectivity. The symposium aims to challenge the binary model through which artworks or media texts are understood as either complicit with, or subversive of, patriarchal representational structures. Debates about post-feminism often continue to legitimate the division between ‘good’ feminist ‘mothers’ and ‘bad’ post-feminist ‘daughters’. But, are there trajectories within second-wave feminism, both in theory and practice that might provide grounds for a rapprochement? Is third-wave feminism marked by a different model in which the relationship between femininity and feminism is fluid, ambiguous or uncertain? To what extent can practice drive theory in this regard? How might feminist understandings engage positively with contemporary representations of femininity when these speak of visual and bodily pleasures that are always-already mediated through popular culture?
Our position is that the strategic imperatives that informed second-wave feminism have shifted and, now that we are in a period of reassessment, there is an urgent need to develop feminist thinking that acknowledges mediated female pleasures in women’s art practice.
Email Clare.Johnson@uwe.ac.uk or Sue.Tate@uwe.ac.uk
I dont know how many of you already know about the Chloe Delaume's Corpus Simsi project -
you can scroll down this link and read about it and then follow the links in the text to bits of the project itself.
http://http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/9597.html
This is a snip from the end of the posting describing the project:
Just as Loquet's Maxed-up MSP computer sounds contain the voices of dead folk singers, Delaume's books contain in their aspic characters from the video games of yesteryear. They prompt a startling thought. Maybe a time will come when all our computer software is unplayable, all our formats incompatible, all our machines useless. When that day comes, maybe the only remaining memory of the virtual worlds we created in the digital age will be encoded in books. The book, the original portable simulated world, might have a strange, phoenix-like destiny: to be electronic simulation's only enduring body. SimWorld's parent... and its child.
