CALL FOR PROPOSALS – The Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University is pleased to announce the 26th Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference (AGIC). We invite both academic and creative submissions that engage with this year’s theme: Con-tact.
Submission instructions: Proposals of max. 300 words are due November 1, 2020 to agic.concordia@gmail.com, and must include: a project title and five descriptive keywords; the applicant’s name, email address, and a brief biography. Those affiliated with a university are asked to additionally submit their department and graduate level. Submissions in both English and French are welcomed, as are multi/intermedia or performance-based works. For more information about the conference, please visit our website: agic-concordia.ca
Embracing the radical possibilities of the virtual world, this year’s programming will be held over a series of four seminars, scheduled on January 26th, February 23rd, March 23rd, and April 20th, from 6pm-8pm EST. Featuring a combination of graduate panelists, creative projects, and keynote addresses, it is our hope that this extended format will encourage sustained engagement and critical ruminations as connections, ideas, and circumstances unfold between and across each meeting.
As notions of encounter and movement – both personal and political – have rapidly altered in form, and as questions of touch and proximity have been thrown into sharp, frictive, and often violent relief, we are urgently called to consider: What does it mean to be in relation to another across axes of feeling and being, time and space; in absence of physical contact, or, alternatively, in suffocating and immobilizing excess of it? Traversing and unraveling these boundaries, we hope to facilitate, or, borrowing from Erin Manning, “reach-toward” new modes of ethical inter-action by placing diverse fields and concepts into unanticipated creative dialogue. Historical and/or contemporary edges of con-tact may be traced along lines of labour and class; migration and diaspora; nationalisms and globalization; affect and sensation; anxiety and wellness; temporality; climate and ecology; humanisms; Blackness and Indigeneity; colonialisms and decolonization; race; gender and sexuality; feminist and queer critique; literature; communications; art and art history; psychology and psychoanalysis. These prompts are necessarily non-exhaustive, and we encourage submissions that take this theme in new, expansive directions.