CA welcomes notices of interest to our readers. These include announcements and reviews of conferences, news items, forthcoming events, etc. Please send them using the submission guidelines.
Call for Papers
Tracing Disgust: Cultural Approaches to the Visceral
eds. Max Ryynänen, Susanne Ylönen & Heidi Kosonen
Deadline: August 15, 2020
We recoil at the thought of mold gathering on the dishes used for eating, of bad breath on a person we do not like, or of a spider walking across our body. Disgust is probably the most visceral of the basic human emotions. Some argue that it engages in particular the so called lower senses — taste, smell and touch —with a function for an organism’s preservation.
Disgust has also facilitated the criticism and resistance of prevailing norms and hierarchical constitutions often reiterated in its moral uses. In countercultural movements, such as artistic avant-garde or punk, or in children’s culture, disgust, disgustingness and varied kinds of disgust-objects from slime toys to disgust-evoking sweets serve also as sources of pleasure. In art and popular culture, disgust has proven to be a welcome enhancement to spectacle-seeking entertainment. Disgust, manifested not only in our instinctive recoiling from danger and decay, but also in these varied kinds of symbolic discourses and cultural products aiming to provoke, agitate or bring about enjoyment, is thus more than the biological mechanism seeking to protect animals from dangers or negative emotions.
We invite researchers from all fields to reflect on the different varieties and functions of disgust. The proposals for an article (300 words) and additional information (see link) should be sent to editors via email (tracing-disgust@jyu.fi and max.ryynanen@aalto.fi) by August 15th, 2020. Notification of acceptance will be sent by September 15, 2020. Full texts (max 9000 words) are expected by December 15, 2020.
See the following link for more information: https://www.popularinquiry.com/cfps-and-news
Call for Papers
The Fifth International Workshop on Science, Philosophy and Literature
Hermoupolis, Syros Island, Greece
14-16 July 2020
Deadline: January 31, 2020
Atmospheric humanities is a fast-emerging field of scholarship seeking to understand sociocultural dimensions of atmospheric experience, knowledge and practice. Examining atmospheric agency in its historical and contemporary manifestations, atmospheric humanities explore the atmosphere as a site of diverse cultural appropriations of air’s modalities and their reproduction in practices of aerial and climatological citizenship. This foundational workshop aims to initiate and foster discussions on how atmospheric themes, memes, and objects emerge, spread and travel across artistic and academic communities. We especially welcome contributions from scholars whose work spans disciplines, including, but not limited to, literary and media studies, history of science, environmental history, aesthetics, visual arts, architecture, phenomenology, and social sciences.
Key themes:
– The changing representation(s) of the atmosphere in art and popular media, both contemporary and historical. – Interfaces and interactions between scientific understanding(s) of the atmosphere and other ways of knowing or experiencing the atmosphere (e.g. political, indigenous, religious, philosophical, aesthetic).
– Explorations of space and scale in relation to human understanding of the atmosphere and related concepts such as weather and climate.
– The material culture of the atmosphere, including technologies used to measure, assess, represent and manipulate the atmosphere.
The workshop is organized by the International Commission of Science and Literature and the International Commission on History of Meteorology. The Commissions will provide a limited travel support to early career scholars, who should send their application letter, presentation abstract and CV to Dr Alexander Hall at a.f.hall@bham.ac.uk and George N. Vlahakis at gvlahakis@yahoo.com
Please send your abstract before 31 JANUARY 2020 to Vladimir Jankovic at vladimir.jankovic@manchester.ac.uk and George Vlahakis at gvlahakis@yahoo.com.
Call for Papers
Pragmatist Legacies in Aesthetics
Contact: Roberta Dreon (robdre@unive.it)
Deadline: 1 August 2020
The 2020/2 issue of the open access EJPAP (European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy) explores the diverse ways of doing aesthetics in the wake of Pragmatism.
Even though the term ‘pragmatist aesthetics’ has become a quasi-label for characterizing Richard Shusterman’s work in the ’90s, one main goal of the present issue is mapping and giving emphasis to the plural heritage of pragmatism in aesthetics. A second purpose is making more evident that English speaking aesthetics is much larger than analytic aesthetics as well as that philosophical aesthetics has been conceived – and is still thought – as broader than the philosophy of art. Pragmatists approaches have been independently evolving within the aesthetic field (social aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, everyday aesthetics); at the same time, pragmatist topics and categories exercised a more or less deep influence on some important figures taking part to the analytical debate in aesthetics (e.g. Nelson Goodman, Richard Rorty, and Joseph Margolis); furthermore, pragmatist options are still very much alive among emerging trends in aesthetics (cf. Mark Johnson’s work on the aesthetic in experience, Alva Noë’s conception of artworks as ‘strange tools’ and, more recently, Shaun Gallagher’s inquiries into artistic performance).
Therefore, EJPAP welcomes the submission of papers explicating (either sympathetically or critically) and/or developing the connections between pragmatism and the following lines of investigations: social aesthetics and pragmatism; environmental aesthetics and pragmatism; everyday aesthetics and pragmatism; somaesthetics and pragmatism; enactivist aesthetics and pragmatism; application of Peirce’s insights within the aesthetic field.
Papers should be sent to Roberta Dreon (robdre@unive.it) by September 1st, 2020. They should not exceed 8,000 words and must include an abstract of 150-400 words and a list of works cited. Papers will be selected on the basis of a process of blind review. Accepted pieces will be published in December 2020.
International Conference
11th Annual International Conference
Visual and Performing Arts
Athens, Greece
8-11 June 2020
The aim of the conference is to bring together academics and researchers of visual and performing arts, and other related disciplines. A number of special events will be organized, including a pragmatic symposium (as organized in Ancient Athens but fine-tuned to synchronous ethics), a special one-day educational island tour, a Mycenae and island of Poros visit, an Athens educational walking tour, a day trip to Delphi, and an ancient Corinth and Cape Sounion visit.
The association was established in 1995 as an independent world association of Academics and Researchers. Its mission is to act as a forum where Academics and Researchers from all over the world can meet in Athens, in order to exchange ideas on their research, and to discuss future developments in their disciplines.
International Conference
Experience :: Music :: Experiment
Pragmatism and Artistic Research
13-14 February 2020
Orpheus Institute (Ghent, BE)
“Truth happens to an idea.” So wrote William James in 1907; and he continued “[truth] becomes true, is made true by events.” James was not thinking of musical performance or of artistic research, but his assertion would seem to apply equally or more so to those domains—domains with which the Orpheus Institute is primarily concerned. Truths in performance are only created and apprehended in the process of performing; and understanding that process constitutes the domain of what we call “artistic research.” This seminar begins with these observations and continues by asking questions like: What follows? What other aspects of pragmatism apply to our field of study? In performance, in research, what is the relationship between experience and experiment? Can pragmatism illuminate other performative relationships—between habit and creativity, between notation and embodied knowledge, between selves and practices, between history and innovation?
We invite proposals for presentations of many kinds, from scholarly papers to performances. All sessions will consist of twenty-minute presentations with ten minutes of discussion. An open, collaborative spirit of inquiry is encouraged throughout. Please send proposals (300 words maximum) for either papers or performances. Enquiries should be sent to William Brooks at william.brooks@orpheusinstituut.be or w.f.brooks@york.ac.uk. Please upload proposals here:
https://airtable.com/shrzAVcIyk2K3RlXW The deadline for receipt of proposals is Monday 18 November 2019. Applicants will be notified of the decisions by Friday 6 December 2019.
More info:
www.orpheusinstituut.be/news-and-events/call-for-proposals-experience-music-experiment
Call for Abstracts
Fifteenth Geo-Aesthetics Conference
“Venturing into the Uncharted World of Aesthetics”
University of the West Indies, Jamaica
March 20-21, 2020
Deadline: January 31, 2020
Could the uncharted world of aesthetics be none other than the charted world of aesthetics, where each world is what it is by virtue of being the site for the constitution of the other? Is there not an uncharted world of aesthetics in which the life of each one of our senses is an expression? As we imagine answers to these questions, it should be clear that, when taken together, their respective answers are about ourselves. Indeed, the uncharted world of aesthetics is the uncharted world of who we are. Moreover, it is a world that deserves affirmation and perpetual preservation in the context of what is conceivably a language with limitless potential.
We invite abstracts that draw inspiration from the uncharted world of aesthetics and that affirms, celebrates, and promotes its existence.
Please send an abstract of 200 words to jmurungi@towson.edu.