CFP
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CFP: “Temporalities of Material Culture,” April 5-7, 2013, University of Rochester

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

“A Matter of Time: Temporalities of Material Culture”

9th Visual and Cultural Studies Graduate Conference

University of Rochester, April 5-7 2013

As cultural critics have noted over the past thirty years, we seem to be living in an age of dematerialization. Increased information transfer speed, the disintegration of boundaries between private and public, and the commercialization of image networks have provoked anxiety regarding the control of objects and images. Yet, taking a critical stance toward the temporal thrust of this thinking–its teleology, its faith in progress–we seek to historicize the anxiety as merely another renegotiation in a continually evolving relation of time and matter. Has our relationship to material objects ever been fixed?

While indebted to the work of material culture studies, we invite papers from a wide range of topics of relevance and disciplines that address questions of materiality and temporality. We understand the relationship between material and time to develop in at least three distinct ways: material in our time, material that generates temporalities, and material that endures. Possible topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

-The relationship between technological and historical change

-Trends in preservation and the time of the archive

-The development of global heritage and the phenomenon of immaterial culture

-Historical phenomenology

-The materiality of language

-The conditions of materiality in the digital age

-The legacies of historical materialism

-The durability of digital objects

-The historical conditions of contemporary visual culture

-Historical monuments and collective memory

Deadline: Submit a 250-word abstract for 20 minute paper presentations and CV via vcsconference@gmail.com by no later than January 15, 2013.

Select presenters will be invited to revise presentations into journal articles for a special issue of InVisible Culture.

About the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester: http://www.rochester.edu/college/aah/VCS

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  1. Pingback: The Matter of Time in Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. | Materials + Process_2013

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