Jobs & Opportunities » Opportunities

Distances in Art and Culture

Type: Calls For Papers [View all]
Posted by: Southern Methodist University (SMU)
Deadline: Fri, December 11th, 2020

 So close and yet so far: Distances in Art and Culture 

 

RASC/a Art History Graduate Student Association (RAHGSA) Conference 

February 26th-27th, 2021 

Department of Art History, Meadows School of the Arts 

Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 

 

"Seeing ’the entire world as a foreign land’ makes possible originality of vision.” Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 2000, p. 186. 

 “Distances were not invariable, fixed once and for all. There might be ten or a hundred different distances, and one could never be sure in advance, before setting out or making decisions, what timetable fate would impose.” Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1949, p. 362.  

 

Start from a point and move. How are you moving and where did you start out? Where are you going to end? Is there an end? Are you moving through time, through space? Through reality, or through your dreams?  

 In a world that is ever more connected and separated, how do journeys create meaning? How do we communicate with a past that is long gone, and a future that we have yet to see? How do we transverse through different lands and how do we translate treks into objects and memories? How does art allow us to inhabit and observe extreme and infinitesimal distances? What happens when we encapsulate space and collect it? 

As our sense of time and space has shifted, and been reshaped by global uncertainties, the 2021 RAHGSA graduate student online conference will focus on the nature of distance as it affects and molds art and culture. Our conference will question how people throughout time have grappled with separation and nearness of any metric, whether voluntary or enforced, close or far away. We encourage papers that are interdisciplinary in nature and welcome discussion of all time periods and geographic locations.  

 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 

- Connectivity and nexuses 

- Closeness and intimacy 

- Proximity and remoteness 

- Travel and journeys   

- Space  

- Migration   

- Diasporas   

- Rememorying    

- Construal Level Theory  

- Ancestral and generational communications  

- Provenance and repatriation  

- Shipping and trade   

- Mementos and souvenirs 

- Mapping and documentation 

- Borders 

- Networks  

- Temporal and generational distance 

- Nostalgia 

- Removal and exile  

- Attachment and communities 

- Borders and homelands 

- Communication and languages 

 

For consideration, please submit a 300-word (maximum) abstract for a 15-minute presentation and a brief CV as PDF attachments to rahgsa@smu.edu by December 11th, 2020. Selected participants will be notified by December 21th, 2020. Participants will compensated in lieu of a traveling reimbursement. The conference will be conducted entirely online and participants will be given more information upon being selected. The conference organizers look forward to your submissions. 

 Please email the conference organizers at rahgsa@smu.edu with any questions. 

Posted on Thu, October 29th, 2020
Expires on Fri, December 11th, 2020

CAA is not responsible for the content of listings in the Opportunities section. All postings are subject to review; inappropriate submissions will not be published.