Conference Call: TRAFFIC: mobility, flows, transgression

TRAFFIC: mobility, flows, transgression
March 10, 2006
The Third Annual English Graduate Conference at Brandeis University

Plenary Speaker: Professor John Plotz, Brandeis University


Traffic will be an interdisciplinary conference that explores the movement of
persons, cultural products, objects, and ideas between different contexts:
nations, cultures, territories, class positions, gender identities, racial
boundaries, urban and rural spaces, and political ideologies.

We seek papers that address traffic as a critical concept useful for thinking
about movement in literature, film, visual culture, anthropology, cultural
studies, psychology, history, gender studies, philosophy, and critical theory.

The conference is open but not limited to original scholarship in the following
areas:

-Piracy, Trade Networks, and Commodities
-Illicit Commerce, Smuggling
-Border Crossing, Boundaries, and Surveillance
-Traffic in Bodies
-Travel Narratives, Narratives of Exploration and Conquest
-Traffic in Ideas
-Censored Artworks and Literatures
-Rural and Urban Spaces, Exurbs, Satellite Cities
-Transportation, Automobility
-Diseases, Vaccine, Viruses
-Immigration
-Refugees, Exiles, and Expatriates
-Speed, Motion
-Intercultural Exchange
-Diaspora, Cultural Dissemination
-Globalization, Third Way Politics, and Empire
-Global Flows, Transversality, Micropolitics
-Liminality, Frontiers
-Passing
-Class Mobility and Stasis
-Movements

Submissions are not limited on the basis of historical period or genre; we hope
to have papers and panels that span different cultural, historical, theoretical,
and disciplinary contexts.


*Send panel proposals and/or paper abstracts (two pages maximum) to
traffic_conference@hotmail.com by December 31, 2005.