9th annual GRAduate student conference

Department of modern languages and literatures

University of Miami - February 25-26, 2011                        

Keynote speaker:

Floyd Merrell, Professor of Semiotic Theory and Latin American Cultural Studies and Literatures at Purdue University. A transdisciplinary researcher, Merrell is the author of many seminal works including Complementing Latin American Borders (2004), Sensing Corporeally (2003), Peirce, Signs and Meaning (1997).

“The Real is relational” Bourdieu

Hyper-connection and inter-dependence, as characteristics of our global world, challenge the validity of the cartesian cogito ergo sum: can one still think in terms of individuality? Both Peirce (who argued that existence lies in opposition) and Benveniste (for whom difference generates meaning) outlined, a century ago, the importance of relational thought. Nowadays, relation remains a key concept in postmodern and postcolonial theories, and it is a necessary condition for individual, social, and cultural identities. It implies a link, an interaction, a mediation even, in short a certain distance between objects, subjects, realities and representations. Spaces – whether fictive, virtual or real – can be envisioned as the referential context in which the relation takes place, or as the distance engendered by relation itself.

This conference invites participants to reflect on different types of spaces in which relations can be conceived. It welcomes papers on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics grouped into three spatial dimensions:

• physical spaces that can be approached on different scales (intimate, local, urban, national, international) and from various points of view (socio-cultural, historical, geopolitics): national borders as relational space, war, no man’s land, and disrupted places, ruins as trans-historical ties, urban palimpsest and peripheral ex-tension.
• virtual spaces which include interfaces created by new technologies (twitter, facebook, blogs, online publishing), or similar but older networks such as “the Republic of Letters,” but also fictional dimensions, utopia and related notions, as well as non-fictive issues: publicity of intimacy, collective writing in the cyberspace, from context to text.
• theoretical and ethical spaces that refer to specific notions related to the topic (fragmentation, displacement, referentiality, rhizome), particular approaches to the matter (environmental psychology, socio-anthropology, existential phenomenology, ethics in political sciences), or authorial concepts (Benhabib's imaginary borders, Ortiz' idea of transculturation, Bourdieu and the notion of field, Glissant’s poetics of relation)

We invite proposals of 250-words for 20-minute presentations that might be given in English, Spanish or French. Please send abstracts by November 29, 2010 via e-mail to spacesofrelation@gmail.com, including name, email address, academic affiliation, and short bio. A contribution of $35.00 will be asked to the participants to help cover the conference costs.