CFP Deadline: April 6, 2008

Identity and Roots

Deadline: April 6, 2008

IDENTITY AND ROOTS (GRAD)
CALL FOR PAPERS

University of Guelph
50 Stone Road East

Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1
May 24, 2008

Keynote Speaker TBA

The University of Guelph Philosophy Graduate Student Association invites submissions from graduate students from disciplines such as political science, cultural and media studies, history, philosophy, critical theory, and area studies. This graduate conference seeks to explore the relationship between the issues of developing, recognizing, and expressing identity and its rootedness in cultural, psychological, and/or material substratum. Our emphasis will be not only on the philosophical underpinnings of identity, but also what it means to realize identity in spatial, tactile, and auditory environments, political associations, cultural groups, and global networks.

Identities are core expressions of a composite of factors responsible for contributing to what it means for a person to be themselves. This said, each person expresses themselves differently given the situations they find themselves in and often discover that their modes of expression are uniquely sculpted by their particular recognition of the past, present, and future. While questions of who we are, how we became as we are, and what this means for our future projects have classically operated as guiding questions for academic projects, these questions are becoming even more important given the (seeming) rapidity of contemporary global environments. As communication, cultural, transit, intellectual, and economic networks are extended and intensified people are simultaneously experiencing a potential closeness to their identity's roots, while often being unable to fully realize that closeness. What are the effects of this alienation of closeness? While these aforementioned networks propose to flatten traditional hierarchies, making all members of the networks equal to one another, what is the effect of this flattening on the development of identity? Can individual or cultural identities continue to use traditional sources to root their identities, or must their modes of formation shift in light of global transformations?

Moreover, what does it mean to identify as a particular gender in this global environment? Can the common identity distinctions between public and private be maintained given the blurring of public/private binary divisions? What are the effects of only partially developing one's identity according to traditionally recognized normative criteria? What codes/symbols/metaphors are involved in the establishment of identity, and where are they located, and how should we investigate them?

 
Each presenter will be allocated 25 minutes. Please email abstracts (400 words) to identityandroots@gmail.com by April 6, 2008. Prepare abstracts for blind review.