Call for Abstracts: "Street Life: A Conference" - Deadline Extended to Nov. 30]]]

[Luella Massey]

Dear All:

Please circulate the attached document to graduate students in your 
Department, Centre, College or Institute.





To: University of Toronto Graduate Students, FAS

From: Professor Ato Quayson and Dr. Joshua Barker

Subject: Extended Deadline for Street Life Conference Submissions: Nov.
30, 2006.

Call for graduate student participation:

The Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies & the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Toronto will be holding an
international and multidisciplinary conference on Street Life from April
18-22, 2007. The conference has received generous support from the
Chancellor Jackman Program for the Arts and from the Connaught Fund. It
will include a series of talks, a film series, and a poster/booth exhibit.

The conference is designed to provide a new lens through which scholars
from the humanities and social sciences can examine, reflect upon, and
understand global city life. It will draw together and showcase, for the
first time, an array of junior and senior scholars whose research goes
beyond the general rubric of urban studies to take the street as an
object of research and analysis. Aimed at a broad audience, the
conference will lay the groundwork for establishing 'street life' as a
recognized site for multidisciplinary scholarly inquiry.

The conference will address a wide range of themes, including the following:

• Street Histories: Oral, written, and material histories of streets and
street life.
• Street Spaces: The social, spatial and cultural geography of
streetscapes.
• Street Cultures: Semiotic, subcultural, and stylistic dimensions of
street life.
• Street Politics and Economies: The political life of the real and the
metaphorical street; street work, street markets, formal and informal
economies
• Street Art: The performative, visual, and plastic dimensions of street
art and street furniture.
• Representing the Street: The street as interpreted in literature,
visual art, and music.
• Knowing the Street: The philosophical, theoretical, and epistemic
foundations of the street.

The conference organizers invite University of Toronto graduate students
of all disciplines to submit abstracts for papers and/or posters that
address one or more of these themes. Submissions will be juried and a
maximum of eight papers and thirty posters will be chosen for inclusion
in the conference.

Guidelines for Submission: Students interested in submitting a paper for
this conference should submit an abstract, a short CV, and a writing
sample. Students interested in submitting a poster should submit an
abstract and a short CV.

Abstracts for both papers and posters should be no longer than 300
words. Submissions should be sent to sharon.kelly at utoronto.ca
<mailto:sharon.kelly at utoronto.ca>.

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO November 30, 2006.


More about the conference theme:

The street is a social space with its own particular cast of characters,
its own forms of social organization, and its own vernaculars. It is
also the site for particular kinds of politics and forms of knowledge,
as well as for distinctive genres of music, literature, performance and
visual art. The centrality of the street to modern life is reflected in
the growing attention it has received from an array of scholars,
including historians, literary critics, anthropologists, sociologists,
political scientists, linguists, economists, and geographers. It is also
reflected in the growing willingness of the mass media to make the
social history of famous streets, such as the Champs Elysees and 42nd
Street, the subjects of widely distributed television documentaries and
films.

Until now scholars researching and writing about street life have done
so primarily within the confines of their own disciplines or under the
general rubrics of urban or area studies. As a result, the theoretical
potential of the street to function as a thematic and empirical anchor
for a focused, comparative, multidisciplinary dialogue among researchers
has gone unrealized. This conference seeks to correct this problem by
facilitating a public dialogue among scholars of street life from an
array of disciplinary backgrounds. More generally, the conference seeks
to announce the arrival of street life as a distinct object of social
scientific and humanistic inquiry.


Many thanks,

-- 
Antonela Arhin, M.A.

Administrative and Financial Assistant
Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies
Medical Arts Building, 170 St George St, Rm 202
Toronto M5R 2M8
Canada

Phone: + 1 416 946 8464
Fax: + 1 416 978 7045
Website: www.utoronto.ca/cdts