CfP: Globalization and New Terrains of Consciousness: Phenomenologies of the Global/ Local/ Glocal
MHRD-SPARC Supported International Conference on Globalization and New Terrains of Consciousness: Phenomenologies of the Global/ Local/ Glocal. 9-10 February, 2021
Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Department of English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Germany
Phenomenological modes of analysis offer perspectives on sense-making practices, wherein we tend to ask questions as to what appeals to a particular community, or makes its presence felt in cultural practices, or even lends to hybridization. We live in sensory environments and glocalisation allows for a critical reflection on the making and remaking of these through assemblages and coming-together. A consideration of humans and our earth- others in building a new form of “planetary imaginary” (Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 2003) is crucial. And, varied sensoriums allow for multiplicity of expressions and relationalities to emerge.
In response to these developments and demands, we propose to develop a multilogical phenomenology of globalization that will enable “an analysis of those experiences that human beings are undergoing as a result of the new socio-economic-cultural and political processes of ‘globalization’, which in turn condition the horizon of all possible expectations an interpretations against which new experiences are possible and intelligible” (Mendieta, "Invisible Cities”, 2001). Our entry point for such a phenomenology of globalization will be the examination of sensory cultures and of their medial articulation. How are local cultures of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch as well as the related routines of spatiality and somaticity impacted by global discourses and media (such as television, popular music, digital media, ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘global literature’)? Vice versa, how and in how far are specific local practices, strategies and legacies of worldmaking represented in and projected into the sphere of global negotiation? How are local and global practices of sensory, spatial and conceptual worldmaking interwoven and negotiated in capitals or megacities like Delhi, Beijing, London and Berlin? The urban sensorium of the smart city contrasts well with the sentient ecological drive in environmental Humanities in the face of mass extinction and global climate change. Thus, this call for papers is interested in an exploration of sensory environments and cultures of knowledge produced and examined in a process of globalized world-making.
We invite you to think about the synesthesia of senses and sense-making, the affective accumulation of images across literary, cultural and programmatized texts that both build and seek a splintering “actuality” which is by virtue of its accumulative articulation an “artifactuality” (Derrida, Echographies of Television, 1996). The local articulations of global experiences of the networked assemblages of the times and terrains of consciousness, open spaces of contemplation about the molecular actualising, or even activating of the desiring and sensory intensities of its parts are ever evolving. It becomes interesting to follow language and its ordering and development of a sense of varied sensory environments, of narrative, of story, of plot, of the epochal and the trivial, bringing us back to thought and sensation through the literary, the cultural and the experiential that eventually dwell on what it means to be human and what it means to overcome the centrality of that thought.
We invite abstracts on the following themes, but are not limited to these:
- Hyperaesthetic Culture
- Hyperculture
- Local Cultures and Global Discourses
- Sensory Adaptation and Sense-Making
- Transnational Linkages
- Agency: Material and otherwise
- Multimodal sensory experiences
- Machinic Assemblages
- Molar/Molecular Becoming/Unbecoming
- Sensory, Parasensory and Extrasensory
- Spatial discourses
- Urbanity, Artifactuality and Time
- Routines of spatiality and somaticity
- Technics and the Megacity
- Worldmaking in popular culture
- Heterotopic Negotiations
- Posthuman/ Other-than human sensory explorations
Important Dates
Submission of Abstracts: 1st December, 2020
Intimation of Accepted Abstracts: 15th December, 2020
Submission of Full-Length Papers: 15th January, 2021.
Guidelines for Abstract and Paper Submission
We invite abstracts of about 300 words along with a short bio-note of 100 words to be sent via email to sparcjmiwu@gmail.com on or before 1st December, 2020. Full-length papers of accepted abstracts, of 6000-8000 words, in citation style MLA 8th Edition, should reach the same on or before 15th January, 2021.
Selected papers will be published in a collection of conference proceedings with a leading international publisher.
For further queries and submissions, kindly write to us at sparcjmiwu@gmail.com.
Patron:
Prof. Najma Akhtar Vice Chancellor Jamia Millia Islamia
Organisers:
Prof. Simi Malhotra, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
Prof. Isabel Karremann, Department of English, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Prof. Zeno Ackermann, Department of English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Germany
Prof. Nishat Zaidi, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
Shraddha A. Singh, Research Scholar, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
Zahra Rizvi, Research Scholar, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia