The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Keynote Speakers: Simon During, Johns Hopkins University; and Professor Gordon McMullan, King’s College London

CALL FOR PAPERS

ABSTRACT DEADLINE: 16 July 2008.

“the passage is a city, a world in miniature” (qtd. in Benjamin The Arcades Project 3)

Borders define the imaginative territories of the mind, the nation state and the cultural text at the very moment that they reveal their porosity. The figure of the border suggests a world of related metaphors with which literature and other arts approach the boundaries of texts, discourses and disciplines. We encourage papers that freely interpret the border and the figure of the border, including explorations of sovereignty, power, self and other. Proposals for papers might address the poetry and politics of frontiers, watchtowers, border conflict, and encounters with the foreign; or thresholds, the “rough edges” of maps, “cartographic silence” and No Man’s Land. We also encourage explorations of “invisible geographies”, of the concealed and the spectral–explorations, that is, of that which haunts us without “yet manifest[ing] itself on the visible surface of the earth” (Gregory and Pred, Violent Geographies).

You are invited to submit a 200 to 300 word abstract plus a 50 word bio by 16 July 2008 to the conference convenors at wipconf@uq.edu.au

Papers should be 20 minutes in length and could explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:

National borders; border transgressions; physical and figurative Australian borders; the ethics of self and other; psychological borders; hosts and parasites; cooperation across borders; psychoanalytic topographies; past and present; living and dying; memory and haunting; topography and landscape; the figure of the border within poetry; the global reach of modern technologies; textual borders; sovereignty; territory; centre and periphery; “Vanishing points”: exceptions to state power; outside borders: formlessness; amorphousness, the void; a critique of state-centred ideologies from the border; transnational texts; domestic space; border pedagogy.

Conference Convenors: Philipa Haly-Summerfield and Mary Trabucco.