ANNOUNCMENT


Date:    May 25, 2012

To:      All UF Graduate Students

Cc:      All UF Graduate Coordinators and Staff

From:    The UF Graduate School

RE:      Call For Papers: Submit by August 7 for "'Cyberaesthetics' and Narrative" Conference


The University of Miami Department of Modern Languages and Literatures has issued a call for papers for its "'Cyberaesthetics' and Narrative" Graduate Student Conference (October 19-20, 2012).

The deadline to submit abstracts is August 7, 2012.

The keynote speaker at the conference will be Dr. Giselle Beiguelman.

With its growing reach and its consolidation as a medium that facilitates extensive interactions and interventions, cyberspace has become a platform for the aesthetic production of hybrid discourses and different forms of narratives. By enabling economic, social and cultural interactions, digital media provide apparently limitless possibilities for human creativity, cultural production and, potentially, for political agency. However, increased reliability on "new media" also demands that scholars, artists and activists pose important questions about the ways in which information and knowledge are acquired, produced, disseminated and accessed.  This conference invites participants to reflect critically on and share experiences about the impact of cyberaesthetics on human creativity, cultural production, agency and aesthetic criticism. 

We welcome papers on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics, including but not limited to the following:

-- The impact of the cyberspace in Literature, Literary Criticism, Drama, Music and Visual Arts.

-- The uses of new media, such as e-books, blogging, social networks, digital libraries, hypertext, podcasts, webumentaries, among others in the construction of new narrative forms.

-- Aesthetic questions posed by cyberspace in relation to new forms of storytelling and expression, simulation, re-imagining the self, re-reading canons, literary, cinematic and art genres.
 
-- Theoretical debates on digital authorship and publishing, digital literature, digital film and digital arts as new forms of cultural production.

-- Cyberaesthetics as a space for redefined agency (cultural, political, social and other forms), i.e.: the Arab Spring and other forms of rebellions orchestrated via social media.

-- (Un)limited access to information, content sharing, sampling, remixing, copyright, public and private information domains.
 
-- Gender, Biopower and Technologies of the Body. 

-- Cyberspace as a (Non) Cultural Space/ (Non) Place / Heterotopy/ Utopia/ Post-Nation.
   
We invite 250-words proposals for 20-minute presentations that may be given in English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese. Please send abstracts by August 7, 2012, via email to [log in to unmask], including name, email, address, academic affiliation and a short bio. Additionally, we invite the presentation of relevant creative projects to be posted at a parallel site to the conference's main panels. To that effect, please, provide a link for us to access a sample of the project to be presented for consideration.

Find us in Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberaesteticsandnarratives/. 

Registration Fee: US $45.