THE ROMANIAN ASSOCIATION FOR AMERICAN STUDIES
THE ROMANIAN – U.S. FULBRIGHT COMISSION
Fifth Biennial Conference
University of Bucharest, Romania
May 22-24, 2008
Call for Papers
"Research Webs: Working Together at the Dawn of the 21st Century" Roundtable Discussion
Moderator: Christian Moraru
Professor of American Literature and Critical Theory
Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro
Brief, 10-min. "position papers" are invited for a roundtable discussion on the new challenges and opportunities for scholarly collaboration, exchange, and partnership in the post-Cold War era with particular focus on the past decade. The session will open with a 10-min. joint statement by the moderator and Professor Phyllis Hunter, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro, followed by five or six individual interventions, and discussion of issues both theoretical and practical in nature. Underpinning these problems are the questions, What sort of transformations has the older rhetoric of "collaboration" gone through after the "Wall"? In what sense are the "network society"'s emerging geopolitical, demographical, and cross-cultural configurations calling on us to rethink the meaning of "cooperation" across increasingly porous, physical and disciplinary boundaries? While some sociologists talk about the "disappearance of work," others point to a conceptual shift that has not done away with work but is rendering it an essentially networked endeavour instead. In other words, we pursue our projects less and less in isolation, explicitly or implicitly.
Like everything else, research takes place in a decreasingly "cloistered" world. At the same time, whatever topics and concerns we are wrestling with these days, sooner or later we discover that they either are of global/cross- cultural relevance or are more effectively addressed in a global/cross- cultural context where, we should safely assume, others elsewhere are also tackling them.
If this is the case—if all work is becoming networked or, at the very least, we are better off if we place our projects in broader, comparative contexts—then, we will also ask, what are the challenges and opportunities we are facing? Is everything turning into "team work"? How are we to define these teams, associations, and sodalities, and what is their impact on traditional affiliations and "rooted" projects? What happens to "authorship" ? What about "originality" ? Along these lines, participants are asked to reflect on the time-honored premises and potentially unprecedented outcomes of our growingly and, some say, necessarily collaborative critical inquiries. Again, such inquiries no longer take place this or that side of geopolitical and ideological divides but inevitably alongside other
similar pursuits elsewhere, at odds or in tune with other methodologies. We will
thus ask, what new opportunities and conflicts might arise epistemologically, culturally, politically, or otherwise in the age of networked research? To answer these questions, papers should draw from specific examples. The session will end with a brief presentation by Professor Hunter on recent collaborative concepts and projects developed by Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro's Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
All proposals must include: a brief, 300-word max. abstract, with a title; a short, 200-word max. bio; your name, institutional affiliation, e-mail, phone number, and mailing address.
Submit all materials to: Professor Christian Moraru (c_moraru@uncg. edu) AND
Roxana Oltean, Ilinca Anghelescu, Mihaela Precup (raas_fulbright_ conference@ yahoo.com and raas.fulbright. conference@ gmail.com) by the 15th of February 2008.
[sursa balkans]
If you want to receive academic resources in your e-mail on daily basis, please subscribe to 10resources-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
