CALL FOR PAPERS

Mapping the Community: Text, Image and Sound
April 9-10, 2010
University of Texas, Austin

The UT-Austin French and Italian Graduate Student Association proudly announces the Seventh Annual Graduate Student Conference at the Department of French and Italian, University of Texas at Austin on April 9-10, 2010.

This conference aims to evaluate conceptions of community in Italy, France, the Francophone world and the Italian Diaspora from an interdisciplinary perspective. We welcome papers encompassing either linguistics, literature, or both. Participants are asked to address communities, keeping in mind Benedict Anderson's theory of the "imagined community" or Edward Said's "imagined geographies". That is to say that participants should consider the idea that the community is an imagined space or population to which the individual belongs through their perception as part of the group. We aim to develop concepts of the community that encompass textual, visual, and/or aural media. We also wish to consider the development of language as a function of community identity.

The literature keynote speaker will be Dr. Alec Hargreaves, Director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and Ada Belle Winthrop-King Professor of French at Florida State University. Dr. Hargreaves is the author, translator, and editor of several books and articles, including Multi-ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture, and Society (2007), Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (2005), Post-colonial Cultures in France (1997).

The linguistics keynote speaker will be Dr. Gisele Chevalier, Professor of French Linguistics at the Université de Moncton. Dr. Chevalier is the author of the medical dictionary Les Mots pour Parler des Maux (2009) and several articles, including “Les marqueurs discursifs réactifs dans une variété de français en contact intense avec l'anglais” (2007).

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

$ Definitions of community

$ Communicative barriers between groups

$ Social, economic, and political groups

$ Regional dialects

$ The effect of language on community belonging or exclusion

$ Linguistic evolution in a given community

$ Shared linguistic traits across communities

$ Issues concerning migration and nomadic communities

$ Levels of belonging (local, regional, national, global)

$ Hybrid identities across communities

$ Community isolation and exclusion within post-colonial states

$ Historical linguistic or social communities

$ Nationalism and community identity

$ Language extinction and disappearing communities

$ Religion, sectarianism, and the creation of spiritual communities

$ Literary movements as social communities

$ The Internet and real and virtual communities

$ Globalization, transnational community, and international language

$ Virtual communication, linguistic registers, and dialects


To be considered, paper proposals, in French, English or Italian, should include:
A 200-300 word abstract
Your name
Mailing address
Email address
University affiliation

Suggested deadline for submission is February 25, 2010, but we will respond to submissions as they arrive. Please email paper proposals as a Word document or PDF attachment to: Jonathan Evans, jlevans@mail.utexas.edu

Sponsored by The Department of French and Italian, The Center for European Studies and The French and Italian Graduate Student Association