BIRTH: The cultural politics of reproduction

BIRTH

The Cultural Politics of Reproduction

An interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, Wednesday 7th March 2007

New health practices and technologies are rapidly transforming cultural understandings and individual experiences of reproduction. As a consequence of these changes ‘birth’ (by which we mean not only childbirth but the range of embodied, social and cultural practices associated with reproduction and parenting) has become the site of intensive academic research. BIRTH aims to create a dialogue between different disciplinary approaches to reproduction.Through a focus on the cultural politics of reproduction, this event aims to bring together academics and researchers from across the social sciences and humanities working in the area of reproduction, pregnancy, birthing, parenting and childcare.

This call for papers encourages the submission of abstracts that address the theme of birth, be that birth practices, birth stories, representations of birth, technologies of childbirth, issues of infertility, or birth as a metaphor for female identity, through a consideration of the cultural, sexual, economic, and institutional contexts from which these experiences of birth emerge.

Possible Themes

Birth Narratives and Body Stories: historical and changing myths of birth, Birth as rite of passage, secrets, shame, injury and birth, maternal monsters, race, ethnicity and birth, the new visual cultures of birth (including representations of birth in literature, television, theatre, film and other media forms), new consumer cultures of birth. Feminist and queer retellings of, `disabled` birth, male `pregnancies`, and `male reproduction`.

The Birthing Subject: feminist philosophies of birth and embodiment, pregnant embodiment, birth as a metaphor for rethinking female identities.

Childbirth: the birthing experience, medical and health practices associated with childbirth (pre-natal, intrapartum and post-natal), Prenatal Diagnostic Screening, genetic testing and engineering and IVF, and the impact of these health technologies on the meaning of childbirth, maternal agency within childbirth, alternative childbirth movements, pain and childbirth, the new legal cultures of childbirth, access to maternal health services, class and economic aspects of childbirth and fertility, Maternal Mortality and Childbirth Injury.

Reproductive `Failure`: discourses of infertility, `Failed` births, ‘Barren’ women, abortion, contraception, family planning, the foetal subject, pro-life politics, intentional childlessness, new mythologies of `having it all`, forced abortion, surrogacy, Sterilization and Human Rights, Reproductive Policies and Practices in non-Western contexts, The Politics of Below-Replacement Fertility.

Please send abstracts of 500 words to Imogen Tyler, i.tyler@lancs.ac.uk <mailto:i.tyler@lancs.ac.uk <mailto:i.tyler@lancs.ac.uk> > , by October 6th 2006.

Non -speakers can enroll for the event as a participant by contacting the conference administrator June Rye, j.rye@lancs.ac.uk <mailto:j.rye@lancs.ac.uk <mailto:j.rye@lancs.ac.uk> > . Please include full contact details with your conference registration email. Please note that places will be limited.

In due course we will send out and publish online the full conference information (including details of accommodation and travel). This event is fully funded and there will be no conference fee.

Imogen Tyler
Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
UG Admissions Tutor for American Studies, Film Studies, Media and Cultural Studies
Institute for Cultural Research <http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/cultres>
Faculty of Social Sciences <http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/faculty/>
Lancaster University <http://www.lancs.ac.uk/>
Lancaster
UK
LA1 4YR
(01524) 594186
i.tyler@lancaster.ac.uk <mailto:i.tyler@lancaster.ac.uk>
www.imogentyler.net

Art and the Senses (Oct 7, 2006)

A one day workshop on ART AND THE SENSES will be held at the
University of Sheffield on Saturday, October 7th 2006.

Speakers:

Fiona Macpherson (Glasgow) ‘Synaesthesia and Art: Scope and
Limitations’
Andrew McGonigal (Leeds) ‘Art and Discriminability’
Catharine Abell (Manchester) ‘The Perceptuality of Pictures’
Robert Hopkins (Sheffield) ‘Sculpture and Visual Perspective’

Some student travel bursaries are available. For information, and to
register (there is no fee) please email r.hopkins@shef.ac.uk.

The workshop is generously supported by the British Society of
Aesthetics, the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience
(Glasgow), and the Sheffield Philosophy Department.

For further information, please visit the workshop website:
http://www.gla.ac.uk/Acad/Philosophy/CSPE/art/art.html

Professor Robert Hopkins
Department of Philosophy
Arts Tower
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TN

Tel 0114 222 0572

Pleasure Dome (Toronto)

Call for Proposals/abstracts:=20

Pleasure Dome, Toronto’s experimental and alternative film and video
exhibition collective would like to invite submissions for its next
publication titled:
Excesses and Extremes in Film and Video.

In this book, which sets out to examine excesses and extremities, and
thereby also liminality, we invite submissions on a range of explorations
that consider creative excrescence and the immoderate in film, video and
expanded cinema.

This collection forays into creative impulses that are extremist in kind,
and also considers the liminal spaces in which such experimentations in
art and thought move.  Essays will take as their point of departure an
exploration of this overarching theme of excess and the “irrational”
through which images in film and video stretch tensile, convulsing to
their edges, producing a shock to thought and topographies of foreignness.

Experimentations in film need the movements of images, sounds, words,
rhythms and anti-rhythms through which the film courses, and through which
the forces within the film itself can be sensed.  In what ways do we
encounter the excesses and extremes in films that pulverize our ordering
of the senses?  And, consequentially, how can we come to characterize such
intensities in sound and images, of forces from the depths in order to
render ephemera in the language of words, in the construction of critique
and in the crystallizing impulses of philosophy?

What is production of the extreme in film, video or expanded cinema?  In
which way(s) does the extreme act upon our senses by disrupting,
interrupting or agitating?  Or, conversely, how does the extreme present a
bodily intemperance in how moving images come to be experienced?

Submissions of such explorations may include a range of forms such as
critical essays, cartoons/comics, visual compositions, story-boards or
film treatments.  Explorations might consider, but are not limited to some
of the following suggestions:

=B7 What are art’s becomings in their terrorizing impulses?

=B7 Can the intemperate of art dissemble the senses?  What is created and
lost in the body through such forces and affects?

=B7 How do intensities become extreme?

=B7 Can we accept in art what we condemn as destructive such as the
annihilative passions of violence and greed?  For instance, can the
extremes of making art, which sometimes indulges in animal cruelty,
defilement of corpses or sexual sadism elicit more than shock? Can such
destructive impulses produce lines of flight from the constant
colonization of consumer capitalism?  When sadistic desire and unbridled
cruelty are transposed to an artistic medium, can what is dangerously
antisocial, hateful and intolerant become an expression of pure joy?

=B7 What kind of release whether by virtue of addictions, obsessions or
psychosis is productive in the land of excess?

=B7 Do rebellious/radical impulses in art recuperate what are dangerous and
toxic waste products?

=B7 Can the ephemera and esoteria of the occult, such as becoming minor
through the dark chthonic impulses found in becoming-witch, satanic or
alien deterritorialize art for a post-capitalist becoming?

=B7 Recycling abandoned detritus of mass media over-production

=B7 In facilitating the shock of trauma, can extreme art produce an
imbalance of forces releasing trapped energy, in what could be considered
a paradox of brutality?

Please send your submissions to:
pleasure.dome@yahoo.ca

Co-Editors:=20

Firoza Elavia
Experimental filmmaker and
Ph.D. Candidate in Film and New Media Studies

Linda Feesey
Filmmaker, programmer and reviewer=20

Deadline for proposals: September 30/2006
Length: 500-800 words

Pleasure Dome is a film and video exhibition collective dedicated to the
presentation of experimental film and video by artists. Programming since
1989 Pleasure Dome is committed to exhibiting local, national and
international work which features shorter length and small format work, as
well as non-traditional work that mixes film and video with other media
such as performance and installation. We organize approximately 20 events
per year into a fall/ winter/summer schedule. Pleasure Dome also publishes
critical texts and catalogues on film/video artists and their work
including the recent catalogue on Barbara Sternberg Like a dream that
vanishes and the anthology Lux: A Decade of Artist’s Film and Video.

Firoza Elavia
PhD Candidate,
Philosophy of Film=20
and New Media Studies,
York University,
Toronto, Canada

Documentary Now!

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
Documentary Now!
A Conference on the Contemporary Context and Possibilities for the Documentary Genre
Conference Location: Birbeck College, Malet Street, London
Dates: Saturday April 14th & Sunday April 15th 2007
9am-5pm
This conference, sponsored by Brunel University,  aims to bring together scholars, filmmakers and interested members of the public to discuss current trends in documentary practice, from the return of documentary as a theatrical box office phenomenon, to broadcast television and beyond. It will explore questions of industry, audiences, questions of aesthetics, documentary theory, questions of political engagement, documentary’s relationship to the mainstream media and other issues.
Themes For The Conference
Documentary and the public sphere
Documentary in the 21st century (new modes and hybrids, new technologies such as internet, phones, podcasting etc).
The changing TV climate for documentary
Documentary audiences.
The renaissance in theatrically-released documentary.
Questions of ‘authorship’ in relation to recent documentary.
New challenges for documentary distribution and exhibition
Documentary in the post-9/11 and post-7/7 political world.
New types of drama-documentary/the relationship between fiction and non-fiction.
Documentary and investigative journalism.
Censorship, regulation and ‘fair dealing’/copyright issues; documentary and the law.
If you would like to give a paper at the conference, please send proposals (around 150-300 words) to michael.wayne@brunel.ac.uk
thanks
Mike Wayne