Breaking Down Barriers: Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference

by EILEEN JOY

Wiley-Blackwell Compass Journals will be holding, from October 19th through 30th, 2009, their first-ever Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference in the Social Sciences and Humanities on the theme of "Breaking Down Barriers," with the sub-themes: Paradigms, Borders, The Environment/Energy, Communication, and Justice/Human Rights. Registration for the conference is completely free and all submissions and presentations will be electronic [textual and also in podcast]. From the website for the conference:

The conference will be entirely virtual taking place online 19-30 October 2009. Participants can attend at any time during the conference, when it suits their schedule, to download keynote addresses, read and comment on papers, and take part in other activities. The conference will include all the sessions you would expect from a real conference including keynote speakers, workshops, question and answer sessions, and a book exhibit. Papers will be posted online along with commentaries for discussion and comment. Accepted papers will be published in special issues of the Compass journals.

I myself will be presenting one of the keynote addresses [on . . . ask me again in six months, but I'm pretty sure I'll be going with the human rights sub-theme in relation to BABEL's various "humanisms" and "anti-humanisms" projects], and I think this presents a wonderful opportunity for medievalists to engage in cross-disciplinary discussion with scholars working in other periods and disciplines on subjects that are critical to the future of higher education [and thereby, to the future of the place and role of medieval studies within higher education]. In other words, I think medieval studies should crash this conference as a virtual gang, a long wave, a cyber-time machine, or . . . something like that.