CALL FOR PAPERS: 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group

Figure 1. Beth Dow, Palace Parking (from Ruins)

by EILEEN JOY

. . . the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question. . . . [which would] keep open the question of what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so grouped in the past. 

--Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

I'm pleased to announce that the BABEL Working Group's Biennial Meeting [inaugurated in 2010 in Austin, Texas and being held from 20-22 September 2012 in Boston, Massachusetts] now has an official website, where everyone can keep track of all developments related to the ongoing meetings:

BABEL Working Group: Biennial Meeting

Just today, we have posted all of the sessions provisionally approved for the 2012 meeting, "cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university," and those who might be interested in submitting individual proposals to any of those sessions [deadline: MARCH 31], should start here:

CALL FOR PAPERS: 2012 BABEL Meeting

If you are interested in sending a random individual proposal, you can do so by sending, also by MARCH 31, a 1-2-paragraph abstract, with full contact information, to Eileen Joy and Kathleen Kelly at: babel.conference@gmail.com. You might also re-acquaint yourself with the overall description of the Boston meeting:

cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university

The meeting promises to be an invigorating, and we hope also, pleasurable engagement between the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and arts in which disciplinary and field differences will be sharpened and also blurred as we converge on shared objects, subjects, terms, genres, tools, materials, concerns, methods, and approaches. We also hope, through conversation and debate with each other and our featured speakers -- Jane Bennett, Charles Blanc, Jeffrey Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, David Kaiser, Marget Long, and Tristan Surtees -- to reconstitute our atomized projects in new ways as we collectively rethink the stamp, the style, the value of distinct disciplinary approaches to common concerns and questions, while also cruising each other’s “bodies” of knowledge. We hope you can join us, whatever your discipline, field, position, inclination(s), whathaveyou. The task of rethinking (or just thinking) the university today must be as collective as possible.

A great way to also keep track of all developments related to the Boston meeting is also to follow BABEL on Twitter!