I’m trying to organise two panel proposals for the 2017 International Studies Association conference (in Baltimore next February) – one on War, Aesthetics and Embodiment (co-organised with Synne Laastad Dyvik at Sussex) and another on the international relations of the Eurovision Song Contest.
I’ve cross-posted the texts of both calls for papers in some other relevant places, but here they both are. Please email abstracts to me for the Eurovision panel and to both me and Synne for the war/aesthetics/embodiment panel.
Call for Papers: War, Aesthetics and Embodiment: Exploring Connections and Change
Convenors: Catherine Baker (University of Hull) and Synne Laastad Dyvik (University of Sussex)
Deadline extended to Sun 29 May 2016
This panel focuses on the connections and changes within two fields of study – aesthetics and embodiment – and how these together help us to understand war and processes of militarisation better. While studies of popular culture and aesthetic expressions in international relations and geopolitics have revealed the pivotal role these play in perpetuating militarisation and war, the connections between these and those that embody them remain underexplored. Yet there are many empirical instances where both lenses converge such as in consumer style fashion, music videos, military and police uniforms, the tattooing practices of military personnel, or forms of struggle against state violence that might constitute ‘counter-militarisation’. The panel invites papers focused on exploring a range of aesthetic embodiments that challenge, contest, resist and reaffirm the prevalence of militarisation and war in global politics. In so doing the panel wishes to chart changing technologies, bodily enhancements, art work, and manufacturing in relation to war and militarisation and how these are embodied and practiced by ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ bodies from a variety of locations. This can help reveal imaginative and changing circuits in the relationship between military institutions and wider militarised spheres. We are considering extending the submission into two linked panels and welcome contributions that seek to challenge hegemonic ways of ‘knowing’ and ‘perceiving’ embodiment, militarisation and aesthetics.
Please send a 200-word abstract to Catherine Baker (cbakertw1@googlemail.com) and Synne Laastad Dyvik (S.Laastad-Dyvik@sussex.ac.uk) by Fri 27 May.
Call for Papers: Popular Culture, Performance and International Competition: the International Relations of the Eurovision Song Contest
Convenor: Catherine Baker (University of Hull)
Deadline Fri 27 May 2016
The annual Eurovision Song Contest, founded by European public-service broadcasters in 1956, is resolutely declared ‘non-political’ by organisers. Nevertheless, it both causes off-stage political controversies and becomes a site where viewers and participants apply and may even gain understandings of international relations and geopolitics. Recently, for instance, the 2014 contest’s winner Conchita Wurst became a symbolic figure in contestations over LGBT geopolitics (and a case in Cynthia Weber’s new study of Queer IR), while Armenian and Ukrainian political communication campaigns directly entered Eurovision performance (e.g. Ukraine’s 2016 winner commemorating Stalin’s deportation of Crimean Tatars) – yet the contest’s longer history also deserves attention. Contributions could explore themes such as: nation-branding, public diplomacy and ‘soft power’; sexual/gender diversity and popular culture in IR; war commemoration and genocide recognition; performance, embodiment, gender and nationhood; the contestation of ethnonational, transnational and other levels of cultural identity; symbolic geographies, boundaries and margins of Europeanness, including but not limited to ‘Europe/Russia’; Eurovision fandoms as everyday internationalism; the continuum between Eurovision and other international mega-events; the political economy of hosting, broadcasting, financing and securing Eurovision. The panel aims for its empirical evidence to contribute to wider conversations in fields such as popular geopolitics or Queer IR.
Please send 200-word abstracts to Catherine Baker at cbakertw1@googlemail.com by Fri 27 May.
…Those two things don’t possibly have anything to do with each other?
(It was either going to be that or Ruslana, and she’s already helped illustrate one post this week…)
Catherine Baker 