CFP + Conference at UCD: The Curious Lives of Documents

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Curious Lives of Documents

One-Day Graduate Student Symposium

University of California Davis

Friday, March 2, 2007

Documents are pervasive artifacts: sought after, collected, venerated, hidden, depended on and fabricated by intellectuals of all paths of life. They are more than the inscribed papers that circulate in economies of information and decay in archives. Passports, financial bulletins, official government papers, maps, scientific reports and judicial verdicts-they are networks in and of themselves, performances surrounded by stories, fed by the social, and empowered to reveal and conceal. The Curious Lives of Documents Symposium seeks to bring documents into focus, to interrogate their textures-their shifting contexts, and the simultaneous practices and relationships that surround them.

The document is a point of friction that operates between what becomes official truth, what is left unsaid and what must remain secret. Technological innovation and social relations affect the materiality of documents, and release them from the surface of paper. As academics we participate in these tensions. Are we, as scribes, too easily seduced by the work of other scribes? From the shifting social life of documents to our role as document makers, this symposium seeks to make visible the curious lives of documents as ethnographic subjects.

The Symposium & Midnight University

This will be a one-day symposium, the intent of which is to provide a space for senior graduate students to present their work and for lively discussions on the symposium theme and panelists' projects. Panel presentations will be limited to 15 minutes (7 double-spaced pages) and each panel will have a discussant. Following the symposium and reception, there will be a Midnight University in which alternative forms of expression and presentation will be explored. The organizers of the Midnight University encourage new forms of presentation-all forms of media are welcome and encouraged.

To best explore the curious lives of documents, we must be willing to investigate the document from various perspectives and with divergent approaches. The symposium and the Midnight University hope to provide various venues for individuals to explore their work in a variety of ways.

Guidelines for Submissions for Symposium and Midnight University:

All presentations should engage the conference theme and abstracts should clearly indicate the argument of the paper (in 200 words) and include title, name of presenter, institutional affiliation, day and evening phone numbers, mailing, email address and indicate if submission is intended for the Symposium or the Midnight University.

Abstracts (200 words) Due: Thursday, November 30, 2006 6pm

Direct all correspondence (and abstracts) to: docu.conference@gmail.com