CFP: Human Traffic

CFP: Human Traffic

Each year, the English department graduate students organize a "scholar's symposium," offering a series of panels held throughout the year where in graduate work is presented on a variety of subjects. The symposium is facilitated in a friendly environment and this serves as good practice forstudents who have not yet presented at a conference, or just offers a greatchance to share your work with your peers. This year, the symposium's organizers would like to open up the Call for Papers to a wider scope. We will be asking for participation from our fellow graduate students in programs like anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, performance studies, French, Spanish, etc. We will have English graduate students on each panel, but our hope is that extending the invitation to participate to other scholars will encourage an interdisciplinary program and facilitate a cross campus exchange that is appropriate to our topic, and more fitting the name "scholar symposium." This, the first panel of our four-part series devoted to "Traffic," (which overall will discuss everything from flows of energy, to the exchange of ideas, to the circulation of capital, to the way food is moved through the digestive tract and across the planet), is especially geared towards the movement and migration of people. (We will put out further calls for the other topicsthroughout the year). We are expecting a fairly liberal definition of the phrase "human traffic" and can imagine including papers that would address topics as diverse as border crossing, transportation technology, sex tourism, and disaster demography. If you would like to make a presentation(of about 20 minutes in length) please send abstracts or proposals of no more than 350 words to Sarah Juliet Lauro (slauro@ucdavis.edu) by Nov.3. We will aim for a date early in December for the first symposium.