2nd HELAAS Young Scholar Symposium
Theme: Conflict and Negotiation in American Culture(s)
March 7–8, 2020
Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, Greece
Building upon the success of its 1st Young Scholar Symposium, the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS) offers another promising event focused on promoting communication and interconnections, as well as scholarly and professional development among young scholars interested in American Studies. The 2nd HELAAS Young Scholar Symposium seeks to bring together postgraduate students, Ph.D. candidates, as well as early career researchers and Americanists whose current research and/or art projects explore “Conflict and Negotiation,” as concepts and experiences, in various American, American-derived, or American- inflected cultural contexts.
Pertinently, it was the Greek thinker Heraclitus who first postulated that conflict maintains the world. Thenceforth, scholars and artists of disparate backgrounds have elaborated on the idea that conflict is generative of human culture. It is through historical conflicts and the attendant processes of negotiation to resolve, or at least make sense of them, that America in particular has evolved, since its inception, to become a cultural stage where world-shaking performances play out: performances of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, faith, among others. Realities of conflict and negotiation have assumed renewed urgency after the paradigm shift initiated by the 9/11 events and, more recently, with the several crises – financial, sovereign, ideological, humanitarian, environmental, and linguistic, among others – in which America has been directly or indirectly implicated. Given America’s pivotal role in international politics and sociocultural affairs within an increasingly globalized world, the said realities have the potential to and often do transform not only America’s/as’ internal workings, but also other cultures caught in its orbit. At the same time, they are productive of new spaces for study, research, and meaning-making within the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. It is these new spaces that the 2nd HELAAS Young Scholar Symposium seeks to address, with the hope to, in its turn, stimulate more generative conflicts and negotiations.
Therefore, the Symposium organizers invite contributions that critically engage with different facets and layers of “Conflicts and Negotiations in American Culture(s),” through multiple lenses of expertise, including those of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. We are particularly interested in proposals evincing an inter-/transdisciplinary and/or inter-/transmedial approach to any of the following issues – and beyond them:
- Conflicts in American/American-inflected art, literature, and other media
- American/American-inflected art, literature, and media as conflict and negotiation platforms
- Conflict across modes of expression – the multimodality of conflict
- The role of new media and technologies vis-a-vis conflict and negotiation
- Conflicts and negotiations across various media
- Conflictual co-existence and the negotiation of diversity in America
- Conflicts among/across Americas – Latinx America, Asian America, African America, South America, etc.
- Intersectional manifestations of conflict and negotiation
- Past conflicts versus present negotiations
- Past negotiations versus present conflicts
- Persistent conflicts in American culture(s) and their effects
- Current crises involving America as narratives of conflict and negotiation
- New and emergent conflicts and negotiations
- Negotiating urban, non-urban and post-urban conflicts
- Environment-related conflicts and negotiations
- Conflict on conflict: conflicting interpretations of conflict(s) in America
- Conflict(s), resolution(s), and transformation(s) in American culture(s)
- Conflicts and negotiations in the field of American Studies
Contributions may consist of individual or collaborative (15-minute) papers, (3- speaker) panels, roundtables, workshops, praxis sessions, provocations, lecture performances, or even actual performances and installations. After all, our primary aim is to demonstrate the plurality, diversity, and breadth of young scholar research and expression within the field of American Studies, besides offering a unique networking opportunity to early career scholars. With that in mind, we strongly encourage formats that transgress disciplinary boundaries and challenge distinctions between different areas of knowledge and experience. We are looking forward to welcoming contributors inclined to think out of/rethink the “academic box”; those whose work resides at the interface between art and science, epistemology, and practice, and/or offers bold readings of past and present conflicts and negotiations related to American culture(s).
In the same spirit, and in order to help young scholars navigate the world of academia, the programme of the Symposium will accommodate opportunities to discover more about practical aspects of scholarly and professional development, from thesis publication and conference tracking to syllabus construction and design. Participants will also be invited to submit full-text articles (5,000-7,000 words) for possible inclusion after being blind reviewed to a special issue of the interdisciplinary journal of the Hellenic Association for American Studies, Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media (e-ISSN: 2585-3538).
Please, send your proposal by January 15, 2020, to youngscholars@enl.auth.gr. Each proposal submission should include a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biographical note of the contributor(s).
For further information, please, direct your emails to Dr. Theodora Tsimpouki, President of HELAAS (tsimpouki@enl.uoa.gr) or Dr. Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou, Young Scholar Representative (aikaterini@enl.auth.gr).
Organizing Committee:
Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou, Postdoctoral Researcher (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
Konstantinos Chatzipapatheodoridis, Ph.D. (Independent Postdoctoral Researcher)
Vassilis Delioglanis, Ph.D. Candidate (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Advising Committee
Dimitra Nikolaidou, Ph.D. Candidate (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Penny Koutsi, Ph.D. Candidate (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Maria Virginia Tsikopoulou, M.A. (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)