UK EGSO

2020 EGSO Symposium: Noise & Silence: Everyday Politics of Erasure

Call for Papers

Event Flyer

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The University of Kentucky English Graduate Student Organization (EGSO) proudly invites abstracts and proposals for its annual spring Symposium, which will take place on February 28-29, 2020. EGSO is interested in the range of graduate student work, which is why this year we are extending this call for papers from English and Creative Writing to other humanities departments, including but not limited to Appalachian Studies, Education, Gender and Women’s Studies, Geography, Hispanic Studies, History, Linguistics, and Social Theory. This academic year, EGSO Symposium offers a space for graduate students across the humanities to foster interdepartmental connections and reinvigorate each other in our research, teaching, and professionalization through the exploration of common themes.
 

Specifically, we invite reflection on how our critical, creative, and pedagogical work navigates, challenges, and complicates the tension between noise and silence. On the one hand, we live in an increasingly noisy society in which silence and digital acts of erasure (a.k.a “going off the grid”) are often spoken of as both desirable and unobtainable. On the other hand, marginalized voices continue to be systematically silenced and/or drowned in noise. How do we make sense of the dichotomy between silence and noise, its manifestations, and the violence it can enact through the lenses of our disciplines? Who makes the noise and why? What silences are revealed and broken when we focus on the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and class, across various geographies, mediums (literature, film, social media, etc.), and time periods? How do we recover silenced voices, given the distortions, omissions, and erasures of the archive? How do we conduct research and develop our pedagogies in a political and media climate of the upcoming elections that in many ways relies on noise? These are just some questions that could guide any submission to this year’s Symposium.
 

We welcome graduate projects that take creative, interdisciplinary, and experimental approaches and forms. Submissions may explore aspects of this theme as manifested across disciplines and in any medium, historical and cultural context, and geographical location. Papers may draw on but are not limited to critical theory, cultural studies, disability studies, feminist theory, film and visual studies, media and communication studies, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. We invite work at any stage of production: seminar papers, potential conference presentations, papers already presented at conferences, dissertation chapters, job talks, and even presentations from published articles.

 

Please submit your abstracts/proposals by Sunday, December 15, 2019 using this Google form. We are interested in individual projects (critical or creative), panel proposals, posters, and roundtable proposals. Poster or paper proposals should not exceed 250 words. Roundtable and panel proposals should define, in no more than 350 words and 500-700 words, respectively, what unifies the proposed presentations and why those on the roundtable/panel were selected for said group. Please email Dasha Goncharova at daria.goncharova@uky.edu if you have any questions.
 

We look forward to your submissions!