Call for Papers 11th International ESPRit Conference
Periodicals and Belonging
Time and venue: 27-29 June 2023, Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University, UK
The 11th International ESPRit conference will be held in Leeds, UK, on the theme of Periodicals and Belonging. This fruitful and timely theme is designed to encourage discussions and collaborations on the ways that ideas, emotions, declarations and imaginings, of belonging or not belonging, manifest in relation to periodical production and reception.
The notion of belonging to a family, a local culture, a national, regional and international group, or a diaspora, including a host of cultural and political ideas, is intrinsic to periodical studies, as is research on communities of authors/contributors, readers, literature and the arts, history, cultural history, linguistics, sociology and memory studies amongst other disciplines. Constitutive to belonging, is the notion of not belonging, and as such, we are interested in exploring themes of exclusion, forms of othering, racialisation, agonism and conflict.
The conference aims to further problematise concepts of association and organisation such as communities (e.g. ‘imagined communities’, ‘interpretive communities’), groups etc., to periodical readerships; enquire into notions of belonging as oppression (periodical policing of boundaries, identities or stereotypes); the use of belonging in marketing/advertising of periodicals, and the role of labour in periodical production (e.g., staff who belong loyally to one publication versus freelance journalists who sell their labour to many titles). Lastly, the conference will consider periodicals as visual and material objects that belong to certain places and spaces (e.g., when used as props or symbols by artists, photographers, film directors and others, or in dentists’ waiting rooms), as well as in circulation and movement across geopolitical locations and chronological periods.
https://www.espr-it.eu/news/events/170-esprit-conference-2023