HOME: A Visual Studies Conference
Hosted by the Graduate Program in Visual Studies, University of California,
Irvine, March 4-5, 2005.
One page abstracts due: January 15, 2005
After decades of cultural war and political struggle, and in a contemporary situation riven by the aggressive return of the topos ³homeland,² questions of ³home² call urgently for analysis, both in terms of their contemporary centrality and historical provenance.
³HOME: A Visual Studies Conference,² will provide a forum for a critical interrogation of ³home² as concept, ideology, physical structure, and object of representation. Our hope is to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines to query how ³home² structures public and private processes of meaning formation, self-fashioning, and political contestation.
Panels may move between such diverse topics as Jacques Derrida¹s interrogation of hospitality and the foreigner, Lynn Spigel¹s inquiry into domestic ideology and technology, Griselda Pollock¹s analyses of the
gendered spaces of modernism, Lucy Lippard's work on the ³lure of the local,² and Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman¹s critique of the politics of Israeli settlement, to name but a few.
We encourage creative and theoretical submissions that investigate ³home² in historical and international contexts as well as domestic, contemporary ones. Through such juxtapositions, we hope to highlight the historical contingency of ³home,² even as we underscore its ubiquity and variegated
universality.
Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to, the following:
Domesticity, Ideology, and/or Technology: Home as ideology or technology in diverse international and historical contexts; the Victorian home and the modern machine home of consumer leisure; domesticity, representation, and the Defense of Marriage Act; House & Home/Home & Garden; Martha Stewart
Living; IKEA; Home Depot; home movies; HBO; the public and private of broadcast media and the internet; virtual communities, both international and local; domesticity, home pages, and internet spaces; home surveillance; McMansions and trailer parks;
Historical and (Inter)National Representations of Home: Representations of domesticity and gender, sexuality, family, and/or communal/political practice in contemporary visual media as well as historical genres; the gendered spaces of modernism; ideology and community in historical and international home architectures and communal spaces; modern domestic design; postmodern representations and conceptions of domesticity;
Home, Hospitality, and the Other: Theorizations of home such as Emmanuel Levinas¹s work on the dwelling or Jacques Derrida¹s work on hospitality and the foreigner; the uncanny; liminality and inside/outside; disciplinarity, ³home departments,² and academia; nationalism; homeland security; citizenship and civic engagement;
Home, Space, Borders, and Populations: Spatial politics; nomadic and transitory cultures and populations; nationalism and globality; national identity and post-coloniality; cosmopolitanism; terrorism and homeland
in/securities; gentrification; town planning; re/settlement; homelessness; migration, deracination, and hybridity; disequilibrium in the ghetto and the planned or gated community.
The deadline for submission of 250-500 word abstracts is January 15, 2005. Please include your name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, and phone number.
Send abstracts to Jonas Leddington (jledding@uci.edu). For general questions about the conference, contact either Jaime Brunton (jbrunton@uci.edu) or Jonas Leddington (jledding@uci.edu).
