Call for Presentations
3rd Global Conference
Saturday 5th July – Monday 7th July 2014
Mansfield College, Oxford
Call for Presentations
From Christian concept of the ‘Apocalypse’ to the Hindu notions of the Kali Yuga, visions of destruction and fantasies of the ‘end times’ have a long history. In the last few years, public media, especially in the West, have been suffused with images of the end times and afterward, from the zombie apocalypse (the AMC series The Walking Dead) to life after the collapse of civilization (the NBC series Revolution.) Several popular television series and video games (Deep Earth Bunker) are now based on preparing for and surviving the end of the world. Once a fringe activity, ‘survivalism’ has gone mainstream, and a growing industry supplies ‘doomsday preppers’ with all they need to the post-apocalyptic chaos. One purpose of the conference is to explore these ideas by situating them in context — psychological, historical, literary, cultural, political, and economic. The second aim of the conference is to examine today’s widespread fascination the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic thought, and to understand its rising appeal across broad sections of contemporary society around the world.
This interdisciplinary project welcomes proposals from all disciplines and research areas, including anthropology, psychoanalysis, political economy, psychology, area studies, communal studies, environmental studies, history, sociology, religion, theology, and gender studies.
Proposals for presentations, papers, performances, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to (but not limited to) the following themes:
- Decline, Collapse, Decay, Disease, Mass Death
- Survivalism and Doomsday Preppers
- Revolution
- Theories of Social Change
- Peak Oil, Resource Depletion, Global Warming, Economic Collapse
- The Second Coming/Millenarianism/Rapture
- The Hindu Kali Yuga
- Sex and Gender at the End of Time
- Ironic and/or Anti-Apocalyptic Thinking
- Utopia and Dystopia
- Intentional Communities as Communities of the End Times
- Selling the Apocalypse, Commodifying Disaster, and Marketing the End Times
- Death Tourism and Disaster Capitalism
- The Age of Terror
- Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
- Disaster Fiction/Movies/Video Games
- History as Apocalypse
- Remembering and Reliving the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire
- Post- Apocalyptic conditions
- Positive aspects of an Apocalypse, including change and transformation
In order to support and encourage interdisciplinarity engagement, it is our intention to create the possibility of starting dialogues between the parallel events running during this conference. Delegates are welcome to attend up to two sessions in each of the concurrent conferences. We also propose to produce cross-over sessions between these groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between visions ofthe Apocalypse and Diasporas.
What to send:
Proposals will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday 14th February 2014. If a proposal is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper of no more than 3000 words should be submitted by Friday 16th May 2014. Proposals should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Apocalypse3 Proposal Submission.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
Sheila Bibb: scbibb@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher: apoc3@inter-disciplinary.net
The conference is part of the ‘Ethos’ series of research projects, which in turn belong to the Critical Issuesprogrammes of ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All proposals accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected proposals may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.
Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit a proposal for presentation.
Details on the conference running alongside this project in 2014 can be found here: Diasporas
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.