The deadline for submissions of research, workshop, and arts proposals is December 15, 2014.

The theme of the 2015 Electronic Literature Organization conference and festival is “The End(s) of Electronic Literature.” This theme plays on several different meanings of “ends.” Topics the conference papers and works will explore include:

Is “electronic literature” a transitional term that will become obsolete as literary uses of computational media and devices become ubiquitous? If so, what comes after electronic literature?

We can also question in what sense electronic literature and digital writing practices are a means to an end. If so, what are the ends of electronic literature? What political, ideological, aesthetic, and commercial ends or purposes do works of electronic literature serve?

In recent years, projects such as the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base have sought to highlight the work of scholars and artists who have worked outside of the mainstream of electronic literature as it has developed as a field, for instance developing research collections based on Russian and Brazilian electronic literature. This conference will seek to shed further light on international communities and practices in electronic literature that have not been widely addressed in the critical literature of the field, those that are located at the “ends” or margins of critical discourse in the field.

Electronic literature is situated as an intermedial field of practice, between literature, computation, visual and performance art. The conference will seek to develop a better understanding of electronic literature’s boundaries and relations with other academic disciplines and artistic practices.

As a laboratory for future literary forms, the field of electronic literature must count the youngest readers among its most significant group of end-users. One strand of this conference will focus specifically on digital reading experiences made for children.

 

Teaching academic writing and speaking courses to international graduate and professional students and contributing to new English Language Support Office.

 

The Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines is a comprehensive writing program serving students at all levels across the seven colleges of the Ithaca campus.  The English Language Support Office (ELSO) focuses on writing and speaking support for international graduate and professional students.

 

Teaching will focus on international graduate and professional students who use English as an additional language. Primary responsibilities will be teaching courses focused on further developing students’ academic writing, presentation skills, and conversational English as well as conferencing with students. Depending on interest and expertise, the position may include tutoring, training peer tutors, and facilitating faculty development or assessment of student learning or program effectiveness. These are non-tenure track, renewable 3-year positions that report to the ELSO Director. Positions begin July 1, 2015.

 

Submit a vita, statement of teaching philosophy, three letters of reference, and a letter of application summarizing relevant teaching experience electronically at

https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/4415. Inquiries may be directed to ELSO Director Michelle Cox (michelle.cox@cornell.edu). 

 

PhD preferred but not required. Experience teaching academic writing and/or speaking to international graduate students is essential. A background in TESOL and writing studies is preferred. Candidates may apply from any field of study, particularly applied linguistics or composition-rhetoric. Desired areas of specialty: English for academic purposes, writing in the disciplines, science writing, second language writing pedagogy.

The Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication proudly presents: 

by Dr. Jennifer Anne Boittin, Associate Professor of French, Francophone Studies, and History at The Pennsylvania State University

Everyone is welcome!

This public lecture is co-sponsored by:

Center for the Advancement of Intercultural Communication (CAIC),UMBC French Club, History, Gender and Women’s Studies, Global Studies,Language, Literacy, and Culture, Sociology & Anthropology, The Mosaic Center

Agnes Bolsø, Norwegian University of Science & Technology, NORWAY

Christine Katz, University of Lueneburg, GERMANY

Mary Phillips, University of Bristol, ENGLAND

Ida Sabelis, VU University, Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS 

There is broad agreement that the Earth is warming, and the impacts of climate change such as loss of polar and glacial ice and more frequent and more intense severe weather events such as heat waves, storms and cold, are beginning to become ever-more apparent. Insidious environmental degradation continues apace. Yet, politicians and the business community seem paralysed and efforts to address ecological crises have been described as a dismal failure (Wittneben, Okereke, Banerjee & Levy 2012). Organizational responses are characterized by a business case approach based on obtaining competitive advantage (Bansal & Roth 2000), finding a technical fix (Boiral, Cayer, & Baron 2009) and greenwashing (Walker & Wan 2012). Banerjee notes that: ‘Rather than reshaping markets and production processes to fit the logic of nature, sustainable development uses the logic of markets and capitalist accumulation to determine the future of nature’ (Banerjee 2003:153). The primacy of market forces, economic progress and technology remains largely unquestioned such that current discursive formations and material practices of organizational sustainability limit possibilities for transformative change. 

The environment/nature is thus presented as a risk that should be ameliorated through mastery and domination or a market opportunity to be appropriated, commodified and consumed (Banerjee, 2003). Conceptualising the natural world in this way is grounded in what Connell (1995) has referred to as hegemonic masculinity. Masculinity is aligned with reason, rationality and the human mind which devalues the feminine, emotion, the body and the natural world (Lloyd 1993). This is a long-established argument made by feminist philosophies, but its treatment has tended to focus on the implications for gender, instead of what it might mean for gender and nature. Feminist approaches to environmental sustainability have  developed in response to the ways in which ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ are conceptually linked in Western thought, wherein the processes of inferiorization have been mutually reinforcing. In so doing, such approaches have the potential to mount a radical challenge to current organizational and academic discourses and practices surrounding sustainability, social responsibility and justice (Plumwood, 1993). This Special Issue will explore the relation between the gendered nature of such discourses and practices and current debates surrounding sustainability in studies of work and organization.

The Special Issue therefore provides an arena through which gendered approaches to environmental sustainability can be further developed in studies of organization especially within the context of environmental uncertainty and crisis. There has been a lack of gendered analysis, including feminist and philosophical analysis, in the field of sustainability and organizational sustainability and we wish to address this. We invite philosophical, theoretical and empirical papers that explore a gendered, and particularly feminist, commitment, practice and politics to the study of gender and nature in the field of work and organization relating to the environment, sustainability and social justice. We argue, following Phillips (2014), that a feminist environmental ethics can provide a critical analysis of the gendered ways in which organizations, and organization studies, represent, construct and appropriate nature, and how that might be subverted and re-imagined to interrogate relations of power, resistance and politics. Indeed does feminism and eco/environmental feminism enable a radical challenge to the field of gender and organization broadly, and sustainability specifically? However, we also acknowledge the problematics within current eco/environmental feminist philosophy in areas such as engaging with post-colonial thought, the representation/appropriation of indigenous voices and practices, corporeality and embodiment and approaches to an ethics of care and we particularly welcome submissions that move these debates forward.

Dr. David Shorter, associate professor of world arts and cultures at UCLA, shares six lessons for first-year doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences.

Do you have any other advice for new and current LLC doctoral students? You may leave a post in the comment section below!

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1. Be grateful for this opportunity, but prepare an exit strategy. First and foremost, pause to consider that you wanted to be in this graduate program. And here you are about to receive attention and training from leaders in your chosen field. Not many professions provide this phase of directed reading, mentorship, and fostering of your creative, intellectual, and personal goals.

UMBC-ADVANCE is pleased to announce the members of the 2014-15 ADVANCE Leadership Cohort

Dr. Anita Komlodi, Associate Professor of Information Systems

Dr. Rachel Brewster, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

Dr. Sarah Chard, Associate Professor of Sociology

Dr. Jennie Leach, Associate Professor of CBEE

Dr. Jane Turner, Professor of Physics

36th Ethnography in Education Research Forum February 27-28, 2015

Given the vast array of reforms that are at play in and transforming the landscape of education, how can ethnographers contribute to more insightful analyses of the interplay of inequality, poverty, and educational experiences and outcomes, particularly with economic disparities growing in our current era? How might ethnographers continue to challenge problematic and pathologizing assumptions to provide more powerful explanations of the influence of poverty and racialized class inequality on education?

At a time dominated by high stakes testing and increased surveillance in educational settings, ethnographers have an ever-increasing role to play in reframing dominant discourses of accountability in policy and practice conversations. A primary purpose of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Urban Ethnography (CUE) from its founding in 1970, and of the Ethnography in Education Research Forum since its beginnings in 1980, has been to encourage and support field research applying anthropological, folkloristic and linguistic skills to the study of American cities, with priority given to the study of ethnic groups in Philadelphia. An early CUE research effort was an ethnographic project in Philadelphia public schools directed toward collaborative monitoring of the effects and consequences of programs and policies in terms of countering educational inequities and advancing social justice.

In keeping with this research tradition, and in today’s transformed educational landscape, the 36th Ethnography Forum invites exploration of methodological alternatives and modes of collaboration in ethnographic research on education. How do proposals such as ethnographic monitoring, practitioner inquiry, decolonizing methodologies, culturally responsive methodologies, and other participatory ethnographic approaches invite, value and respect the teachers, learners, schools and communities we work with? How might ethnographers invite deeper engagement and self-reflection by all of us as we work to create more socially just educational policies and practices?

For more information about the Ethnography in Education Forum, visit http://www.gse.upenn.edu/cue/forum or email cue@gse.upenn.edu.

For proposal submission, visit http://www.conftool.com/forum2015/. The proposal deadline is October 1, 2014.

See proposal guidelines on the attached file [Only on MyUMBC Groups]