The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC) invites submissions across disciplines and fields that engage with the idea of “MOSAIC” in culture and theory. Mosaics are images produced by the arrangement of glass, stone, tile, and other non-precious materials into a pattern. While mosaic most immediately invokes an artistic aesthetic, the term also encompasses notions of perspective, legibility, materiality, representation, collectivity, and place.

Mosaic is a way of considering the relationships between the one and the multiple, troubling the artificial divisions cracking and crackling within our social compositions. As Jason W. Moore contends, we must recognize society and nature as entwined in a world-ecology. World-ecology interrelates capitalism, nature, power, and history as "the fundamental co-production of earth-moving, idea-making, and power-creating across the geographical layers of human experience." Society and nature are often categorically separated, but they must be recognized as always and necessarily co-constituted. Margaret Rhee's art, as both a praxis and poetics of social equality, enacts this kind of social consciousness in storytelling that interrelates being with desire. To recognize a mosaic is to engage in aesthetic attention to the world. This kind of perspective is also being taken up by studies in fields such as (but not limited to) eco-criticism, new materialism, ethnic and indigenous studies, media studies, Marxism.

This conference seeks to further complicate how the moments of world-ecology and social poetics fit together to attend to the permutations and arrangements of parts that make up various social, political, personal, and ecological wholes. What images can we abstract from the uneven fragments and "cheap natures" of our inherited world ecology? How can patterns help us attend to a long history of industrial grids, racial fractals, gendered webs, and class pyramids?  What materials are necessary to form a more sustainable political and empathetic economy? How do we become through our loves?

This two-day conference welcomes and encourages research across disciplines to collectively consider, question, and critique “mosaic” in theory, art, literature, music, architecture, philosophy, ecology, medicine, anthropology, art history, sociology, media, psychology, mathematics, history, biology, etc. MIGC will also showcase an evening of artistic performances, readings, and art installations. Please see the call for creative submissions.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Mosaic and its history in art and cultures
• World-Ecology as mosaic, mosaic in the Anthropocene
• Form and its relation to content
• Assemblages, nature-cultures, and other ways of thinking about nonhuman arrangements
• Mosaic and architecture, urban planning, and public art
• Gender and sexuality as mosaic
• Embodiment as mosaic
• Theories of political organizing and activism
• Literature and film that considers the singular vs. the collective
• Pattern, arrangement, organization in digital media and coding
• Theories of cut-ups, mixed-media, collage in art and cultural texts
• Comics as mosaic
• Games

Questions can be directed to themigc@gmail.com. Please use the form below to submit all submissions by December 1, 2016. All submissions will be reviewed anonymously by a committee of UWM graduate student organizers.

The 12th annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference is supported by the Center for 21st Century Studies, the College of Letters and Sciences, the Graduate School, the Office of Student Affairs, and the Department of English, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.