August 11-14, 2011, Palmer House Hilton Hotel, Chicago, IL
Submission Deadlines:
Individual Papers or Presentations: October 15 (send to conference planner Nick Salvato, ngs9@cornell.edu)
Complete Sessions: November 1 (submit online directly to ATHE at www.athe.org)
The LGBT Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) invites panel, performance, roundtable, seminar, “text-and-response,” working group, and related proposals for ATHE 2011 in Chicago. Although presentations on all topics related to theatre and performance in general and to LGBTQ issues in particular will be considered, we encourage participants to develop ideas related to the conference theme, “Performance Remains, Global Presence: Memory, Legacy, and Imagined Futures,” and, more especially, to our Focus Group’s riff on that theme, “A Queerer Time, A Queerer Place.”
As the conference on the whole challenges us to transcend national borders and disciplinary lines, as well as to think about theatre’s ostensible insistence on repetition and presence, the LGBT Focus Group is interested in sessions exploring the specific ways in which LGBTQ scholars, performers, audiences, educators, and students negotiate the local, the global, time, space, and their queer interpenetrations. Questions to be considered could include:
What do recent theorizations of queer temporalities disclose to us about performance practices across different times and places—and how may an investigation of discrete performance practices reshape (or make anew) theories of queer time?
How have queer media contributed to globalizing the local, and what are the specifically queer dimensions and articulations of “glocal” performance?
How may considerations of the rural, the suburban, the ex-urban, or the village challenge hegemonic emphases on the urban and on the cosmopolitan in queer theory and queer studies of performance?
Is camp a necessarily local practice, and if so, how do studies of camp’s localities contest globalizing or totalizing theories of camp’s circulations (as well as its impasses and even its supposed terminations)?
How can we profitably use the methodologies of queer theory and performance studies to trace the remains of early or pre-modern expressive behaviors and artistic formations?
What are the pressing concerns and issues for community- and campus-based makers and teachers of queer performance, and how may their explorations of the local and of space become, importantly, meditations on safe space?
We also invite session coordinators to think “queerly” about the kinds of sessions that they propose and the composition of the colleagues in those proposed sessions, as ATHE on the whole encourages a move away from traditional panels (though a certain number of traditional panel proposals are, of course, welcome). How, for instance, might a session incorporate a performance, a paper, and on-site response(s) to the paper and performance? How might we profit from a series of participants’ short, interpretive assessments of a single, guiding performance or text? What kind of conversation would emerge in a seminar whose members (scholars, artists—and others—alike) circulated pre-written papers and used those papers to generate discussion questions for the conference? And what more radical alternatives to the traditional panel have yet to be conceived?
INFORMATION ON SUBMITTING PROPOSALS:
Completed proposals (with all session members assembled) may be submitted directly to ATHE at www.athe.org no later than November 1, 2010. Please forward a copy of your completed proposal to Nick Salvato (ngs9@cornell.edu), and please note that all technology requests must be included in your completed proposal. If you would like your session to be considered for the series “A Queerer Time, A Queerer Place,” please begin your session title with that phrase (e.g., “A Queerer Time, A Queerer Place: Rural Performances of Sexuality,” or, “A Queerer Time, A Queerer Place: Camp Articulations in the Suburbs”). For those planning sessions for this series, consultation with the LGBT conference planner before the November 1 deadline is also appreciated and recommended.
While complete sessions are strongly encouraged, individual paper proposals may be submitted to the LGBT Focus Group conference planner, Nick Salvato, at ngs9@cornell.edu. I will attempt to group submissions into cohesive sessions, but I cannot guarantee inclusion. In order to be considered, individual proposals must be submitted by October 15, 2010. Abstracts (250 words) must include the presentation title and the submitter’s contact information and must specify any A/V needs. Indicate also whether you would like your proposal to be considered for one of the sessions being organized under the rubric, “A Queerer Time, A Queerer Place.” ATHE does not accept individual paper submissions: do not submit your individual proposal on the ATHE website. Individuals wishing to identify colleagues with whom to create sessions prior to the November 1 deadline may use the LGBT listserv to circulate questions or possible session topics (LGBT@LISTSERV.COFC.EDU).
All A/V support is fee-based. Grants for A/V support are available and encouraged. To apply, follow the directions on the proposal submissions form at ATHE’s website and fill out any additional information required. You will be notified of grant monies at the same time that you are notified of the status of your session. ATHE cannot accommodate A/V requests submitted after November 1 without substantial cost to the individual presenter.
Please note that ATHE runs from Thursday through Sunday in 2011. The application form will not accept scheduling preferences.
Presenters wishing to create multidisciplinary sessions should contact the Focus Group conference planners for each of the three groups that they propose as co-sponsors of their sessions, since MD session coordinators who do not complete this step are likely to have their sessions ranked low or rejected.
Presenters proposing sessions outside the traditional panel format are asked to be specific in their proposals concerning the structure and number of participants, so that ATHE can be notified about time/space needs.
ATHE will notify the LGBT Focus Group concerning accepted or rejected panels by late February. Presenters should expect to hear from the conference planner or the session coordinator by early March.
More information here.
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