5 – 8 December 2013
The Australian National University Canberra, Australia

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor WJT Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago
Dr Honni van Rijswijk, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University Technology, Sydney
Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Director of Westminster International Law & Theory Centre

The annual conference of the Association invites scholarly and creative research from academics and graduate students working at the crossroads of law, justice, and culture, whether based in legal theory or in disciplines such as literature, art, film, music, history, continental philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, visual culture, or cultural studies.  Contributions may take a variety of forms from traditional academic papers to poster presentations, video, or other genres or media.

Contributors should provide a title and an abstract of 200 words or less, no later than 31 May 2013, by email sent to coast@law.anu.edu.au.  Please include your name and the word Interpellations in the subject line.

For more information on this year’s program, including on-line registration, please go to http://law.anu.edu.au/conferences/interpellations.

24-27 October 2013
London, UK

If indigeneity and globalization are seen to articulate (with) each other in cultural as well as political spheres, what hangs in the balance? Working through the analytical window of performance in a range of sites and modalities, this interdisciplinary conference examines the power and the precariousness of indigeneity as a politicized cultural force in our unevenly connected world. The growing visibility of artistic networks and ideological coalitions among indigenous peoples on a transnational scale urges a fresh look at the mechanisms of cultural entanglement and the particular rights and insights afforded by indigeneity in that process. Cast as an ethical touchstone in some arenas and a thorny complication in others, indigeneity now matters in global debates about natural resources, heritage, governance, representation and social justice, to name just some of the contentious issues that continue to stall the unfinished business of decolonization. Indigenous arts, simultaneously attuned to local voices and global cultural flows, have often been the vanguard in communicating what is at stake in such debates, to international as well as grass-roots audiences. At the same time, the global circulation of indigenous arts as cultural capital has affected the ways in which indigeneity is activated and understood across different social and aesthetic platforms. Our explicit focus on performance is designed to probe the specificities of these related movements at the level of embodied praxis. It should also prompt questions about the interactions, contradictions, disjunctions, opportunities, exclusions, injustices and aspirations that globalization entails.

The conference will be held in central London in conjunction with two international events: the Origins Festival of First Nations and a performance-based exhibition, Ecocentrix: Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts.

Proposals might bring indigeneity, performance and globalization into dialogue in reference to any of the topics listed below:

- indigenous diasporas or cosmopolitanisms
- intercultural contact zones
- sovereignty, cultural diplomacy, citizenship
- protests and activism
- advocacy, collaboration, networks
- democracy and the public sphere
- mobility, locality and geopolitics
- digital performance, hybrid arts praxis
- local/global platforms
- branding, tourism, touring circuits
- belonging, affect and the senses
- mega-events and spectacle
- languages, epistemologies
- resources, ecologies, environments
- margins and mainstreams
- reconciliation/reparation movements
- heritage, transmission, repatriation
- curating and mediating events

Presentations are invited from, but not limited to, the disciplines of indigenous studies, film, dance, theatre, music, postcolonial studies, anthropology, cultural studies, politics, geography, history, sociology, and philosophy. We are especially interested in contributions that explore the participatory, phenomenological thickness of performance as a means of communication and the material processes involved in its making. While the focus is on indigenous cultures in or from the Americas, Australia, the Pacific and South Africa, outstanding proposals on topics outside this scope will be considered. Performative presentations are welcome.

Send 250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations and a short biography to Helen Gilbert and Dani Phillipson at dani.phillipson@rhul.ac.uk by 30 April 2013. The main language of the conference is English though we welcome proposals in other languages and will facilitate translation for those wanting to speak in Spanish, French or Portuguese.

For further details, please refer to the full call for papers available at http://www.indigeneity.net/events/Cfp-In%20the%20Balance%20conference-final.pdf.

In honour of the 100 years since Furphy’s death, JASAL will publish a special issue to be edited by Sue Martin and Susan Lever, including papers from the two seminars at Lake Mungo and Shepparton.  Submissions should go directly to the JASAL website: http://nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/JASAL by mid-December 2012.

3 – 5 July 2013
Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga

We welcome all and any offers of papers on Australian Literature in its widest senses (specific authors, periods, publications as well as generic, thematic clusters) and particularly on:

- Notions of ‘country’, ‘region’, ‘location’ in Australian literature: what used to be called ‘bush’, ‘outback’, ‘never-never’ etc but reconfigured or problematised in relation to specific regionalities (eg. Riverina, trans-Tasman, Gulf), rivers (Murrumbidgee, Murray, Darling) or ruralities;
- Reimaginings of eg. ‘antipodes’ from both European and Asian ‘norths’: national & transnational, global & local literary communities & literary spaces;
- Cosmopolitan/rural interaction, settler/(post)colonial versions of country: ‘pastoral’, ‘wilderness’ embodied as ‘heart’ (eg Mackellar) or ‘mind’ (cf Voss);
- Indigenous perspectives on ‘country’ and its significance in literary, political, cultural senses; ‘whiteness’, ‘blackness’ in relation to country, authority & authenticity; community & country…
- Sacred & profane country…
- Poetry and the digitized country (geek bards in virtual wildernesses?); publishing and ‘performance’; ecopoetics: landscape poetry and its (ir)relevance to location and locatedness (Malley in the Mallee?)
- Children’s Literature: tree-changes, sea-changes and refugee-changes.

Our three keynote speakers are Wiradjuri woman and author of Purple Threads, and Dark Secrets: After Dreaming, Dr Jeanine Leane, from AIATSIS, Canberra; Associate Professor Alison Ravenscroft, author of The Postcolonial Eye, LaTrobe University, Melbourne; and novelist and Professor of Creative Writing Brian Castro (Shanghai Dancing, The Garden Book, Street to Street). In addition, Dr Mark Macleod (Charles Sturt University) will head up a panel/section on Children’s Literature, and Dr Keri Glastonbury (University of Newcastle) will do the same for poetry/poetics/creative writing.

Papers will usually be of 25 minutes duration (in a half-hour slot). Abstracts of about 250 words should be sent, by 31 January 2013, to:

David Gilbey
Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English
School of Humanities & Social Sciences
Charles Sturt University
Locked Bag 588
Wagga Wagga NSW 2678
Australia
ph/fax +61 2 6933 2465
email dgilbey@csu.edu.au

Alternate contact: Dr Lachlan Brown, Lecturer in English at CSU as above, ph/fax +61 2 6933 2478 labrown@csu.edu.au

Lydia Wevers and Brigitta Olubas will be editing a special conference issue of the Association’s peer-reviewed on-line journal JASAL.

The editors welcome submissions from conference delegates by 1 February 2013 through the normal JASAL portal: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/