September 1-4, 2009 (Manchester, U.K.)
As contemporary social theorists continue to signal the need to
reconfigure our deliberations on the social through attention to
practice, to object-mediated relations, to non-human agency and to the
affective dimensions of human sociality, this conference takes as its
focus the objects and values which find themselves at centre stage.
And we ask, in the context of nearly two decades of diverse
disciplinary approaches to these issues, what matters about objects?
How are they inflecting our understandings of technology, of
expertise, and of social change? How has a focus on objects
reconfigured our understandings of how values inflect the ways in
which people make relations, create social worlds, and construct
conceptual categories? How have objects become integral to human
enthusiasms and energies, to transformational ambition, or to the
transmission of values across time and space? How do objects move
between ordinary and extraordinary states, shade in and out of
significance, manifest instability and uncertainty? How do moral and
material values attach to objects as they move in space and time? What
dimensions do they inhabit and/or reveal?
To address these questions we welcome papers on the following themes:
The transformational work of everyday objects
Object-centered learning
Materiality, Stability and the State
Radical Archives - within and beyond textual assemblages
Conceptual Objects and Methods as Objects
Immaterial Objects - haunting, virtuality, traces.
Financial Objects
Affective Objects
Ephemera, Enthusiasm and Excess
Spiritual and/or Moral Objects
Controversial and Messy Objects
Please submit either (a) proposal for individual papers, or (b) panel
proposal including 3 papers by the end of February 2009. Guidelines
and Proposal Forms are available at
http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/conference2009/callforpapers.html and
should be sent to:
CRESC Conference Administration
178 Waterloo Place, O
xford Road
University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL
Tel: +44(0)161 275 8985 / Fax: +44(0)161 275 8985
Conference Organisers:
Conference Administrators: Bussie Awosanya and Karen Ho
Conference Manager: Josine Opmeer
Email: CRESC.AnnualConference@manchester.ac.uk
