This conference is now concluded. Thanks to all participants, volunteers, and supporters.

Call For Papers

Engaging Communities - 5th Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta.

The graduate students of the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta are pleased to invite submissions for Engaging Communities. This interdisciplinary graduate student conference will be held 1st - 3rd of May, 2009 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Engaging Communities endeavours to generate critical dialogue about multiple conceptions and forms of community in our own social contexts and intellectual milieus. Everyday we traverse social landscapes populated and enmeshed with bodies and minds. These are spaces marked with patterns of human flow, and distinct possibilities of individuation and subjectivization. But what do we mean when we speak of "communities"?

We welcome papers that address the individual, historical, social, ethical, virtual and political aspects of communities. We would like to be as inclusive as possible, without detracting from the focus on what it means to engage with and as communities.

The deadline for abstracts is 15th March 2009.

Our keynote speaker for the event will be Dr. Jodi Dean, a political and media theorist from the Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Dean has authored numerous articles, edited book chapters, and manuscripts, including most notably: Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Cornell: 1998), Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Cornell: 2002), Zizek's Politics (Routledge: 2006), and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Duke, forthcoming).

Key words: Communities, collectives, the virtual, truth, consumer groups, politics, sharing, justice, diaspora, support, the social, formation, advocacy, doxa, and organization.