Call for Sessions from the BABEL Working Group

If you are interested in Medieval Studies and you're not yet familiar with the blog In the Middle, take a minute and head over there!

They recently posted about a Call for Sessions for the second biennial BABEL conference:

* * * CALL FOR SESSIONS * * *cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university20-23 September 2012                 Boston, Massachusetts

[co-organized by the BABEL Working Group, Boston College, Northeastern University, M.I.T., postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and punctum books]

(In the interest of social networking, you can also like the BABEL Working Group on Facebook.)

A call for individual papers will follow. This call is for sessions only. Follow this link for much more information on their featured speakers, possible topics, and submission guidelines. Proposals for sessions are due December 15, 2011 to Kathleen Kelly and Eileen Joy at babel.conference@gmail.com. Get creative with your formats! They are not looking for the standard delivery with the 20-minute paper. Proposals must include a title, name(s) and contact information of organizer(s), and 250-500 word description of the session's aims, objectives, and format. 

Here are few ideas from their website about session formats. My favorites: drag shows and séances.

Think about sessions as working groups, as demonstrations, speculations, drag shows, hypotheses, clinical trials, love letters, conservatories, plea bargains, theorems, performances, séances, salons, discographies, bills of sale, slams, manifestos, postcards, recording sessions, lab reports, embassies, mash-ups, and other experiments that aspire to make strange or re-estrange the chosen object of study via close-reading or any other techne currently practiced or yet-to-be-imagined: distance studies, the new materialism, materialist history, a demography of things, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, deconstruction, networkologies, genome mapping, hermeneutics, discontinuist histories, hypothesis, post-historicism, carnal phenomenology, vibrant materialism, guerilla metaphysics, morphology, Latourian sociology, anachronism, case study, queer touching, taxonomies,machine reading, dark ecology, eliminative nihilism, erotohistoriography, the fine arts, philology, science-technology studies, rhetorical readings, codicology, thin and thick description, flat ontology, new scholasticism, ludology, etc. — and let’s not forget the nominalists. And when in doubt, consult Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.