CFP: World Picture Conference 2013

Call for Papers

World Picture Conference
November 8-9, 2013
University of Toronto

"Willing”

With keynote addresses by Linda Zerilli (University of Chicago) & Davide Panagia (Trent University)

The theme of this year’s conference is willing, a term that raises questions about how we might conjugate a more nimble understanding of the relation between any number of ideas typically opposed to one another, and burdened with no small share of history: will and submission, intervention and compliance, purposiveness and purposelessness, manipulation and naiveté, among others.

We take the question of willingness to be pertinent now in part because of the mediate qualities that increasingly seem to inhere between the terms that gather around it in the social, political, and aesthetic environment of digital culture, where critical theory often casts modes of participation, exchange, contact, and collaboration in terms of immaterial movements, processes, and relations. But the equivocations opened up by this question overflow any one conceptual framework or historical moment. We welcome papers that address the question of willingness—or its constituents—from any number of different theoretical, philosophical, or material perspectives.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with a five-entry bibliography and a brief bio, to brian.price-AT-utoronto.ca by June 22nd.