The next annual conference of the International Society for Cultural History will be held in Trieste, Italy, from 18 to 22 July 2016.
The conference will be open to host papers and panels designed to address general questions of cultural history, particularly if meant to engage with methodological issues of wide interest and/or discuss the state and future of this area of research.
The proposed yearly special topic is ‘Gender and Generations’.
The perspective of gender studies and the study of generations developed in remarkably different cultural and historiographical contexts. However, in the current state of cultural studies, which is characterized by a marked interdisciplinary profile, they share the function of drawing attention to the fact that every subject is positioned, in a relationship that represents his/her ‘status’ and social and historical ‘quality’.
By focusing on the terms gender and generations (as distinct categories and reference fields or else as a particularly complex binomial) the conference invites to investigate, from a cultural history perspective, specific factors in the development and processing of identities.
It will explore how in different places and times the anthropologically unavoidable variables gender and generation interact on the cultural level in the processes of formation, stabilization and transformation of community and social structures.
It will investigate their relevance in the interweaving of culture, population trends, and economic determinants.
It will apply and improve the methodologies of the most attentive gender historiography, which goes beyond the binary system man – woman, to analyse the discursive processes that produce diversity, and makes use of methodological acquisitions and contents coming from the studies on the history of youth cultures in different contexts of time and space.
Panels and papers may focus on gender (female, male, LGBT) or on the elements of intergenerational continuity and change that interact with gender, and originate particularly complex identity games.
The following subtopics are suggested for interdisciplinary and historical-comparative discussion through the multiplicity of proposed case studies from different cultural areas, socio-economic formations, and times.
1) Concepts, definition and methodologies: the state of the question
2) Representations and sources
3) Gender, generations and the ‘rhetoric’ of family
4) Gender and generational ‘statutes’: everyday practices; roles and institutions
5) Values, rituals, myths and religions
6) Gender, generations and the paradigms of power
7) Gender, generations and work (cultural-historical perspectives)
8) Memory: private transfers and communitarian/social networks; tradition, transmission and mediation
9) Huge crises: loss of relationships, loss of languages and cultural changes
10) Fall of political regimes; wars and migrations: ‘generational justice’ and intergenerational dialogue
11) Time ‘measuring’ between public and private spaces.
Suggestions for more discussion items and thematic panels are warmly encouraged.
DEADLINES Submission of proposals: by 15th December 2015
Notification of acceptance or refusal: 31st January 2016
Each researcher can submit either the proposal of an individual presentation or that of a panel composed of 3 to 4 presentations.
–For a presentation: an abstract (not exceeding 1,500 characters) and a short CV of the author, including a list of his/her main publications.
–For a panel: name of the organizer, an overview of the panel (not exceeding 1,000 characters), abstracts of the presentations (not exceeding 1,500 characters) and short CV of the authors, including a list of their main publications.
Presentations should be no more than 20 minutes in length and will be delivered in English or French.
All the delegates must be members of the ISCH (http://www.culthist.org/membership/) and pay the fees specified at the time of registration. Speakers will be encouraged to submit their papers to the Society’s peer-reviewed journal Cultural History (http://www.culthist.org/isch-journal/), where a selection of them, if appropriate, may be published.
For initial questions please contact valera@units.it; proposals should be sent to isch2016@culthist.org.