Culture and the State: Past, Present, and Future
Edmonton, Alberta – Canada
May 2-5, 2003
www.arts.ualberta.ca/cms/cfp.htm
Call for Papers, Presentations, Panels and Participation
Labour Culture – Union Culture – and the Culture of Resistance
The advance of the labour and trade union movement has contributed an enduring legacy to the quality of life for all people in the modern age. Yet, the relation of this contribution has to date not been well articulated by social and cultural scholars.
Previous generations of working people involved in such mass movements as the Chartist and Syndicalist movements in England and France of the nineteenth century fought bitter struggles with state and capitalist authorities to gain social rights and working standards often taken for granted.
The political implications of these movements mark the wider social expression of working class interest, manifesting of a culture of organized resistance. This culture of resistance acts directly as the engine of labouring peoples' political interests world wide, forming the anarcho-syndicalist and non-market socialist movements of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
This series of panels and events explores the broad relational themes of these movements, providing a forum for the interchange of ideas and histories of the diverse range of working class culture and working class politics. We invite both academic and non-academic presentations on all aspects of trade union and labour culture, including their political and economic relation to past and present anarchist and socialist movements. Question periods and further on and off-campus discussion and educational forums will ensue.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to: Chartism, Syndicalism, and Wage-Work - Labour, Fabianism, and the Left - Radical-Reform Politics of the Late-Eighteenth, Early-Nineteenth Centuries - The Franchise and "Eight Hour Day" Literature and Anarchism/Socialism - Rosa Luxembourg – "Reform or Revolution" Labour Precedents – Contemporary Role(s) of The Canadian Labour Congress and Alberta Federation of Labour - Women, Work, and Politics - Robert Owen/Saint-Simon - French and English Utopian Socialism and Labour - Levellers, Diggers, & "The Norman Yoke" Theory – Early Foundations of Labour-Politics Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Bakunin – Anarchist & Socialist Thought - Art, Labour, & Socialism – William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - Working Class Co-Operatives in Canada and the United States - Young Workers & the Labour Movement - Music, Film, & the Labour Movement - Industrial Workers of the World, The Impossibilists, and One Big Union Canada, the United States, and Twentieth Century Working Class Realities
Please send a 200-300 word abstract for a 15–20 minute paper (7-10 pages) and a brief CV by January 15, 2003 to the theme coordinator:
John Ames
Department of English
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada, T6G 2E5
ames@ualberta.ca
Call for Papers
In 1989 some proclaimed the imminent universal triumph of a particular state form—the modern liberal state. Since then, others proclaim the imminent demise of the modern nation state under advancing globalization. Yet modern states continue to be formed—from the former Yugoslavia to the new East Timor.
One thing is clear in these developments. Despite the global promotion of science and commerce, culture in various forms had and has a major if not central role in state formation, from ancient times to the present.
The Edmonton Conference on "Culture and the State: Past, present, and Future" will address all these issues, and more. Organized around a set of flexible themes, the conference will consider the role of culture variously defined -- high and low, elite and popular, local and global, historical and contemporary -- in the creation, maintenance, transformation, and demise of states.
A broad range of themes will be addressed, including culture and commerce; the state and cultures of sexuality; indigenous and industrialized cultures; science and culture and cultures of science; culture and social difference; culture and immigration and integration; the relations of different cultural forms; culture and modernization, post-modern cultures and post-modern states, and so on. Conference papers will be published.
The conference organizers invite proposals, panels, and presentations on these or any other aspect of the relation of culture and the state, from antiquity to the present.
The conference organizers especially encourage presentations in forms other than read papers, though these too are welcome.
Proposals for this general call should be addressed to the conference co-ordinators and received no later than February 1, 2003. Submissions may also be made to particular theme co-ordinators (see themes for individual deadlines).
Conference co-ordinators:
James Gifford and Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux
Department of English
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada, T6G 2E5
gifford@ualberta.ca
Conference chair:
Gary Kelly
Canada Research Chair
Department of English, University of Alberta
The conference is funded by the Canada Research Chairs programme.