Call for articles for L’Esprit Créateur

We are excited to announce that we will be editing a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur which will include papers from our conference. We are also looking for unsolicited articles to include in our issue. Please see the call for articles below and circulate it far and wide!

Challenging Normative Spaces and Gazes: The Body in 20^th and 21^st Century Francophone Culture’

This special issue of L’Esprit Créateur (Summer 2020) will provide a holistic examination of the body in Francophone culture within and beyond the metropole, with a broad temporal, national, ethnic, racial, gendered and generic scope. We ask for each author to explore the ways in which the body can be deployed to challenge normative spaces and/or gazes, including fixed notions of identity, as well as heteronormative and patriarchal structures of representation and power. Articles (6000 words or fewer) will focus on how the body is understood and presented in the twentieth and twenty-first century across multiple medias including film, literature, and television. We invite papers from a variety of disciplines such as sociology or philosophy. We will aim for a far-reaching conceptualization of the body, inclusive of the queer, racialized, transnational, exiled and abject body. Further, the issue will problematize the concept of space by exploring migration and questioning the boundaries between the public and private.

Papers could address the following topics (other themes will also be taken into consideration)

–       Queer identity
–       The maternal body
–       Disability studies
–       The posthuman body

Abstracts in English or French of no more than 250 words, along with a short biography, should be submitted to Dr. Antonia Wimbush, Dr. Maria Tomlinson and Polly Galis at imaginingthebody@gmail.com by 15^th January 2019.

Final Programme and Book of Abstracts

Hello everyone,

The final conference programme and book of abstracts have just been circulated via email (let us know if you haven’t received yours!), and you can find the latest programme here on our website. We are thrilled to have such a rich programme to look forward to.

We will be printing copies for you all at 5pm today, so if you have any urgent requests for inserts and/or changes we would be very grateful if you could notify us before then.

A très bientôt,

Antonia, Maria and Polly

Programme Changes

Hello everyone

It is not long now until the conference. We cannot wait to welcome you all to Birmingham in January.

We have made some changes to our programme. Please click the programme page on the menu above.

Have a lovely Christmas!

Maria, Polly, and Antonia

Registration

We are thrilled to announce that conference registration is now open! Costs are as follows: £15 full registration, £7.50 day ticket, with concessionary rates for student and/or unwaged attendees (£10/£5 respectively). The deadline is 1st December 2017, so do make sure you get yours nice and early here:

http://shop.bham.ac.uk/…/imagining-the-body-in-france-and-t…

Also, do let us know by the same date if you would like to join us for the dinner on Friday night at Côte Brasserie (around 19h30). Feel free to explore the menu first at: https://www.cote.co.uk/restaurant/menu/birmingham

In any case, we look forward to seeing you on the 19-20th!

A bientôt,
Polly, Maria and Antonia

An update from the organisers

We would like to thank everyone again who submitted an abstract for our conference – there were a very large volume of them! We were impressed with the high quality and variety of submissions we received. We have now contacted everyone who applied. If you have not heard from us, do let us know. Our programme is shaping up nicely and our diverse range of panels pays testament to the wide variety of research that is being undertaken in the field of French and Francophone studies. We will be in contact again with our delegates in September once we have finalised the programme and registration details. Thanks to the generous donations of the Institute of Modern Languages Research, The Society for French Studies, The University of Birmingham and the University of Leeds, the conference fees will be minimal. In the meantime, if you have any questions about accommodation in Birmingham or any other matters relating to your attendance please let us know at imaginingthebody@gmail.com. Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @imaginingbody

We are very much looking forward to seeing you in Birmingham on the 19th-20th January 2018!

 

Thank you to the Society for French Studies!

We just received the very exciting news today that the Society for French Studies will be contributing to ‘Imagining the Body in France and the Francophone World’. We would like to thank them for their support. Many thanks again, of course, to the IMLR who will also be generously supporting the conference.

We have been enjoying reading the abstracts we have received so far – what a variety of fascinating topics!

Every one else, don’t worry! You have until the 1st June to submit your abstract to us. Phew!

We look forward to hearing from you! Get in touch via email at imaginingthebody@gmail.com or twitter @imaginingbody

Bonne semaine à tous!

 

Hello and welcome

Hello everyone and a walm welcome from the organisers of ‘Imagining the Body in France and the Francophone World’

We (Antonia Wimbush, Polly Galis, and Maria Tomlinson)  are now in the process of sending out our call for papers far and wide. You can have a peak at it on the ‘Call for Papers’ page here on this blog – we look forward to reading your submissions.

We have some excellent news – the IMLR (Institute of Modern Languages Research) have announced that they will be supporting our conference. We would like to thank them for their generous contribution.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts.