The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC) invites submissions across disciplines and fields that engage with the idea of “MOSAIC” in culture and theory. Mosaics are images produced by the arrangement of glass, stone, tile, and other non-precious materials into a pattern. While mosaic most immediately invokes an artistic aesthetic, the term also encompasses notions of perspective, legibility, materiality, representation, collectivity, and place.

Mosaic is a way of considering the relationships between the one and the multiple, troubling the artificial divisions cracking and crackling within our social compositions. As Jason W. Moore contends, we must recognize society and nature as entwined in a world-ecology. World-ecology interrelates capitalism, nature, power, and history as "the fundamental co-production of earth-moving, idea-making, and power-creating across the geographical layers of human experience." Society and nature are often categorically separated, but they must be recognized as always and necessarily co-constituted. Margaret Rhee's art, as both a praxis and poetics of social equality, enacts this kind of social consciousness in storytelling that interrelates being with desire. To recognize a mosaic is to engage in aesthetic attention to the world. This kind of perspective is also being taken up by studies in fields such as (but not limited to) eco-criticism, new materialism, ethnic and indigenous studies, media studies, Marxism.

This conference seeks to further complicate how the moments of world-ecology and social poetics fit together to attend to the permutations and arrangements of parts that make up various social, political, personal, and ecological wholes. What images can we abstract from the uneven fragments and "cheap natures" of our inherited world ecology? How can patterns help us attend to a long history of industrial grids, racial fractals, gendered webs, and class pyramids?  What materials are necessary to form a more sustainable political and empathetic economy? How do we become through our loves?

This two-day conference welcomes and encourages research across disciplines to collectively consider, question, and critique “mosaic” in theory, art, literature, music, architecture, philosophy, ecology, medicine, anthropology, art history, sociology, media, psychology, mathematics, history, biology, etc. MIGC will also showcase an evening of artistic performances, readings, and art installations. Please see the call for creative submissions.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Mosaic and its history in art and cultures
• World-Ecology as mosaic, mosaic in the Anthropocene
• Form and its relation to content
• Assemblages, nature-cultures, and other ways of thinking about nonhuman arrangements
• Mosaic and architecture, urban planning, and public art
• Gender and sexuality as mosaic
• Embodiment as mosaic
• Theories of political organizing and activism
• Literature and film that considers the singular vs. the collective
• Pattern, arrangement, organization in digital media and coding
• Theories of cut-ups, mixed-media, collage in art and cultural texts
• Comics as mosaic
• Games

Questions can be directed to themigc@gmail.com. Please use the form below to submit all submissions by December 1, 2016. All submissions will be reviewed anonymously by a committee of UWM graduate student organizers.

The 12th annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference is supported by the Center for 21st Century Studies, the College of Letters and Sciences, the Graduate School, the Office of Student Affairs, and the Department of English, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

Modern Languages & Linguistics MLL 300

Time: MW 5:30-6:45pm                               Location:         Fine Arts 006

Instructor: Dr. Christopher Tong 唐老师               Office: Fine Arts 445

Email: ckt@umbc.edu                                               Office hours: Th 2-3, 5-6pm or by appointment

Course Description                                         

From the New Culture Movement of 1917 to World War II, from literary journals to rock concerts, from self-expression to social engagement, poetry has played an integral role in remaking modern Chinese life. In this course, you will study the works of key poets, musicians, and revolutionaries who shaped the development of modern Chinese culture and history in the 20^th century. Examining a range of materials such as poems, song lyrics, music (folk, classical, jazz, pop, rock, punk, hip hop), films, and scholarly essays, you will learn about modern Chinese lyrical culture as it evolved in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and its relationship with national and regional identities. While this course is designed for students with little or no prior knowledge of Chinese or Chinese culture, MLL 190, 191, 230 or 301 is recommended. Since this is an MLL course, all class discussions, assignments, and materials will be in English. Poems will be available in Chinese for those interested in reading the original.

Student Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will be able to: (1) analyze modern Chinese poems using technical terms; (2) interpret modern Chinese poetry and music in their historical contexts; (3) recall major developments in modern Chinese history in the 20th century; and (4) improve your ability to think critically and write academic papers on literary topics. You are expected to work toward these goals, participate in all classroom activities, and complete all assignments in a timely manner.

The Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh announces a two-day colloquium on the topic:

MASCULINITY AND AFFECT
Thursday April 6 and Friday April 7, 2017
602 Cathedral of Learning on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh

Emotion and masculinity have been studied together for decades now. But what would it mean, in 2017, to place affect studies and masculinity studies into dialogue? What do concepts such as energy, force, or pre-conscious bodily sensation do to masculinity and to masculinity studies? Where does affect leave emotion?

We will spend two days generating thought on these and other questions. Our colloquium will include presentations and reading groups and will involve scholars from a broad range of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Presenters (preliminary list):
Pitt Faculty:

• Todd Reeser (GSWS/French)
• Brent Malin (Communication)
• Scott Kiesling (Linguistics)
• Paul Johnson (Comm)
• Julian Gill-Peterson (English)
• Gabby Yearwood (Anthro)
• Julie Beaulieu (GSWS)
• Dominique Johnson (Comm/GSWS)
• William Scott (English)

Non-Pitt faculty:

• Lucas Gottzén (Childhood Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden)
• Jonathan Allan (Gender Studies, Brandon University, Canada)
• Sam De Boise (Musicology, Örebro University, Sweden)
• Natalie Kouri-Towe (Women/Gender Studies, University of Toronto, Canada)
• Chris Haywood (Media and Cultural Studies, Newcastle, UK)

This December, Kevin A. Wisniewski and Felix Burgos released the special issue Tours & Detours, part of their journal Textshop Experiments (ISSN: 2377-9039). Wisniewski (Cohort 15) and Burgos (Cohort 14) are currently both Ph.D. candidates in the Language, Literacy & Culture PhD Program.

TE is an electronic, open-access journal dedicated to works on and operating in the apparatus of electracy.  It publishes scholarly and creative projects on and in new media, Internet culture, and experimental writing. 

The editors were first introduced to electracy by Professor Craig Saper in his seminar with the same name and continued to work with related concepts in Independent Studies and as editorial assistants for Saper’s co-edited anthology Electracy: Gregory L. Ulmer’s Textshop Experiments (Davies Group, 2015). 

The two were immediately aware of a void present in academic journals and related venues dedicated to experimental Humanities projects and started a forum for students and faculty to discuss and share their work and experiences.  From here, Textshop was born, and Wisniewski and Burgos built a new infrastructure and impressive advisory board, which included Saper, for the journal.  Published last May, Issue 1: The Textshop (T)issue acted as a response to the aforementioned anthology.  It was visited by over 5,000 unique viewers. 

 The latest issue Tours & Detours has compiled an impressive fifteen original works, including pieces from scholars Barry Mauer (University of Central Florida), Sergio C. Figueiredo (Kennesaw State University), Matthew Newcomb (SUNY New Paltz), and Megan M. McIntyre (Dartmouth College) and artists matthew and allen, Curt Cloninger, and David Prescott-Steed, as well as fellow doctoral students from the University of Southern California and Clemson University.

 Wisniewski and Burgos are delighted by the overwhelmingly positive response the journal has received and are already at work on Issue 3 and the production line-up for 2017-2018, which includes a new chapbook series.

Textshop Experiments may be viewed at http://www.TextshopExperiments.org/.