[SlovLit] razpis

[Jaka Zeleznikar]

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

THE SECOND EUROPEAN CONFERENCE OF
THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR LITERATURE
AND SCIENCE:

EXPERIMENTING ARTS AND SCIENCES

May 8-12, 2002.

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS AND WORKSHOPS

The second European conference of the International Society for
Literature
and Science (SLS) will take place at University of Aarhus, Denmark,
May 8-12, 2002.

The conference will gather scholars from human, social, medical,
technical
and natural sciences as well as artists, who are interested in inter-
and
transdisciplinary approaches and linkages between the study of culture,
literature, visual arts and technoscience, and between science and the
arts.
Culture and technoscience used to be regarded as disparate activities
and
fields of study that referred to separate spheres of society, and to
different epistemologies, methodologies and practices. But in recent
years,
a growing number of scholars from many disciplines have forged
transversal
lines and links between the study of culture/literature/visual arts and
technoscience, exploring issues such as for example

* links between fact and fiction
* transversal lines between science and story-telling
* links between cultural imaginaries and scientific practices
* semiotic-material practices
* how metaphors matter and matter performs metaphorically
* intersections and incommensurabilities between visual arts,
literature,
culture and technoscience
* translations between physical and virtual spaces
* cyborg identities and cyborg bodies
* feminist and postcolonial perspectives in technoscience studies

The conference will be a forum for exchange of ideas between senior and
junior researchers committed to the exploration of such issues and to
experiments with transgression of boundaries between the formerly
disparate
fields of culture/literature/visual arts and technoscience. In
particular,
the conference will give space to scholars who want to compare notes
cross-nationally and cross-Atlantically.

Many European scholars seem to be committed to the study of the new
interdisciplinary field of culture & technoscience studies without
knowing
about the International Society for Literature and Science that
originally
was started by US-colleagues. The first European conference of the
society,
held in Brussels in April 2000, initiated a much needed cross-Atlantic
dialogue. The idea is that the second conference in May 2002 shall take
this process important steps further.

Proposals for papers and workshops are invited from both senior and
junior
scholars from all disciplines who are interested in the links and border
transgressions between the study of culture, literature, visual arts and
technoscience.

Abstracts for papers and workshops (2-300 words) should be sent to
SLS na imv.au.dk before Oct. 1, 2001.

SLS c/o: Randi Markussen, Associate Professor, Ph.D.
Dept. of Information and Media Studies
University of Aarhus
Niels Juels Gade 84
8200 Aarhus N
Denmark
Phone (switchboard)     +45 89 42 11 11
Phone (direct)          +45 89 42 19 66
Telefax         +45 89 42 19 52
Conference website from September 1: http: //imv.au.dk/SLS-Europe
The City of Aarhus can be visited 'virtually' at
http://www.aarhus-tourist.dk/index.htm
and University  of Aarhus at http://www.au.dk/en/

SLS HISTORY
Literature and science has existed as a field of study in the US since
the
1920s, when the Modern Language Association established a division of
that
name. Its practitioners were almost solely literary scholars, and its
reigning paradigm was the "influence" model that focused on the one-way
interaction from science to literature. By the 1980s there was a strong
desire to open the field to a greater number of disciplines and
approaches.
Discussions among a small group of scholars, envisioned a new Society
for
Literature and Science (SLS) where scholars from a broad range of
fields,
and particularly the sciences, would feel welcome, and where the
discursive
arena would belong to no single discipline or  group of disciplines. SLS
was officially launched in 1985 and held the first of its annual
meetings
in 1987.
The Society's deliberate refusal to delimit "literature and science"
encouraged the participation of scholars from many fields whose common
commitment was the investigation of the representations of rhetoric or
the
practice of science. Thus, SLS meetings began to attract those
interested
in visual and aural as well as textual representations of science.
An important stage in the Society's development was the establishment of
its journal, Configurations that first appeared in 1993. Although a
small
number of European colleagues have attended annual meetings in the US,
their numerous contributions to Configurations reflect the much larger
number who share interests  among themselves and with their American
colleagues.
  In order to provide a forum for these European scholars to interact,
the
first European SLS conference took place in Brussels in April 2000. Its
success provided the momentum for the second European conference that
will
take place in Aarhus, Denmark, in May 2002. Here, the establishment of a
European SLS branch will also be discussed.