The Call

Deadline for Submissions: June 15, 2008

The 2008 New Media & the Global Diaspora Symposium at Roger Williams University is an interdisciplinary humanities conference addressing the global migrations of the past 100 years and the role media has played in transmitting “living traditions,” particularly as these traditions are subject to loss, gain, and interpretation. What impact do media have on the forging and sustaining of cultural identities? How can the humanities guide us to understand why “living traditions” are at the nexus of questions about the global diaspora? This three-day event will feature paper and roundtable sessions, an International concert, and culminate in a tour of Newport, Rhode Island, a significant immigrant destination for nearly 400 years.

The symposium is a plenary experience; no overlapping presentations will be scheduled. Symposium participants hear all presentations and stay for the entire program in order to build the kind of feedback and informal discussions that mark the nature of this event. Most presentations are given a time slot of 20 minutes. This format allows for a respondent and audience questions. We are very pleased that the proceedings of this symposium will be published in our new peer-reviewed journal Reason & Respect: civil discourse in a global context, to be published beginning Fall 2008.

The organizers of the 2008 Symposium invite the submission of position papers addressing one of the following topics:

• Locating Interdisciplinarity: Technology and the Humanities

• Real Places—Virtual Spaces: Creating Cultural Communities

• Exploring Gender at the Crossroads of Media and Culture

• Seeing Diaspora: Media, Community and Visual Rhetoric

Paper Submissions
Authors should submit complete papers (not to exceed 20 pages). As these papers will be blind peer-reviewed, please follow the submission instructions carefully:

• Papers should have a top sheet with the Title, Name of the author(s), Email address and Affiliation.
• The abstract section should give a clear sense of the scope of the paper and the method of inquiry used.
• Please remove all identifying information from the body of the paper.
• Please EMAIL your paper submission to roconnell@rwu.edu.

All papers must received by June 15, 2008.
Authors will be notified by July 15, 2008.