(dis)junctions 2015: Strange Bedfellows
“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”-Shakespeare’s The Tempest (2.2)
UC, Riverside’s (dis)junctions conference invites papers and panels that push at the boundary of contemporary scholarship. Our critical focus, “Strange Bedfellows,” is geared specifically toward innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to cultural, literary and theoretical texts. We are looking particularly for scholarship that emerges from the disjunction of incongruent forms, that thrives on the border of the unfamiliar, and that transgresses the boundary of the expected.
“Strange Bedfellows,” is defined as a “peculiar alliance or combination,” as “unlikely companions or allies.” In challenging accepted definitions of normativity and similarity, “strange bedfellows” asks us to reconsider our own formulations of identity, community, and social structure. Access to knowledge and the structures that produce knowledge are at the heart of this re-formulation.
Possible presentation topics could include various tensions between:

• the natural and the unnatural
• the familiar and the unfamiliar
• the self and the other.
• urban and natural environments
• global and local
• space and place
• materiality and abstraction
• art and science
• subject and object

We welcome papers that explore unexpected combinations and perform innovative critical interventions, including:

• genre studies
• Queer readings
• Anachronistic applications
• Ecocritical approaches
• Non-normative mediations

The innovative reconfigurations of strange bedfellows will ultimately call into question the boundaries of academic discourse. Papers engaging this aspect might come from Philosophy, Education, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, History, Rhetoric, Composition, Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, English, Music, Religious Studies, Dance and Theatre Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Digital Humanities, Art and Art History, Software and Industrial Design, Economics, Archaeology, the Natural and Physical Sciences, Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies, Queer Studies, Material Cultures, Global Studies, and many more.
Participants may submit a full panel proposal or respond to the individual call for papers. We welcome proposals for formal papers as well as creative writing, spoken word, dance pieces, and installation artwork. Abstracts (250-300 words) may be emailed to disjunctions2015@gmail.com.
Abstract Due Date: June 1, 2015
Tentative Conference Dates: November 2–3, 2015 at UC, Riverside.