Please see CFP below....
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Sally Haslanger
Professor of Philosophy and Director, Women's and Gender Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
New website: http://sallyhaslanger.weebly.com
(Please update your bookmarks!)
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The Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture announces:


The 5th International Conference on Adoption and Culture

Adoption: Crossing Boundaries

March 27 - 30, 2014

Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida: http://www.fsu.edu/


Call for Proposals


ASAC's biennial conferences feature stories and histories of adoption as
explored by writers, artists, and scholars across the disciplines,
especially the humanities. Adoptions and the lives of adoptees always
involve crossing boundaries, whether the boundaries of families, the
boundaries of races, the boundaries of nations, the boundaries of
aboriginal peoples and others, the boundaries of communities, the
boundaries of law, or all of these borders. This conference takes up these
themes and threads, and also encourages other kinds of
boundary-crossing—boundaries between disciplines; between adoptees,
birthparents, adoptive parents, and social workers; boundaries between
creative writers, scholars, and activists. And we extend our topic across
other boundaries by considering similar issues with regard to foster care
and assisted reproduction.
The conference includes academic work from a wide range of scholarly
disciplines and areas—literature, film and popular culture and performance
studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology,
religion, political science, law, women’s and gender studies— as well as
film, creative writing, graphic art, music, drama, or productions in other
media. We encourage interdisciplinary panels, presentations, and
productions.

Keynote speakers:

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing, Newcastle University (UK),
Scottish-Nigerian adoptee, author of the groundbreaking volume of poetry
The Adoption Papers, the adoption memoir Red Dust Road, and many other
works of poetry, prose, and drama.

Laura Briggs, Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies,
University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Somebody’s Children: The
Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Duke UP, 2012), the
winner of the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American
Historians

Featured films will include: Somewhere Between (2012), a documentary which
follows four teenage girls adopted from China; Resilience (2009), which
shows a Korean birthmother who searches for and meets her son in the US;
and Any Day Now, (2012) a fictionalized account of a gay couple’s attempt
to adopt a special-needs child they have fostered (the script is based in
part on events in Florida, and we hope to have some of the parties at the
conference.)

We invite proposals for papers and panels that:
● Analyze literary, cinematic, dramatic, musical, visual, dance, popular
culture, or performance art representations of boundary crossing in
adoption, foster care, or other nonstandard means of family formation or
child care, and boundary crossing in narratives of the lives of adoptees,
adoptive parents, and/or birthparents
● Study boundary-crossing in adoption and other reproductive, family and
caring structures in historical, anthropological, philosophical,
sociological, legal, religious, political, gendered, LGBTQ, and/or
psychological perspectives.
● Promote dialogue between people positioned differently with regard to
adoption because of their life experience, profession, and/or discipline.

We expect that most papers will run about 20 minutes and that panel
proposals should allow some time for discussion (assuming that panels will
be about an hour and fifteen minutes ).
We also invite creative presentations (writing, film, drama, graphic arts,
other media, etc.) on border crossing in relation to adoption. Writing
samples should ordinarily be less than 10 pages.

Please send 200-word proposals for papers or samples of creative work, a cv
or resume along with your proposal, and links if you are working in visual
or multimedia, to [log in to unmask] Give your proposal, cv, and/or writing
sample a title that includes your last name.

Proposal deadline July 15, 2013

Applications from graduate students interested in submitting papers are
invited for a travel grant award of up to $500. Awards will be given based
on quality of paper submitted by July 15 (not just 200-word proposal), cost
of travel, contribution of papers to scope of conference, and amount we
have available.

A conference website is under development and we will soon post information
about registration, accommodation, and travel. For additional information,
contact Eric Walker at [log in to unmask]

Conference program planning committee includes:

Eric Walker, Department of English, Florida State University, co-chair
Marianne Novy, University of Pittsburgh, co-chair
Karen Balcom, McMaster University
Emily Hipchen, University of West Georgia
Margaret Homans, Yale University

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