Interactions/Intimacies Workshop

Call For Proposals

Dear Everyone,

We are pleased to announce our department's new Interactions/Intimacies Workshop （IIW）in the spring/summer term 2024.

The IIW workshop is a theoretical and methodological forum for critical engagement with new or emerging research around social scientific and humanistic themes of social interaction as well as inter-personal intimacy, The particular theoretical and discussion foci of the workshop are the following

l  The (re)conceptualization of intimate relations;

l  Pragmatics and metapragmatics of love, hate, and other affective intensities in post-socialist societies;

l  The translation of feelings across cultures;

l  Theories of identity performance and performativity;

l  Machine-human or other alternative (non)human forms of intimacy and interactions;

l  The gender/sex dimension of motion and emotion;

l  Science’s role in mediating social relations;

l  Identity and intersectionality in non-western encounters;

l  Contradictions between mediation and immediacy in ethnographic research;

l  Dialectics of interaction and interactionism;

l  Critical reconsiderations of theories of kinship, anomie, and the division of affective labor in mass-mediated societies – particularly in the global south.

We welcome proposals for new articles and book chapters, as well as research-related PhD and MA theses in Chinese or in English. Selected proposals will be invited to submit work to the workshop which will then meet and discuss the author’s submission in a supportive and constructive intellectual forum. (Please see details concerning general workshop protocol and goals).

The current deadline for proposals (a 250-300 word abstract/a 400-600 word abstract in Chinese to IIWworkshop@163.com) is January 30th. Successful applicants will be notified soon after that for a cycle of presentations beginning in the middle of March.

We look forward to your contributions and participation in this new intellectual endeavor.

Best wishes,

Chang Xiuci (Coordinator)

Qiu Yu, and Jay Ke-Schutte (Faculty Sponsors of IIW)