About
"Networks"
Information, resources, and diseases are all things that are communicable across real and imagined borders. They are transmitted by the World Wide Web, television, highways and trains, diasporas, marketplaces, governments, viral media, social events, casual associations, the human system, and more. Networks as a model and metaphor for examining the structures of societies, politics, culture, and the body appear in seminal texts across disciplines, including Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948), Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979), Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), and Timothy Morton’s Ecological Thought (2010). In the year 2020, the idea of networks and networking has taken on additional poignancy. There is fear of socializing spreading disease, yet this same spirit of connectivity is necessary to propel movements like Black Lives Matter. This conference seeks to explore how networks, broadly defined, have impacted culture.
The Crossroads Humanities Student Conference strives to incorporate diverse perspectives and topics from a range of humanities fields including history, philosophy, literature, languages, cultural theory, and the arts. We also invite papers in legal studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, national security, family therapy, communication, conflict resolution studies, and international relations when approached with a humanities lens.
Undergraduate and graduate students from all academic institutions are invited to submit abstracts of 150 words or less to Dr. Aileen Miyuki Farrar at humanities@nova.edu no later than January 15, 2021.
Possible Topics
Distribution of power, prestige, and resources
Sources of social action
Disease and culture
Postcolonialism/Imperialism
Transgression, fluidity, and forbidden territories
Immigration
Politics of language, translation, codeswitching
Collective and individual identity
Relations between Human/Animal/Machine
Artificial Intelligence and Cyborgs
Viral media
Computer and Network Surveillance
Comparative History/Politics/Philosophy/Literature
Transatlantic Studies
Digital Humanities
Medical Humanities
Environmental Humanities