Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC): “Mosaic”
The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC) invites submissions across disciplines and fields that engage with the idea of “MOSAIC” in culture and theory. Mosaics are images produced by the arrangement of glass, stone, tile, and other non-precious materials into a pattern. While mosaic most immediately invokes an artistic aesthetic, the term also encompasses notions of perspective, legibility, materiality, representation, collectivity, and place. Mosaic is a way of considering the relationships between the one and the multiple, troubling the artificial divisions cracking and crackling within our social compositions. Society and nature are often categorically separated, but they must be recognized as always and necessarily co-constituted.This conference seeks to further complicate how the moments of world-ecology and social poetics fit together to attend to the permutations and arrangements of parts that make up various social, political, personal, and ecological wholes. What images can we abstract from the uneven fragments and “cheap natures” of our inherited world ecology? How can patterns help us attend to a long history of industrial grids, racial fractals, gendered webs, and class pyramids? What materials are necessary to form a more sustainable political and empathetic economy? How do we become through our loves?
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jason Moore (Binghamton University)
Keynote Workshop and Reading Conducted by: Dr. Margaret Rhee (University of Oregon)
Conference Dates: February 17–18, 2017, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
Submissions Deadline: December 1, 2016
This two-day conference welcomes and encourages research across disciplines to collectively consider, question, and critique “mosaic” in theory, art, literature, music, architecture, philosophy, ecology, medicine, anthropology, art history, sociology, media, psychology, mathematics, history, biology, etc. MIGC will also showcase an evening of artistic performances, readings, and art installations.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Mosaic and its history in art and cultures
- World-Ecology as mosaic, mosaic in the Anthropocene
- Form and its relation to content
- Assemblages, nature-cultures, and other ways of thinking about nonhuman arrangements
- Mosaic and architecture, urban planning, and public art
- Gender and sexuality as mosaic
- Embodiment as mosaic
- Theories of political organizing and activism
- Literature and film that considers the singular vs. the collective
- Pattern, arrangement, organization in digital media and coding
- Theories of cut-ups, mixed-media, collage in art and cultural texts
- Comics as mosaic
- Games
Please use the website form to submit all submissions. All submissions will be reviewed anonymously by a committee of UWM graduate student organizers.
Submission form for creative works – papers use above link.
Questions can be directed to themigc@gmail.com (link sends e-mail).