Triangle Center for Japanese Studies Conference, April 11-13, 2014

The Triangle Center for Japanese Studies (a joint undertaking of Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with support from the Japan Foundation) invites proposals for papers to be presented at our inaugural conference, to be held April 11-13, 2014, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Recent social scientific explorations of labor in the neoliberal global economy have focused on the condition of precarity, which is marked by, among other things, the vitiation of established social contracts and guarantees, and which has provoked new forms of social identification and political struggle. The objective of this conference is to expand the analytical parameters of the concept of precarity, thus rendering it productive across a longer chronological span and opening it to multiple disciplinary approaches that can generate novel understandings of”Japan”
and Japanese studies in the world.

The conference will engage with the following broad questions:

* How have different historical shifts (political systems, economic conjunctures, environmental shifts, wars, natural disasters, etc.) produced new terrains of social struggle and rendered existing social relations “precarious”? How have modes of inclusion and exclusion evolved across time, giving different meanings to”Japan”?

* How have transformations in knowledge systems rendered disciplines or modes of knowing “precarious” and engendered struggles for reintegration?

* How have different spaces been mapped or experienced as precarious or marginal, and what struggles have arisen to invest spaces with meaning and political value?

* How have the shifts noted above called forth new modes/forms of language, expression, sight, and sensibility, and through them new subjectivities that might be considered precarious? How have they mobilized and transformed existing actors, institutions and practices?

* How has precarity informed the experience or understanding of bodies, gender, sexuality, and reproduction?

Anne Allison (Duke University) will be the keynote speaker. The program will also include a workshop and roundtable discussion for graduate students. The Triangle Center for Japanese Studies will support travel and accommodation for conference participants.

Please send paper proposals of no more than 300 words and a 2-page C.V. totcjs2014conference@gmail.com. Proposals must be received by November 1, 2013.

For more information about the Triangle Center for Japanese Studies, please visit our website athttp://trianglejapan.org/.

David Ambaras

David R. Ambaras
Associate Professor and Director of the Honors Program
Department of History
Campus Box 8108
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-8108
Phone: 919-513-2228
Fax: 919-515-3886
dambaras@ncsu.edu
Skype: dambaras
http://history.ncsu.edu/faculty/view/david_ambaras