The second conference of the International American Studies Association will be this coming August in Ottawa. The program is posted as a Word document that you can download by clicking a link on the official conference web site, and here's the link to the official visitors' web site for the city of Ottawa (French site also available). I'm looking forward to visiting that part of the world and seeing some familiar faces from Leiden, Oxford, and of course Hartford and Atlanta.
On Thursday afternoon, we're doing a linked session (too ambitious?) combining a round table discussion and a workshop for brainstorming new ideas and solutions for networking American studies around the world. We are hoping to make (and also hear) some concrete, practical suggestions for how to foster networking across boundaries of language, location, and even discipline. Any ideas or suggestions before the conference are extremely welcome! Please just click the comments button or send one of us an e-mail. If you don't know our e-mails, please request them as a comment; we are a little protective of them because of spambots, etc.
Thursday
free articles!
Hey everybody, you can go to the web site of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and download the free stuff on globalization: just go to the Blackwell journals home here, then go to the journal home which I can't link to directly because they use servlets. You can select the journal title from the alphabetical pulldown "Quick Link" menu on the right. These papers were originally presentations delivered at the International Geographical Union 2004 meeting, now in a special issue called "Geography: Making a Difference in a Globalizing World." Although the authors are all geographers, I think Americanists can find some interesting ideas in there, especially regarding power relations that exist in processes and moments of globalization. Clearly, those of us looking to theorize international or global American studies have a lot in common with geographers hammering out theories of globalization, so check out these articles while they are still free at Blackwell.
Saturday
ASA Atlanta
ASA Workshop: Geographies of American Studies
Friday November 12, 2004 at 12:00 noon
The plan for the workshop next Friday is here. . . . Looking forward to Atlanta!
Friday November 12, 2004 at 12:00 noon
The plan for the workshop next Friday is here. . . . Looking forward to Atlanta!
Monday
Sage free ride--October only
FREE FREE FREE! Apparently Sage journals are available free online this month only. Run, don't walk, to download the controversial issue 2.2 of Comparative American Studies featuring Djelal Kadir, Amy Kaplan, and other important authors (us). You can open the PDF files and click the save button or just print them right out. Of course maybe some people will be more excited about some other Sage journals, but this discovery made my day.
UPDATE: Rats! It really was just for a month. Now you need a subscription. So get your library to get one.
UPDATE: Rats! It really was just for a month. Now you need a subscription. So get your library to get one.
Sunday
JJAS free online!
Free, online journal! The Japanese Journal of American Studies is now available online. We are both on the editorial board and the journal publishes an issue each year. Share this link widely in the interest of promoting open access Americanist scholarship online.
Oxford colloquium
Now recovering from summer break, which included our exciting weekend colloquium at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford (with excellent hospitality courtesy of Paul Giles). We got a chance to speak about our take on translation and language in American studies, which was fun. But more fun was the opportunity to get to know more Americanists interested in international practice and subject matter. We were our usual gadfly selves, asking questions about geography and hemispheres and the power relations that exist in the discipline. Are we closet Platonists? Stay tuned!
Thursday
ANZASA
Well, visiting New Zealand for the first time was really spectacular. Pretty much all the Kiwis we met were friendly, down-to-earth, and glad to help jet-lagged visitors. The ANZASA conference organizers were incredibly welcoming and our fellow attendees were super-engaged and interested in discussing American studies both in terms of loads of interesting research topics and also in terms of located academic practice!
We had a great audience for our talk and our workshop the next day. The text of talk will be part of a longer essay that we will be revising in the next couple of weeks, but we want to make our workshop materials available here for participants to see in advance or afterwards if you want another look. This is the workshop description and set of quotations we used in the ANZASA workshop, a similar version of which we are planning to use at ASA in Atlanta for scheduled for November 12, 2004.
We had a great audience for our talk and our workshop the next day. The text of talk will be part of a longer essay that we will be revising in the next couple of weeks, but we want to make our workshop materials available here for participants to see in advance or afterwards if you want another look. This is the workshop description and set of quotations we used in the ANZASA workshop, a similar version of which we are planning to use at ASA in Atlanta for scheduled for November 12, 2004.
our essay in CAS
We have a piece in the June 2004 issue of Comparative American Studies. We wanted to post a draft of the essay in case some of you don't have access to that journal, so follow this link to read an earlier, pre-galleys draft.
Tuesday
workshops around the world
This year we'll be running workshops at the Australia & New Zealand American Studies Association in Auckland and at the US American Studies Association in Atlanta, in July and November respectively. The basic plan for the workshop will be the same for both, though of course we expect to have different groups of participants and different results. Our plan is here. We also have proposed a linked round table and workshop at the next IASA in Ottawa (fingers crossed). We want to add materials for the workshops and allow for comments here too, so watch this space!
In Auckland next month, we are also giving a paper about location and identity in American studies reading and writing practices. The abstract for that paper is available here.
In Auckland next month, we are also giving a paper about location and identity in American studies reading and writing practices. The abstract for that paper is available here.
Monday
Sheila's paper now online
Sheila's paper "Sharing Academic Space" is now in press and available on-line, details at the Geoforum website. This is the revised version of a paper that was part of a plenary panel on "The Spaces of Critical Geography" at the 3rd Biennial International Conference of Critical Geography, Békéscaba, Hungary, in 2002.
Sunday
our paper on geographical theory and AS
Another essay came out of our panel at the first conference of the International American Studies Association in Leiden, the Netherlands in 2002 (now in press in the proceedings). The aim of this group of presentations was to give examples of how geographical theory could be useful to Americanists who work with literature and cinema. The three papers were authored by Sheila, Julia, and Khadija. We'll link to the publication when we get the info; meanwhile here is the draft that combines the three papers.
Massey's latest article
Here is the latest issue of Geografiska Annaler, a Blackwell journal. It's free right now, so hurry up and download the essays while you can. The Doreen Massey piece "Geographies of Responsibility" is especially recommended!
