Call for Articles/ Presenters: 11th International Conference on the Arts in Society

The Practice of Art in the Age of the Anthropocene: Average global temperatures are rising. With increasing frequency we are faced with extreme weather events. Our water reservoirs are drying up. Natural resources are being exploited at an alarming rate. Once-pristine landscapes are filled with the debris of economic and social activity. These are some of the symptoms of the age of the Anthropocene - an age defined by all-consuming modes of production and imaginaries of innovation, the material consequences everywhere to be seen and felt in the natural environment. How do practices of art and our ways of interpreting art reflect, reverberate, contest, the eco-social realities that we now face? What is this duty of art, what are its practices and forms, in the age of the Anthropocene?

Theme 1: Arts Education: Teaching and learning through and about the arts

Theme 2: Arts Theory and History: Interrogating arts histories, theories, paradigms and frameworks for critical analysis

Theme 3: New Media, Technology and the Arts: Examining the use of technologies and media in the arts

Theme 4: Addressing Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts

Scope:

What are the sites of art?

In our twenty-first century context, longstanding sites of production, consumption and display such as the theatre, the museum, the gallery, and the publishing house are being contested by new forces of media, popular culture, and commerce. These various forms of contestation and re-arrangement have given rise to new art forms, media and venues, from the street to the Internet. To what extent have old forms and new forms merged, replaced or challenged one another? In what ways do the various sites of reception and display affect sites of production from the artists studio to the community hall? Is there such a thing as interdisciplinarity? And how do artistic media work with and interpret these cultural flows and institutionalized spaces?
Media

How do we understand the media and mediation of art?

We live in an increasingly visual culture, where all forms of media intersect with the crisis of information that overloads everyday life. These media include the visual arts, the textual arts, the aural and musical arts, the gestural and performative arts, and the spatial arts. These categories roughly correspond to standard classifications of artforms as music, theatre, literature, poetry, dance, painting, sculpture, photography, film and television, and architecture. Such are the disciplines and artforms of our historical experience. While these disciplines undergo various processes of transformation and at times destabilization, they are sometimes displaced by new means of production and their related meanings (the raw materials and methodologies of representation), reproduction of forms and meanings (first mechanical and now digital), and distributions of meaning (the methods of reaching audiences and interacting with them). To what extent do we need to develop new creative tools and research approaches to redefine classical disciplinary classifications?
Policy

How does art shape educational, cultural and national policy?

Given the proliferation of cultural institutions, such as museums and galleries, what role do these institutions play in larger projects of community formation, nation-building or international relations? How are hierarchies of art world classifications reproduced or challenged by new forms of institution-building and policy-making? Artists and the arts themselves are often referred to as cultural ambassadors in international forums. Such terms raise issues of political relevance and call into question related concerns of value neutrality, and the deployment of art forms and practices to signal or help to dissolve social and political conflict at local, regional and international levels. What is the role of public education in these debates? Which publics are represented or included?
Participants

Who are the participants in art worlds?

Has the art world fragmented into a scattered heteronomy of art worlds? Who are the players, the gatekeepers, and to what extent do our mainstream institutions reinforce or reflect the hierarchies of art world structures and opportunities for artists? How do artists and cultural workers reconcile their visionary projects with the mundane pursuits of marketing and profit as measures of success? What are the structural constraints that create and perpetuate the motif of the starving artist? How do shifting contexts create and redefine audiences and audience participation? What is the responsibility of the artist to explore these and other issues? What, finally, is the role of art in society?

More than ever, these are open questions. As a space to engage these questions and others, and to broaden a participatory base, the Arts conference, journals, book imprint and news weblog provide an epistemic community setting in which to make linkages across disciplinary, geographic and cultural boundaries.

2016 Call for Presenters

The Arts in Society team invites proposals for paper presentations, workshops/interactive sessions, posters/exhibits, virtual lightning talks, virtual posters, or colloquia.

How to become a presenter:

1. If you would like to present, start by submitting a proposal. You will need the following: presentation type, short/long descriptions, keywords, focus, themes, and biographical information. For more informatione view the Step-by-Step Guide to submitting a presentation proposal.

2. Get Accepted. After the submission of your presentation proposal, it moves to the evaluation step. All proposals will be reviewed between two to four weeks of submission.

3. Once your proposal is accepted, you must register before our Program Development team can schedule your presentation.

Submission of proposals are welcome at any time of the year. The dates below serve as a guideline for proposal submission based on the corresponding registration deadlines.

Early Proposal Deadline 10 January 2016
Regular Proposal Deadline 10 May 2016
Late Proposal Deadline 10 July 2016

2016 Call for Articles

To begin the process, submit an article proposal. At this point, you do not need to submit the article itself, but you will need the following: short and long descriptions, keywords, focus, themes, and biographical information.

If your article is an extension of a presentation from the International Conference on the Arts in Society and your presentation proposal has been reviewed and accepted, then you can move directly to the next step.

Once the article proposal is reviewed, you will be notified if it has been accepted. At this point, you will be asked to submit the full article, and it will receive an initial editorial check. Next, your article will move into the peer review phase. This process is anonymous - identifying information about the author or reviewers are not provided. (Please be sure to remove them from submissions, such as author self-citations.) Each article is assigned to two reviewers with editorial experience and/or relevant expertise. After your article is reviewed, you will receive the reviewers feedback and publication recommendations.

Once your article had passed peer review and is ready for publication, the Arts in Society team will help you through the final steps to bring it to completion. Once complete, your article will be published in The Arts and Society Collection. At this point, you may also elect to make your article available Hybrid Open Access.

For more informatione view the Step-by-Step Guide to submitting a article proposal.

Please note that while you do not need to be a member of The Arts in Society Knowledge Community to submit a proposal, you must become a member and accept our standard publishing agreement for your article to be published.

For more information about Arts in Society and the 2016 conference, please click here.