AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
 

Call for Papers: North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa, 04/10





This is the first call for papers and participation for the Ninth Northeast Workshop on Southern Africa (NEWSA). We encourage scholars from all disciplines who are currently working on southern Africa (Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) to submit proposals. The meeting will be held at the Bishop Booth Conference Center in Burlington, Vermont (US), April 9-11, 2010. Located on 130 acres of forest with its own secluded beach, the center is an ideal location for scholarly conversation.

The NEWSA conference is organized around intensive discussion of pre- circulated papers. There are also many opportunities for informal conversation about work in progress. Drawing on the successful precedents of the former Southern African Research Program at Yale and the Canadian Research Consortium on Southern Africa, this program is designed to give southern Africanists the opportunity for close and intensive discussion of work across a wide variety of scholarly fields. We aim to prioritize scholarship, regardless of discipline or topic, that is grounded in an analysis of African discourses and concepts, and which elucidates local worldviews and experience.

We encourage the presentation of previously unpublished work, and submissions from graduate students and junior faculty in particular. We especially encourage participation from professionals, scholars and graduate students in Africa, as well as those located in Europe, Canada, and the United States.

There are multiple ways to participate in the NEWSA conference. Participants may:

  1. present a paper
  2. propose an entire panel of three papers
  3. serve as a discussant
  4. serve as a mentor – This is a new role for NEWSA 2010. We are aiming to match all graduate student participants with a mentor, and to provide this option for junior faculty participants (mentors may also participate as presenters or discussants).

Because of the high demand for participation relative to the size of the conference facility, and our desire to maintain the workshop atmosphere, we will not be allowing attendees who are not serving in one of the above four roles.

If you wish to give a paper, your proposal should include a title and one- to two-paragraph abstract.

If you wish to organize your own three-paper panel, your proposal should include all the authors' names, titles and abstracts for all three papers, as well as a brief rationale for how the papers complement each other. The organizers will be happy to negotiate alternative panel formats (such as open discussions of a current issue).

If you wish to serve as a discussant, your proposal should indicate the areas of southern African studies on which you are most prepared to comment. Once the conference participants are selected and organized into panels, each panel will be assigned a discussant. Discussants thoroughly read the pre-circulated papers by the participants in their session, and at the conference give a 10-15 minute constructive criticism/comment on the papers individually and collectively. Discussants also coordinate discussion of the papers amongst those attending the panel.

If you wish to serve as a mentor, you should be prepared to commit adequate time at NEWSA to offer supportive feedback on the graduate student/junior faculty member's presentation and provide guidance about how to develop the paper for publication or further research. Mentors may also work subsequently with the author on their paper.

The deadline for paper and/or panel proposals, and to volunteer as a discussant, is September 21, 2009. Send proposals to Derick Fay at newsa2010@dfay.fastmail.fm.

Completed papers, not to exceed thirty pages, will be due March 1, 2010, so that the papers can be pre-circulated on a conference website ahead of the meeting.


Accommodation, Registration and Travel:

All participants are housed at the Bishop Booth Conference Center (http://www.dioceseofvermont.org/Orgs/BishopBooth.html ), which offers inexpensive accommodation and meals in a beautiful setting. The conference facility can sleep up to a maximum of 50 people. Single and double rooms are extremely limited and most rooms sleep 3 people with shared bathrooms.

The estimated costs are as follows:

Rooms (per person, sharing):
Double: $50 per night
Triple: $40 per night

All meals for the weekend (Friday dinner – Sunday breakfast, excluding Saturday night dinner): $90

Registration:

Full time faculty at North American or European Institutions $90
Graduate Students at North American or European Institutions $35
Attendees traveling from Southern Africa are not required to pay

registration.

Burlington is easily accessible. By car it is 90 minutes from Montreal, 3½ hours from Boston and approximately five hours from New York. In addition to its airport Burlington is served by AMTRAK (train) and several bus lines.



Page Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Ph.D.

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