Call for Contributions

Centre for Creative Ethnography, in collaboration with Seamus Heaney Centre, invites academics, students, poets and others to participate in a one-day, in-person symposium. The objective is to employ creative ethnography, poetry, and other modes of artistic exploration to explore how inequalities related to intersectionalities of gender, sexuality, race, religion, class, age, and/or disability are

• embodied and experienced
• embedded in wider societal structures
• politicised and resisted

Bodies: We invite submissions that investigate physicality, aging, mortality, emotional interaction, individual bodies and body politics.

Vulnerabilities: Related questions around inequalities, oppression, interdependence, and experiences of disempowerment and trauma are highly relevant.

Empowerment: We also welcome contributions that examine broader themes of bodily agency, resistance, and transformation.

Contributors might similarly consider relationships between artist’s bodies and bodies of work, exploring how concrete works exist in space, culture and society. Another relevant question is how creative practice can make us as creators both vulnerable and empowered. What are the complications of trying to express

• an individual experience
  • “The days are getting longer now, however many of them / I have left. / And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily / outlast their end.” –Ciaran Carson’s “Claude Monet, Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1880)

● a collective experience

• • (“All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body” –Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric”)

We encourage, but do not require, submissions that incorporate a performative element. Performances can include, but are not limited to, readings, dance, visual arts and crafts, sound, and film.

ORGANISERS: Amanda Lubit, Milena Williamson, and Maruška Svašek.

FORMAT: Each contributor will have up to 15 minutes for their presentation, demonstration and/or performance. If you wish to contribute, please send a 200-word abstract and a 100-word bio to CFCE@qub.ac.uk by January 15, 2025. Please specify the format of your contribution. If you are doing a demonstration and/or performance please let us know what that will involve.

KEYNOTE: TBA