Disrupting Ideologies
Change, Challenges, and Contests over Ideas
Sponsored by Germanna Community College
Online, Thursday March 2 – Friday March 3, 2023
Deadline for submission: February 10, 2023
The Virginia Humanities Conference invites presentations, panels, and creative arts that address challenges and contested ideas in the arts and humanities. The disciplines that make up the Humanities help us make sense of the world in the context of diverse cultural traditions, historical experiences, and perspectives. Historically and today, these ideas and ideologies of varied traditions have been sites of conflict. It is imperative that we explore areas of intellectual incongruity to better understand the past, the present, and the future of our field. As academia confronts issues of reckoning with the past with an understanding of the impact that current events and their interpretation have on the future, academics must reflect on how changes have altered and disrupted the study of the humanities and human creativity and expression itself. We invite papers that explore ideological changes, contests, and confrontations in a variety of contexts including presentations on historical research, explorations of theory and methods, reviews of the state of a field, or speculations upon future challenges.
Topics could include:
- The intersection of Art and Humanities with current human rights struggles
- Constructive and emancipatory contributions that convey orientations for social action
- The role the humanities play in sustainability-oriented transformative research
- Issues around the collection, creation, curation, and stewardship of data
- Humanities spaces as spaces for challenging or resisting
- Humanities classrooms as safe spaces
- Strategies of intersectional feminism in the age of Trumpism
- Questions about discipline and method: How do different methodologies negotiate an encounter between ideas or ideologies? How do disciplines transform in conversation with each other?
- Spaces at the horizons of exciting new opportunities for creative expression
- Unexpected and untapped directions for research
- Conflicts between discourses of science and the humanities (or specifically, science and religion)
- The rapid change and varied views around lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues and the disruptiveness of gender studies.
- The role of the Humanities on issues of race, ethnicity, and social justice
