CFP: Annual Physical Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference

Annual Physical Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference:

Call for Abstracts: “Bodies, Science, and Technology”
Friday April 17th
Annual Graduate Student Conference on Friday April 17th, 2015

Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) – housed within the Department of Kinesiology at the University at the School of Public Health Building on the College Park campus. This one-day conference will consist of a series of student presentations commenced with a keynote by Dr. Jennifer Sterling, PCS alumnus and current postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech University. Dr. Sterling’s research focuses on how science and technology studies can inform and extend critical examinations of sport.

This year, the conference will be organized around the theme, “Bodies, Science, and Technology.” Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship reveal the intricate ways social, political, economic, and cultural values dialectically affect science and technological developments. Such theories, methods, and approaches provide useful inroads for advancing a myriad of research on the construction, and disruption, of bio- medical and technological understandings of health and human performance. We seek to expand the definitional boundaries of science and technology as scholarly areas of inquiry, utilizing this year’s conference to explore and examine the complex and often contradictory intersections encompassing science, technology, and the human body.

We invite papers that reflect upon these and other relevant questions, especially that research and those researchers working in dialogue with an empirical basis. We invite presentations oriented around, but not limited to, the critical study of the [in]active body, physical culture, constructions of sociocultural practices implicating the body, and the intersection of science, technology, and embodiment more generally.

The conference aims to promote an inter- and trans-disciplinary dialogue, and as such is a space for work that develops from within or across multiple academic disciplines.  We welcome all submissions from a multitude of disciplines on a multitude of related topics, but encourage submissions interrogating physical cultural practices.

The submission deadline is February 1st, 2015

Please e-mail abstracts (300 word limit) to umdpcs@gmail.com

Within your email, include as an attachment (in .doc or .pdf format) the following: Paper Title, Abstract, Keywords, Author(s) contact information, and institutional affiliation(s). For more information about PCS please visit http://www.umdpcs.org; for questions please contact PCS Graduate Conference Committee at umdpcs@gmail.com