Disintegration - Northern Star Symposium 2023 CFP

 Northern Star Symposium 2023

Disintegration

 

22-24th of May

Nord University, Bodø

The Northern Star Symposium is a three-day academic gathering in Bodø, a Norwegian city just north of the Arctic Circle. The goal of this symposium is to have a place to discuss topics and questions that are not among the mainstream of conferences and journals, a place to test out new ideas and listen to fresh voices in academia. The keynote speakers will not have presented elsewhere, and the participants are there to satisfy their curiosity and their interest, foster new directions of research and exploration, and engage in debate and the exchange of knowledge. The symposium is organised annually, and it has a limited number of attendants.

The Northern Star Symposium is organised by the Journalism research group within the Faculty of Social Sciences, Nord University, Bodø.

The topic for 2023 is Disintegration

Disintegration marks the end of things as we have known them. This can mean disintegration of identities and the crisis of identities when old configurations of the self are increasingly challenged.

Disintegration can be a form of violence, when something is forced to come apart, both ways of pressure and ways of direct violence. We also see disintegration of institutions at a growing speed.

 Disintegration is both internal and external to us. Our attention is continuously becoming more and more disintegrated as we attempt to engage with multiple tasks, streams of information, and modes of being at once. Material things, too, disintegrate. There is a sense of decay and things coming apart around us: the world itself is disintegrating, as we see the crisis of the impact of human hands on the climate, and the disintegration of global security. There is a general sense of dishevelment and collapse.

 However, with disintegration, we also see new forms of configurations and organisation. Things come together in surprising ways.  Reconfigurations of institutions, as wells as new entities, emerge, and revolutions in a broad sense clear the way for new constellations of things, materials, and people.

 In this year's symposium, we want to examine the ways things, ways of being, ideas, institutions, and artefacts are disintegrating. We invite reflections on how different forms of technologies, media, and play contribute to disintegration of attention, identities and communities, as well as evoke the question what is the role of play when ‘everything’ is coming apart, disintegrating. Equally important, we would like to examine how this entropy creates new forms and meaning when decay gives way to growth.

 

Format:

We invite abstracts of up to 500 words (not including literature lists), for the following formats:

Paper, work in progress, reflection.

Reflections: This is a flight of fancy, a description of potential ideas and connections that the concept Disintegration fosters.

Abstract: This is a summary of a relevant research project you have done, and which you would like to present to the others.

Work in progress: This is a work you would like feedback on.

We also invite more formats: experiences, performance, experimentation and roleplay.

Feedback: You will get a commenter, and be asked to provide feedback on the work of another person.

 

Deadline:

Early deadline 17th March. We start accepting from this date. (Saint Patrick’s day)

First date of decisions: 20th of March. (Spring equinox.)

Late deadline 17th April.  (Saint Kateri Tekakwita’s day)

Submit by email to Northern.Star.Symposium@gmail.com

 

Selection process:

Submissions are not anonymously reviewed. Program decisions will be made by the program committee, Torill Elvira Mortensen, Tomasz Majkowski, Mike Hyslop Graham, Dom Ford and Maria Ruotsalainen.