1st Global Conference: Madness: Probing the Boundaries‏

1st Global Conference
Madness: Probing the Boundaries  

Monday 8th September - Wednesday 10th September 2008
Mansfield College, Oxford  

Call for Papers
This inter-disciplinary research conference seeks
to explore issues of madness across historical
periods and within cultural, political and
social contexts. We are also interested in
exploring the place of madness in persons and
interpersonal relationships and across a range of
critical perspectives. Seeking to encourage
innovative inter, multi and post disciplinary
dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all
disciplines, professions and vocations which
struggle to understand the
place of madness in the constitution of persons,
relationships and the complex interlacing of self
and other.  

In particular papers, workshops and presentations
are invited on any of the following themes:  

1. The Value of Madness or Why is it that We Need
Madness?
~ Critical explorations: beyond
madness/sanity/insanity
~ Continuity and difference: always with us yet
never quite the same
~ Repetition and novelty: the incessant emergence
and re-emergence of madness
~ Profound attraction and desire; fear of the
abyss and the radical unknown
~ Naming, defining and understanding the elusive  

2. The Passion of Madness or Madness and the Emotions
~ Love as madness; uncontrollable passion;
unrestrainable love
~ Passion and love as a remaking of life and self
~ Gender and madness; the feminine and the masculine
~ Anger, resentment, revenge, hate, evil
~ I would rather vomit, thank you; revulsion,
badness and refusing to comply  

3. The Boundaries of Madness or Resisting Normality
~ Madness, sanity and the insane
~ Being out of your mind, crazy, deranged...yet,
perfectly sane
~ Deviating from the normal; defining the self
against the normal
~ Control, self-control and the pull of the abyss
~ When the insane becomes normal; when evil reins
social life  

4. Lunatics and the Asylum or Power and the
Politics of Madness
~ The social allure and fear of madness; the
institutions of confining mad people
~ Servicing normality by castigating the insane
and marginalizing lunatics
~ Medicine, psychiatry, psychology, law and the
constructions of madness; madness as illness
~ Contributions of the social sciences to the
making and the critique of the making of madness
~ Representations, explanations and the critique
of madness from the humanities and the arts  

5. Creativity, Critique and Cutting Edge
~ Madness as genius, outstanding, out of the
ordinary, spectacularly brilliant
~ The art of madness; the science of madness
~ Music, painting, dance, theatre: it is crazy to
think of art without madness
~ The language and communication of madness: who
can translate?
~ Creation as an unfolding of madness  

6. Unrestrained and Boundless or The Liberating
Promise of Madness
~ Metaphors of feeling free, unrestrained,
capable, lifted from reality
~ Madness as clear-sightedness, as opening up
possibilities, as re-visioning of the world
~ The future, the prophetic, the unknown; the
epic, the heroic and the tragic
~ The unreachable and untouchable knowledge of madness
~ The insanity of not loving madness  

7. Lessons for Self and Other or Lessons for Life
about and from Madness
~ Cultural and social constructions of madness;
images of the mad, crazy, insane, lunatic, abnormal
~ What is real? Who defines reality? Learning from
madness how to cope with reality
~ Recognising madness in oneself; relativising
madness in others
~ Love, intimacy, care and the small spaces of madness
~ Critical and ethical implosions of normality and
normalness; sane in insane places and insane in
sane places  

Papers will be considered on any related theme.
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday
18th April 2008. If an abstract is
accepted for the conference, a full draft paper
should be submitted by Friday 8th August 2008.  

300 word abstracts should be submitted to both
Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word,
WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this
order: author(s), affiliation, email address,
title of abstract, body of abstract. Please use
plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using
any special formatting, characters or emphasis
(such as bold, italics or underline). We
acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper
proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply
from us in a week you should assume we did not
receive your proposal; it might be lost in
cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an
alternative electronic route or resend.  

Joint Organising Chairs
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Director of Research,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Barcelona, Catalunya,
Spain
E-Mail: acc@inter-disciplinary.net  

Rob Fisher
Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom
E-mail: mad@inter-disciplinary.net  

The conference is part of the 'Persons' research
projects, which in turn belong to the 'Probing the
Boundaries' programmes of ID.Net. The aim of
the conference is to bring together people from
different areas and interests to share ideas and
explore various discussions which are
innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for
and presented at this conference are eligible for
publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected
papers will be developed for publication in a
themed hard copy volume.  

For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/persons/madness/madness.html  

For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/persons/madness/m1/cfp.html