Madness - Probing the Boundaries

2nd Global Conference
Madness - Probing the Boundaries

Monday 14th September - Thursday 17th September 2009
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 accepted which deal with related
areas and themes. Pre-formed panel proposals are
also encouraged.

The 2009 meeting of Madness will run alongside our
project on Monsters and the Monstrous - Myths and
Metaphors of Enduring Evil and we
anticipate holding sessions in common between the
two projects. We welcome any papers considering
the problems or addressing issues of Madness and
Monsters for joint project sessions.

Papers will be considered on any related theme.
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday
17th April 2009. If an abstract is accepted for
the conference, a full draft paper should be
submitted by Friday 7th August 2009.

300 word abstracts should be submitted to the
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 E-mails should be
entitled: Madness 2 Abstract Submission

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.

Organising Chairs

Maria Vaccarella
Hub Leader, Making Sense Of:
E-mail: maria.vaccarella@yahoo.it

Abel B Franco
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy,
California State
University, USA
E-mail: abelbenjamin@yahoo.com

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Freeland,
Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
E-mail: mad2@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the 'Making Sense Of:'
series of research projects. 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 may
be invited to go forward for development into
a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a
not-for-profit network and we are not in a
position to be able to assist with conference
travel or subsistence.

For further details about the project please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of/madness/

For further details about the conference please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of/madness/call-for-papers/