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This conference is aimed at postgraduate and early career researchersacross multiple fields and disciplines. We hope to encourage a dialogue anddissemination of ideas between individuals, schools, and areas of research.As such, we would like this conference to be one in which contact and

transcending boundaries is not only theorised, but actualised through openand multidisciplinary engagement.

The term Contact comes with a wide range of connotations; to touch, tomeet, to communicate and to connect. Contact can be a meeting or interfacebetween the familiar and the unfamiliar. It suggests new understandings ofself and other, and testing the limits of thought, perception andunderstanding.

In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva contends that the modern subject is'a strange land of borders and otherness ceaselessly constructed and

deconstructed.' Borders may suggest separation, between spaces that can bephysical, or conceptual. Limits may invoke liminal spaces, or thresholds,beyond which beings become exiles, separated from the group, and indeedas Kristeva suggests, separated from the self. Yet it can be said that this stateof liminality can have great transformative and creative potential.

This year, the School of English, Media and Performing Arts invites proposalsthat engage with the broad themes of contact, 'borders', 'limits', and/or'thresholds', from researchers across the humanities, and beyond. Proposalsmay be critical or creative, theoretical or performance based.

Topics may address (but are not limited to): The manifestations of contactin literature, film, theatre, film, music and popular culture; Imaginings and

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reimaginations of Kristeva and/or iek; Contact between bodies; Contactbetween cultures; Space; Nationality/ Nationalism; Cosmopolitanism; Crisis;Exile/ Escapism; Modernity; Multimedia/ New Media; Bodymodification/cybernetics; pervasive technologies; colonialism; postcolonialism;Speculation and imagination; Time, temporality, duration and/or spontaneity;

Subalternality; sound, noise and delay; Pleasure, pain and/or corporeality;Deleuze, assemblage, deterritorialisation.

Creative, performance based, and cross-disciplinary works are encouraged.All papers and performances will be limited to 20 minutes. Applications forpanels are also welcomed. Registration and attendance is free.

Please send a 300 word abstract and a short (approx. 100 word) biography tothe conveners Chris Oakey, Naomi Riddle and Amy Parish atunsw.symposium@gmail.com by the 15th July 2011.