November 15, 2013 Table of Contents: Call for Papers Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities Call for Papers Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities Colloquium: March 28-29, 2014 Completion of edited volume: December 2014 Many scholars in the humanities have found fieldwork an indispensable tool, as we have, and have found that it transformed the practice and goals of our scholarship.  Yet there exists in the humanities no public discourse on fieldwork, nor any formal training in how to conduct fieldwork. Far from fieldwork's being an institutionalized or at least institutionally recognized part of our work, we often have to fashion and improvise our own rough tools with which to conduct it.  And we do this largely in isolation.  This colloquium launches a conversation amongst humanities scholars doing fieldwork on the global south.  It seeks to articulate, share, and develop our practices and understanding of fieldwork in the humanities. To that end, on March 28-29, 2014, we will bring together a number of scholars from a range of humanities disciplines (including literature, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, media studies, theatre, and art history) and several areas in the global south: Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.  We seek papers from such disciplines as Art History, Literature, Media Studies, Performance Studies, and Ethnomusicology. Participants will be asked to write working papers that reflect upon some of the guiding questions below through the lens of their own fieldwork-based scholarship.  The working papers will be revised into essays of 8-10,000 words for publication in the peer-reviewed volume Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities, which we plan will go to press at the end of 2014 and appear in 2015. Guiding Questions: How do the histories and orientations of different disciplines in the humanities inflect their visions of fieldwork? How might fieldwork contribute to the goals of the humanities? How might it expand the topics and scope of humanities inquiry? What does current fieldwork in the humanities look like? What made you turn to fieldwork? How did it extend, shift, or transform your scholarship? In what ways did you break with traditional practices of your discipline? In what ways were the questions you asked enabled by, informed by, or grounded in your discipline? What have you found to be some of the most powerful examples of humanities-based fieldwork, to which you turned to help you? What are the gains and methods of fieldwork if the topic of investigation is not contemporary? How do you understand the relationship of your fieldwork to the practices and questions of social-science fieldwork?  What are the similarities and differences? What forms of interdisciplinarity did you practice?  What kinds of conversations between social science and the humanities were necessary or enabled by your project? What kinds of ethical dilemmas and protocols arose for you in the course of fieldwork? What forms of accountability might fieldwork facilitate that we might ordinarily not develop in the humanities? How can fieldwork contribute to the project and methodologies of a humanities-based comparative Area Studies? Deadline for Bio and Abstract of up to 1000 words: December 1, 2013 Deadline for working papers: March 1, 2014 Colloquium: March 28-29, 2014 Deadline for revised papers: October 1, 2014 For additional information please contact organizers Shalini Puri, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh (spuri@pitt.edu) and Debra Castillo, Professor of Comparative Literature, Cornell University (dac9@cornell.edu)