Last year myself, Emmett O'Keeffe and Terry O'Hagan launched and organised an international, inter-disciplinary conference focused on theoretical approaches to material culture (TAT 2009).

Following on from the conference a number of delegates expressed an interest in continuing the conference in a different venue in 2010. A competition was run and the University of Michigan proposal was successful. An international committee has been set up alongside the local committee and I was delighted to receive the CFP (click the read more link to see it) for TAT 2010 last week.

Thinking About ‘Things’ (TAT):

Interdisciplinary Futures in Material Culture

An Interdisciplinary, International Material Culture Conference for Graduate Students

May 10-12, 2010

University of Michigan

Call for papers—please circulate widely


Thinking about ‘Things’: Interdisciplinary Futures in Material Culture

TAT 2010 is a three-day international and interdisciplinary graduate student conference designed to explore material culture and the ways in which we create it, interact with it, use it, discard it, and study it.

Papers dealing with notions of preservation, broadly interpreted, are sought from graduate students working across a diverse spectrum of disciplines and interdisciplines.

Accepted papers will be arranged in panels according to the following rubric of theme areas:

1. Preservation in nature—preservation and decay with little or no human intervention (e.g. relics, ruins, remains)

2. Human practices of material culture preservation (e.g. food storage, taxidermy, archiving, museums, ‘green’ culture and resource conservation)

3. Preserving the intangible (e.g. memories, identity, social status) through the material.

4. Aesthetics, ethics, prescriptions, politics and theory of preservation, conservation, and restoration of material culture.

5. Meaningful objects and the museum—issues of preservation specific to the context of museums and museum-like institutions.

6. TATart—Nontraditional submissions are invited in audio, visual, textual, and virtual formats.

 
Deadline for submission of abstracts is January 15, 2010. For more information or to submit your 250-word abstract, visit www.tat2010.com.

We welcome submissions from students at all stages of graduate study.