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The Brandeis Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference on "Metamorphoses: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Processes of Social Change and Transformation", organized by the graduate students of the Anthropology Department of Brandeis University (MA), is accepting abstracts for the conference to be held on Saturday, April 5, 2008.

Metamorphosis is a multi-faceted concept first and foremost referring to the transformation of form, function and perception, which makes it highly useful as a way of bringing together different approaches to the study of social change. This change can take place on the level of form or structure of individual bodies, identities, or larger social groupings such as communities, ethnicities, nations, states. The term metamorphosis implies biological naturalness and evokes an evolutionary scheme, moving from one stage of development to another along a life course or a process of growth, which is profound and irreversible. But it can also signify abrupt or startling change in character or circumstance, such as the result of individual or collective creativities as well as hint towards the magical. Therefore, rather than describing a complete change often the Kafkaesque notion of metamorphosis, with its roots in the antique Ovids poem, characterizes a society that is in a constant flux, that is always in the process of becoming.

Sub-topics appropriate for investigation could include but are not limited to:

• body, sexuality and gender, ethnic identity,
• power, violence, structure and agency,
• performance, cultural landscapes,
• nation-states, globalization, development.

The keynote speaker of the conference is anthropologist and sociologist Professor Hugh Gusterson from George Mason University, who has done fieldwork in the United States and Russia, where he has studied the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists. He also writes about militarism and about science more generally, and has a strong interest in professional ethics. He is the author of Nuclear Rites (UC Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb (Minnesota, 2004) and co-editor of Cultures of Insecurity (Minnesota, 1999) and Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong (UC Press, 2005).

Send abstracts of 250-500 words to gradconference@brandeis.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2008.


On behalf of the organizing committee, Ieva Jusionyte

Ieva Jusionyte
Doctoral student
Department of Anthropology
Brandeis University
P.O. Box 549110, MS 006
ieva@brandeis.edu