Vitality and resilience: Creative Thinking as Survival and Research as a Way of Life
Society for French Studies Postgraduate Conference 2021
Friday 28 May – Online Event
Keynote speaker: Dr Emma Claussen (Cambridge)
The global pandemic has had a significant impact on postgraduate students alongside countless others. The shock of the crisis made it necessary for us to learn how to take care of ourselves and of others. It has created difficulties in maintaining progress and motivation and it required, for some of us, significant restructuring of our projects. For this reason, this year’s conference is placed under the sign of vitality and resilience to emphasise that the arts and humanities continue to be essential to the researchers, the scholarly community, and society. The event is an invitation to come together to revive our enthusiasm and interest in our work and that of others, and it presents research as a way of life that find its merits in sparking necessary debates, exchanging knowledge and ideas, but also in campaigning for the value of and place for the arts and humanities. Despite the optimistic outlook that we highlight in this conference, we consider it nonetheless necessary to discuss the need to resist the pressure for continuous well-being and productivity in times like these.
This event is designed as a work in progress seminar in which research students are invited to share and refine their projects with a collaborative audience. Students may wish to present an overview of their project or one particular aspect, and they may decide to give a shorter presentation (10 mins) or a more traditional paper (20 mins). Possible key areas and questions may include but are not limited to:
- Impact on scholarship, policy making, and public engagement
- Artistic and scholarly responses to disease and crisis
- Impact of the ongoing public health crisis on postgraduate research and lifestyle
- Research and well-being: studying past crises to cope with current ones
- Limits of wellbeing and the place of negative effects in crisis response
The full CFP (in English and French) can be downloaded below. Please note that the deadline for proposals has been extended to Monday 5th April 2021.
