I wanted to place a plug for the upcoming “Expanding Literacy Studies” conference, the first international, interdisciplinary conference on literacy studies organized and hosted by graduate students. It will be held at The Ohio State University on April 3-5, 2009.
This conference is dedicated to exploring the broad range of literacies–alphabetic reading and writing, visual, digitial, rhetorical, critical… and so on. If you compose or decode a text, that’s a literate act. And this conference offers an opportunity to contribute to a conversation that transcends the usual disciplinary borders… while chatting with a group of smart, fun people. Tell ’em Harlot sent you.
See http://literacystudies.osu.edu/conference for more info.
Great implied comment on the importance of interdisciplinary practice by this really old guy:
“Do you imagine, that when the famous Hippocrates of Cos flourished, there were then some of the medical faculty who cured diseases, others wounds, and a third class the eyes? Do you suppose that geometry under Euclid and Archimedes, that music under Damon and Aristoxenus, that grammar itself when Aristophanes and Callimachus treated of it, were so divided into parts, that no one comprehended the universal system of any of those sciences, but different persons selected different parts on which they meant to bestow their labor?”
~ Cicero (On Oratory and Orators)