All Work, No Play symposium

'All Work, No Play' Symposium

Call for Papers

The Covid-19 pandemic has redrawn the boundary between spaces—private and public, domestic and institutional—necessitating a critical re-evaluation of the histories of these categories. Home was exposed as a leaky container that struggles to hold or keep secure those values long associated with the domestic sphere: family, comfort, cleanliness. Modern familial relations were complicated when parents were made into teachers and children became students within the home. Meanwhile, school and tertiary educators suffered major losses of classroom space, collegial solidarity, contracts, career progression, and even wages.

2023 has marked the return to a seemingly ‘normal’ circulation within and across these everyday spaces. We take this ongoing moment of global upheaval as the vantage point from which to reconsider the work we do as educators and researchers. This conference invites speakers to reflect upon the transformations—material, social, emotional— that they have had to respond or adapt to in their work. We encourage considerations of pedagogical and research practices, as well as interpretations of texts and performances that have emerged as newly urgent, such as readings of domestic labour, maintenance, and care economies.

Keynote Speaker: Dr Claire Hansen, The Australian National University.

We invite papers on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Zones of living and working; ‘WFH’, digital space, office space, hot-desking, repurposed space etc.
• Research practices reimagined; slow scholarship, distant and remote collaboration etc.
• Teaching crisis, teaching shortage, hiring crisis, denigration of teaching
• Pedagogical and domestic imaginaries
• Place-based learning
• Staging lifestyle, consumption of lifestyle, lifestyle influencers
• Maintenance, housework, teaching as maintenance
• Generative mess, catering and practices of hospitality, cleaning and maintenance
  as productivity and/or creative endeavour
• Domestic labour, care economies, emotional labour, threats to domesticity,
  challenges to domestic infrastructure
• Homeliness/Unhomeliness
• Poetics of the everyday
• Pedagogical histories and teaching philosophy; history of childhood, governesses
  and tutors, home-schooling etc.
• Campus culture, campus regeneration, the return to the classroom.

Please send abstracts of 200 words and a brief bio to the symposium organisers, Sara Fernandes and Beth McLean (ETS, Melbourne), at: allworknoplaysymposium@gmail.com not later than Sunday 30th of July 2023.

The symposium will be held in person at the University of Melbourne on Tuesday 28 November 2023.

This symposium is supported by the English and Theatre Studies Program, the Shakespeare 400 Trust, and the Critical Research Association Melbourne.