The IWW Edmonton General Membership Branch is pleased to be participating
in this conference. We are co-sponsoring along with the University of
Alberta Library and the English Department the display of archival
materials from the University of Berekely Emma Goldman Archives. The
conference will be happening during Edmonton's annual May Week Labour
Festival of Art, Culture and Politics.

Culture and the State Conference:

Past, Present, and Future

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, May 2-5, 2003

conferenceCall for Papers, Presentations, Panels and Participation

Labour Culture — Union Culture — and the Culture of Resistance

The advance of the labour and trade union movement has contributed an
enduring legacy to the quality of life for all people in the modern age.
Yet, the relation of this contribution has to date not been well
articulated by social and cultural scholars.

Previous generations of working people involved in such mass movements as
the Chartist and Syndicalist movements in England and France of the
nineteenth century fought bitter struggles with state and capitalist
authorities to gain social rights and working standards often taken for
granted.

The political implications of these movements mark the wider social
expression of working class interest, manifesting of a culture of organized
resistance. This culture of resistance acts directly as the engine of
labouring peoples' political interests world wide, forming the
anarcho-syndicalist and non-market socialist movements of the nineteenth,
twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

This series of panels and events explores the broad relational themes of
these movements, providing a forum for the interchange of ideas and
histories of the diverse range of working class culture and working class
politics. We invite both academic and non-academic presentations on all
aspects of trade union and labour culture, including their political and
economic relation to past and present anarchist and socialist movements.
Question periods and further on and off-campus discussion and educational
forums will ensue.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Chartism, Syndicalism, and Wage-Work

Labour, Fabianism, and the Left

Radical-Reform Politics of the Late-Eighteenth, Early-Nineteenth Centuries

The Franchise and "Eight Hour Day"

Literature and Anarchism/Socialism

Rosa Luxembourg ˆ "Reform or Revolution"

Labour Precedents ˆ Contemporary Role(s) of The Canadian Labour Congress
and Alberta Federation of Labour

Women, Work, and Politics

Robert Owen/Saint-Simon - French and English Utopian Socialism and Labour

Levellers, Diggers, & "The Norman Yoke" Theory ˆ Early Foundations of
Labour-Politics

Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Bakunin ˆ Anarchist & Socialist Thought

Art, Labour, & Socialism ˆ William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Working Class Co-Operatives in Canada and the United States

Young Workers & the Labour Movement

Music, Film, & the Labour Movement

Industrial Workers of the World, The Impossibilists, and One Big Union

Canada, the United States, and Twentieth Century Working Class Realities


Please send a 200–300 word abstract for a 15–20 minute paper (7–10
pages) and a brief CV by January 15, 2003 to the theme coordinator, John
Ames.


Theme Coordinator:

John Ames

Department of English

3-5 Humanities Centre

University of Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta Canada, T6G 2E5

Call for Papers:

In 1989 some proclaimed the imminent universal triumph of a particular
state form˜the modern liberal state. Since then, others proclaim the
imminent demise of the modern nation state under advancing globalization.
Yet modern states continue to be formed from the former Yugoslavia to the
new East Timor.

One thing is clear in these developments. Despite the global promotion of
science and commerce, culture in various forms had and has a major if not
central role in state formation, from ancient times to the present.

The Edmonton Conference on "Culture and the State: Past, Present, and
Future" will address all these issues, and more. Organized around a set of
flexible themes, the conference will consider the role of culture variously
defined -- high and low, elite and popular, local and global, historical
and contemporary -- in the creation, maintenance, transformation, and
demise of states.

A broad range of themes will be addressed, including culture and commerce;
the state and cultures of sexuality; indigenous and industrialized
cultures; science and culture and cultures of science; culture and social
difference; culture and immigration and integration; the relations of
different cultural forms; culture and modernization, post-modern cultures
and post-modern states, and so on. Conference papers will be published.

The conference organizers invite proposals, panels, and presentations on
these or any other aspect of the relation of culture and the state, from
antiquity to the present.

The conference organizers especially encourage presentations in forms other
than read papers, though these too are welcome.

Proposals for this general call should be addressed to the conference
co-ordinators and received no later than February 1, 2003. Submissions may
also be made to particular theme co-ordinators (see themes for individual
deadlines).

Conference co-ordinators:

James Gifford and Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux

Department of English

3-5 Humanities Centre

University of Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2E5

Conference chair:

Gary Kelly

Canada Research Chair

Department of English, University of Alberta

The conference is funded by the Canada Research Chairs programme.