This research conference seeks to explore issues of intimacy and love within the context of persons and interpersonal relationships and across a range of critical, contextual and cultural perspectives. Seeking to encourage innovative inter, multi and post disciplinary dialogues, we warmly welcome papers from all disciplines, professions and vocations which struggle to understand what it is to be a person and what it means for persons to stand in individual, social and national relationships of intimacy, love, desire and friendship.

In particular papers, workshops and presentations are invited on any of the following themes:

1. Public and Private Contexts of Intimate Relationships
~ How and where to locate intimacy?
~ Should we re-think the idea of intimacy?
~ Modern and postmodern intimacies
~ Identity and belonging; the local, social, national and international
~ Structures, institutions and systems; economics and intimacy; work and intimacy
~ Acts and interactions; representations and symbols; space and time

2. Love, Desire, Lust and Sex
~ Persons and the search for meaning
~ Norms that rule the intimacies of our lives
~ The death or killing of love, desire, lust or sex
~ Commitment and obligation; choice and respect; loyalty and trust
~ The secular and the religious; the heretical and the sacred
~ Personhood and identity without love, desire, lust or sex

3. Bonds of Care, Friendship and Love
~ Persons and family: blood, heritage, choice and happenstance
~ Who is a friend?
~ Historical, social and symbolic shifting grounds
~ Meaning, obligation, identity and belonging
~ Loving and caring for children, siblings and parents
~ Hospitality and bonds of care

4. When Relationships End or Fail
~ Norms, agreements and expectations
~ Betrayal, cheating and infidelity
~ The loss of intimacy; the destruction of trust
~ Isolation, alienation, loneliness and estrangement
~ Conflict, breakdown, crisis and the demise of relationships
~ Separation, mourning and bereavement; unlinking and unloving

5. Caring for Others
~ Persons, acquaintances, others and the needs of strangers
~ Intimacies between strangers
~ Why should we care about others and distant others?
~ Dislocated persons; homeless persons; uprooted persons
~ Selfishness and selflessness; expecting and giving
~ Aloofness, estrangement and disconnected persons

6. Caring for Self
~ Selfhood intimacies and pleasures of the self
~ Soul, emotions, ideas and the inner-self
~ Dreams, fantasies and desire; symbols, meaning and the unconscious
~ Time, space, solitude and the recognition of self and the inner-self
~ Body rituals: aesthetics, playfulness, health and functions
~ Alienation, madness, crisis of the self, despair and suicide

7. The Politics of Intimacy
~ Inequality, power relations and intimacy
~ Normativity and normalisation; difference and dissidence
~ Productivity, efficiency and the dwindling of free time
~ Homogeneity, identity and intimacy
~ The democratisation of intimate relations
~ Freedom, personhood, resistance and rebellion

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 17th November 2006. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 2nd March 2007.

300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, PDF or RTF formats.

Joint Organising Chairs
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Department of Sociology & Anthropology University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA, USA	Rob Fisher Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the ‘Probing the Boundaries’ programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

All papers accepted for and presented at this conference will be published in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.

Download Style Sheet v.7		Download Style Sheet 2