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FUTH 2014 - GLOBALIZATION AND HEALTH: EAST AND WEST

University of Pittsburgh, USA

June 23-26, 2014

The Flying University of Transnational Humanities (FUTH) is an annual summer school for graduate students and young scholars interested in the transnational paradigm of humanistic inquiry. Each year beginning in 2010, FUTH has gathered graduated students and young scholars from across the globe for advanced lectures, student presentations and feedback sessions on various 'transnational' themes.

FUTH takes its name and immediate inspiration from Poland’s Flying University, an underground institution that offered an alternative education outside the confines of state control and government censorship. The program is particularly concerned with developing critical understandings that resist the ideological and conceptual hegemony of the nation-state and the epistemological and hermeneutic conventions that support it. This does not mean that FUTH seeks to dispense with the “national” and construct a reified “transnational” with which to replace it, or to foster “transnationalism” as an ideological alternative to “nationalism.” Rather, FUTH aims to free our imaginations from essentialist approaches to the nation or the state and to offer new ways of thinking about the political, social and cultural order of the world, both past and present.

During the week of June 23-26, the University of Pittsburgh will host the 2014 FUTH meeting, with the theme of "Globalization and Health: East and West." The summer school will address globalization in its socio-cultural and health dimensions. It centers on "the East" - the various regions of Asia - in two ways. First, it focuses on the nature and impact of globalization and health in the East, present and past, tracing the nature of globalization in the region of densest population. Second, it focuses on the impact of Eastern processes of globalization on other regions in the world, notably Europe, the Americas, and Africa.

The program is to include lectures, discussions, and panels of papers presented by participants. Distinguished speakers include Edmund Burke Ⅲ (Univ. Cal-Santa Cruz), Rila Mukherjee (Hyderabad Univ.), Naoki Sakai (Cornell Univ.), Joanna Waley-Cohen (New York Univ.-Shanghai), James L.A. Webb (Colby College), Christine Yano (Univ. of Hawai'i), and others TBA. FUTH 2014 will include up to 40 participants from around the world. Conference facilities, including food and lodging, are on the university campus.

We invite applications from graduate students and junior scholars in all disciplines. Prospective participants should send proposals that include a title, a 500-word abstract, a short (2-page) CV, names of two referees to worldhis@pitt.edu by March 31, 2014. Proposals should include a clear topic and may include methods, temporal organization, and reference to any links between the proposal and broader global, historical, and especially interdisciplinary approaches and questions. Participants will be selected for paper presentations or as discussants in trasdisciplinary workshops.