HGSS 2025 Call for Papers

Humanities Graduate Students Symposium 2025:
Technology and Transformation

Saturday, February 8, 2025
Pond Inlet, Brock University

Call for Papers

The third annual Humanities Graduate Student Symposium invites Brock and external graduate students in the Faculty of Humanities to explore the impacts, relationships, and possibilities of technology from the immediate future to the ancient past. The symposium’s theme of “Technology and Transformation” will foster dialogue on the diverse ways technology influences, shapes, and transforms our world.

The 2024 Humanities Graduate Student Symposium provides an opportunity for humanities graduate students to discuss their research as it relates to the theme in a welcoming environment.

“Technology and Transformation” is a formal, graduate student-run symposium consisting of three sessions. Each session will have three 10-minute paper presentations followed by a 30-minute round-table discussion with presenters and attendees.

From the earliest human innovations to the digital revolution, technology has driven change, enabled new relationships, and sparked future possibilities. The conference will explore topics including but not limited to:

  • Impacts of Technology
    • Understanding how the role of technology has shifted over time, and how it has impacted everyday life.
    • Explorations of the construction, formation, and origin of types of technology.
    • Impacts of artificial intelligence on the way we teach or learn in humanities. The long- or short-term consequences of artificial intelligence.
    • Technology mismanagement in the past or present. Societal or environmental disadvantages to advancing technology.
  • Relationships of Technology
    • Technology’s role in creating, preserving, sharing and altering cultural heritage.
    • Technology use as a tool for propaganda or knowledge dissemination.
    • Technology’s impact on inter-personal or intra-personal relationships.
    • Indigenizing digitization/interactions of Indigeneity and the digital.
  • Possibilities of Technology
    • Digital tools and methodologies for humanities research.
    • Data visualization (ex. 3D modeling, virtual reconstructions etc.) for knowledge mobilization.
    • Speculations on the future of technology in the modern digital age.
    • Ethical considerations and limitations of virtual experiences.
    • The ways in which technology exacerbates or ameliorates economic, social, or racial divides.

Please send your abstract (250-350 words) along with a brief bio (name, pronouns, program of study) to our committee at hgss@brocku.ca by January 10, 2025.