Making Sense of Beauty
The Beauty Project

Friday 11th September - Sunday 13th September 2015
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations:
We see beauty; we experience beauty; we think beautiful words,
beautiful thoughts. It raises us up, comforts, inspires, thrills,
takes us out of ourselves to the sublime and the sacred; it also
challenges, disturbs, discomforts and brings us to the most unlikely
and unexpected places of death and destruction. Some find no beauty in
life, or claim they are unable to see the beautiful any more. It is
many things to many people. But it is never neutral or detached and
you cannot 'take it or leave it'; without fail, it elicits a response.

What is beauty? The flickering shafts of light playing through the
leaves of a tree, the nuanced strokes of an artist's painting,
nature's rich abundance of animals, the interplay of light and shadow
on a human face, the angles and curves of a building, the structure of
a snow flake or (diseased) molecular cell, the simplicity of a
mathematical formula, the manner of a death: all have been labelled
beautiful. What is it - if anything - they share in common that allows
us to call them beautiful?

Is the word itself a problem? Are 'beauty' and 'the beautiful' the
same thing? Or are we dealing with something which is literally in the
eyes of a billion beholders, eliciting a billion reactions and
consequently a billion unique definitions?

Does it matter? Is preoccupation with beauty a distraction from other
considerations, such as functionality, utility or practicality? Is
beauty merely one of life's luxuries, or is it directly related - in
both positive and negative ways - to health, happiness, well-being,
sense of self and other essentials for survival? How does beauty
inform the way we cultivate personal relationships and experience love
and romance? How does it shape our values and our perceptions of the
broad spectrum of human creativity? What is at stake when we talk
about art, literature, film or music in terms of beauty?

The Making Sense of Beauty conference seeks to explore these questions
in an inclusive environment that welcomes participants from all
disciplines, professions and vocations. As we come together to engage
in a rich interdisciplinary conversation we will wrestle with issues
that cross the boundaries of the intellectual, the emotional and the
personal. The conference organiser's therefore welcome the submission
of proposals for presentations that deal with any aspect of beauty,
such as:

1. Experiences and Representations of Beauty:
- Beauty and the everyday
- Beauty and social stratification: gender, sexuality, class, race,
ethnicity, age, etc.
- Beauty specialists
- Beauty disciples
- Pursuit of beauty
- Appropriations of beauty
- Expressions of beauty
- Appearance of beauty
- Making beauty
- Documenting beauty
- Emotion and beauty
- Beauty and seduction
- Representing beauty in art, literature and popular culture
- Visualising beauty

2. Beauty and Nature:
- Beauty and the natural world
- Beauty and the Sublime
- Beauty and desire
- Science and mathematics of beauty
- Medical aspects of beauty
- Beauty and power
- Symbolic beauty
- Symmetry and beauty

3. Beauty as Commodity:
- Beauty and consumer culture
- Beauty and cultural capital
- Beauty professions and trades
- Beauty cities
- Beauty marketing and forecasting
- Professional beauties (models, actors, celebrities, beauty pageants etc.)
- Fashion and beauty
- Glamour and beauty
- Constructs of beauty

4. Beauty in Flux:
- Beauty and transgression
- Beauty and ugliness
- Beauty and aging
- Defiling the beautiful
- Destroying the beautiful
- Beauty and death
- Beauty and decay, horror, the grotesque
- Beauty subcultures - Enhancing the body beautiful: cosmetics,
tattoos, piercings, surgical interventions, and other forms of body
modification
- The body in flux
- Future bodies
- Beauty across cultures
- Historical perspectives on beauty
- Are we haunted by our past beauty/reflecting on the past?

5. Using Beauty:
- Beauty and mental health
- Beauty and clinical/rehabilitative/restorative practices
- Beauty and engineering, urban planning and development
- Beauty as vehicle for social/political/cultural critique
- Beauty and education/learning
- Beauty and public policy: legislation that preserves/neglects beautiful things

Subsequently, as well as more traditional forms of presentation, we
encourage submission of proposals for short workshops,
practitioner-based activities, best practice showcases, how-to
sessions, live demonstrations, performances, and pre-formed panels. We
particularly welcome short film screenings; photographic essays;
installations; interactive talks and alternative presentation styles
that encourage engagement.

What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 5th June 2015. If an
abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be
submitted by Friday 7th August 2015. Abstracts should be submitted
simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or
RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in
programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of
proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Beauty5 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using
footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as
bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all
paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a
week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be
lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative
electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:
Donna Louise Bevan: donna.bevan@solent.ac.uk
Rob Fisher: beauty5@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the 'Ethos' series of research projects,
which in turn belong to the Critical Issues programmes of ID.Net. It
aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to
share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and
challenging. All proposals accepted for and presented at the
conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in
an ISBN eBook. Selected proposals may be developed for publication in
a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference
will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the
conference.

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and
professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should
attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make
this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation.

For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/beauty/call-for-papers/