Conference on Poetics and Discourse: 12-14 December, 2011

Hosted by Victoria University (Melbourne, Australia) at its City Campus

With the theme of ‘Testimony, Witness, Authority: the politics and poetics of experience’, the conference brings together practitioners and researchers in a forum to explore the variety of ways experience is reproduced and cultures built through oral, written and other verbal media.

To be held at Victoria University’s city campus in Australia’s cultural capital, Melbourne, the 2011 conference will feature language, voice and text from scholars, composers and performers.

OWOVM is a conference about language-based arts and related media of expression.  It focuses on the relationship between medium, mode, and meaning.  From ethnic cosmologies and narratives of survival to the lyricism of love and loss – cultures are built on verbal reproductions of experience, on their dissemination through arrays of oral, written, and other verbal media, and on the complex relations between participants in these discourses.

Building on the previous OWOVM at the University of Saskatchewan in 2008, this conference is for both practitioners and researchers in discourse and the language arts and in related fields.  It expressly provides a forum for explorations of Indigeneity and autochthony, orality and literacy, and ideologies around cultural reproduction.  It brings together composers and performers across creative fields including language, voice, and text, as well as scholars from a range of fields in the creative arts, humanities, and social sciences.