Philosophies of Travel: Exploring the Value of Travel in Art, Literature, and Society

Registrations for the Philosophies of Travel conference are now open!

For futher information, see our call for papers and online registration pages.

Places at the conference are limited and filling fast for presenters and attendants, so please register soon.

The Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics is proud to announce its annual conference, to be held from September 29 to October 1, 2011. This year the Society’s conference theme is ‘The Philosophies of Travel’ and the event is being co-hosted with the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney.

The conference aims to explore the range of ways in which people conceive of travel. Abstracts have been received from scholars in such fields as cultural studies, sociology, literary studies, and business management. As such the range of approaches to the topic will be broad, and it is hoped that this meeting of disciplines will fire the scholarly imagination and contribute to our knowledge about matters relating to travel; tourism, pilgrimage, war, work, play.

The organisers hope the conference will foster the building of collegial and interdisciplinary links between scholars interested in travel. Moreso, it is the intention of the organisers and the Society to have the conference contribute to published scholarship on travel. Following the conference a refereed conference proceedings (E1), open to all presenters, will be published on the Society’s website. A call for papers will also be distributed for the Society’s journal, Literature & Aesthetics, for an issue on the conference theme, to be published in vol. 22, no.1 (July 2012). Preference will be given to papers from authors who presented at the conference.

The organisers continue to welcome proposals for papers to be presented at the conference, though due to popularity limited places are available. Please read the Call for Papers if you are interested in giving a paper at the conference.

Below is a selection of the papers to be given at the conference;

  • ‘Travel as Transformation: Women and Pilgrimage to the Self’
  • ‘Pleasure-seeking on the Goan Coast: Animal-centred Volunteer Tourism as an Ethical Alternative to Mass Tourism in India’
  • ‘The Beginning that is Already an End: Finding the Significance of Labyrinthine Travel’
  • ‘Visiting the Master’s Shrine: In search of Shams-e Tabrizi
  • ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and Travel’