Call for Proposals - NCPH Annual Meeting -- Indianapolis, Indiana, April 19-22, 2017
Apr 14, 2016
Call for Proposals -- "The Middle: Where did we come from? Where are we going?" NCPH Annual Meeting -- Indianapolis, Indiana, April 19-22, 2017
The call for proposals is open through July 15 at http://ncph.org/conference/2017-annual-meeting/
WHY SHOULD YOU SUBMIT A PROPOSAL? The National Council on Public History conference program should reflect all of the varied and diverse corners of the public history field, to do so, we need YOUR ideas to make this meeting a success! What innovations, controversies, and overlooked topics are important to your work? Public history is built on the work of others (YOU!) so this conference needs YOUR presentations, papers, projects and ideas so we can share our knowledge and advance the field. NEED AN IDEA? In a society fascinated by extremes, the middle is often undervalued, overlooked, and unstudied. Public historians, however, tend to engage in work that addresses the interests and concerns of the wide-ranging public, not just the select. For public historians, the middle can be a delightful but challenging place. The concerns of the masses, not just the elite; the swirling firmament of the center of a story, not only the clearness of the beginning or end; the quotidian, not the extraordinary; is always ripe with ambiguity and importance. But who controls and speaks for the middle? How one parses the middle, and who gets to tell the story, is challenging and difficult. The 2017 NCPH conference in Indianapolis, itself located near the median center of the US, is the ideal location for the diverse public history field to wrestle with the concerns of the middle in interpreting the past.
