Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, the Department of French & Italian, the Graduate Association of French and Italian Students (GAFIS), the Brittingham Trust, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Friends of the Library.
The 2024 Graduate Association of French and Italian Students (GAFIS) Symposium will be held on the April 5th and 6th at the Pyle Center. The theme this year will focus on the notions of games and play, and how they intersect not only with the study of literature, but also of film, theatre and many others. Games and play are omnipresent in human society and take innumerable forms. Questions surrounding the role of play and games have generated much theoretical debate from which various perspectives and approaches have emerged, taking different forms across time and space. Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, numerous fields of research have taken an interest in the topic including mathematics, literary and media studies, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, pedagogy, psychology, economics, and computer science. Indeed, as Johan Huizinga has suggested, games and the “spirit of play” underpin a broad array of social structures, practices and institutions. Language, religion, poetry, visual and performance art, literature, education, politics, economics, mathematics, the “hard” sciences all incorporate or contain elements of play and games as an object of study or as an underlying structure regulating relations between elements in a complex system.
The keynote speaker, Dr. Aubrey Gabel, current Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University, will present the elements of her forthcoming book-length study, The Politics of Ludics: French Authors Playing Politics from the 1950s to the Present. Additionally, this symposium will give twenty to twenty-five graduate student researchers in divers fields the opportunity to present their research related to the perennial theme of games and play.
For more information, check out: GAFIS Symposium 2024: “Games & Play” – 37th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium – UW–Madison (wisc.edu)