Call for participation: Apres Vous: A symposium for Professor Roger Simon

For over thirty years, Professor Roger Simon has provided intellectual and scholarly leadership to students, colleagues and interested intellectuals beyond the university. Professor Simon’s contributions have been in the realm of stimulating conversations and dialogues and thus building intellectual communities. In the length and breadth of his career, Simon has worked across a number of different scholarly areas and trained many scholars. As a way of honouring his active and diverse career, we are organizing an event that will take place on November 12-14, 2010.

Roger Simon’s intellectual influence has been far, wide and deep. Scholars who have encountered Professor Simon have both learned from him and taught him. However, the encounter with Simon is one that always works to stimulate new questions, different insights and an encouragement to ethically engage with knowledge and its production as a form of community making. It is in this spirit that we are gathering Professor Simon’s former students to join the conversation at the symposium. Rather than focus on any one theme or problematic constituting Professor Simon’s work, the symposium asks how his trajectory or ouvre is being taken up by those who continue to follow, critique, complicate and/or extend his thinking. We hope that this symposium reflects the spirit of academic thinking, dialogue and collegiality that has been a hallmark of Professor Simon’s scholarship.

As a student, former student, colleague, or as someone who has been influenced by Professor Simon’s work, we would like to invite you to come and be part of the conversation.

A note to people who wish to present: Generally, we hope to gather a number of people who have worked with Professor Simon and whose ongoing contributions to intellectual, artistic, and political thought comprise the afterward of their encounters with him. We are hoping the event reflects in some way the diversity of scholarship and community work that characterizes those with whom Professor Simon has worked. If you would like to participate by presenting on your work or in some other fashion, please send us an email. This will be a somewhat small event, but we are still in the process of planning and we may have room to accommodate more presenters. We have given priority to students of Professor Simon to engage with the many directions in which his work is taken up. Presentations will take various forms, from panel presentations to roundtable discussions to artistic contributions.

Please RSVP by emailing apresvous2010@gmail.com. We regret that at this time we do not have any funding to subsidize travel expenses.

Please feel free to forward this invitation to those who have been influenced by Professor Simon’s work.