From: Cultural Studies Association [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 23 September 2008 21:35
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CSA Seminar Proposals for 2009
CSA 2009 Seminars
Applications are invited for three seminars to be held at the 2009 US Cultural Studies Association conference in Kansas City, April 16-18: "Bio/Cultural Studies"; "Going Pro: What Difference Does Cultural Studies Make?"; "New Research in Cultural Studies." For details about the seminars and how to apply, please see the descriptions below or click on the links on the front page at www.csaus.pitt.edu <http://www.csaus.pitt.edu/> .
Applications are due by November 14, 2008.
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Seminar 1.)
Bio/Cultural Studies
[Individuals interested in participating in this Cultural Studies Association seminar should contact Bernice Hausman at [log in to unmask] or Brad Lewis at [log in to unmask] Deadline: 14 November 2008.]
Seminar Description:
Lennard Davis and David Morris, in their "Biocultures Manifesto" that opens the summer 2007 special issue of New Literary History on Biocultures, argue that the field of intellectual endeavor encompassing biocultural studies exists but needs a name. They write, "We are not necessarily nominalists, but we do believe in the power of a name to consolidate scattered research agendas and to generate change." Their manifesto is a clarion call to begin to reconceptualize the existing cross-fertilization of scientific investigation with cultural inquiry, broadly construed.
We are interested in a more pointed version, or subfield, of biocultures that sets cultural studies against, or into, biomedicine. Some of the more interesting variants of this field explore biopsychiatry and detail the emergence of the "neurochemical person" (N. Rose) and/or the "pharmaceutical person" (E. Martin). The bio/cultural studies approach to medicine cannot rest on a "cultural critique" of science and its objectified research paradigms. Instead, biocultures demands a kind of interpenetration of objectives from both fields, assuming that the alleviation of suffering is approached authentically in both cultural analysis (where the goal is often social justice) and medicine (where physical suffering begins the diagnostic enterprise and ending it is the goal). In this way, bio/cultural studies is about critique but also collaboration; as a paradigm it insists on new research questions that straddle the edge of the "two cultures" so famously described by C. P. Snow.
Seminar Requirements:
This seminar is for scholars and scholar-activists interested in learning more about what we are calling bio/cultural studies and in developing research questions and projects in this field. We will circulate a set of texts to seminar participants in February, and ask for brief (5-page) descriptions of projects, research areas, or developed research questions in mid-March. These will be shared with all seminar participants in late March. The object of the seminar itself will be to workshop these projects and questions to aid participants in the development of their projects, and to establish an ongoing research network of scholars. We will also discuss funding opportunities and cross-discipline collaborations that will allow research in this field to impact medical practice, biomedical research, and public health initiatives both nationally and globally. It is our belief that bio/cultural studies is not a project enclosed within academic contexts but one that should reach out to affect practices and policies worldwide.
Seminar Moderators:
Bernice L. Hausman, PhD, is professor of English at Virginia Tech and a teaching affiliate in Women's Studies and Science and Technology Studies. Educated in feminist and critical theory, she has spent her career studying medicine, gender, sexed bodies, and motherhood. Her research addresses how human embodiment has become both a problem for, and a project of, modernity. Her books include Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (1995) and Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture (2003).
Bradley Lewis, MD, PhD is an assistant professor at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study with affiliated appointments in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of Psychiatry. He has dual training in humanities and medicine (with a psychiatric specialty), and he writes and teaches at the interface of cultural studies, medicine, and humanities. Lewis is the author of Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: Birth of Postpsychiatry and is associate editor for the Journal of Medical Humanities.
Contact information:
Bernice L. Hausman, English Dept. (0112), Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061; 540-231-5076; [log in to unmask]
Bradley E. Lewis, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, 715 Broadway, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10003-6806; 212-998-7313; [log in to unmask]
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Seminar 2.)
Going Pro: What Difference Does Cultural Studies Make?
[Individuals interested in participating in this Cultural Studies Association seminar should contact Randy Martin: [log in to unmask] Deadline: 14 November 2008.]
Seminar Description:
Every good discipline has its protocols of professional socialization. Get into the right program, leave with the ideal dissertation, land the perfect post. Reset. The commingled crises of jobs and fields have gummed up the reset button. Cultural studies would seem to promise something different even as it inhabits some familiar terrain. This seminar aims to provide some analysis of where cultural studies fits in the broader ambit of interdisciplinarity that seeps through the ruins of professional replication and to offer a space to consider participants' own projects, aspirations, and strategies in deploying their cultural studies training inside the university and without. It will approach the pathways by which our labor travels as a matter of intervention-an array of strategic concerns by which we evaluate the institutional and epistemological forces at hand, how we divine available alliances and affiliations, where there are the greatest prospects of yielding more of what we seek. Specifically, this means thinking through issues such as where we publish or disseminate work, how we approach job searches, what is involved in implementing new programs and curricula. One premise of this conversation will be that cultural studies loops not only through the university, but through the entire field of what can be called the cultural industries or knowledge sectors. How this circumstance bears upon theoretically informed and politically engaged work remains an open question. The potential of the CSA itself to play a constructive role in this process will also be part of the discussion, insofar as we can strategize as to the kinds of critical reflection, support and resources our professional association can provide to these endeavors.
Seminar Requirements:
Participants will be asked to provide short scenarios of predicaments they have face in the annals of professional socialization and what questions and dilemmas they would like to work through as a consequence. These will be shared along with a series of relevant readings. The first portion of the seminar will be devoted to a diagnosis of institutional/epistemological circumstances, and the second part will draw problematics from the submitted scenarios.
Seminar Moderator:
Randy Martin is the current CSA president and chair of the department of art and public policy at New York University. He has served as an associate dean of faculty, editor of Social Text, and is author of books on dance, theater, marxism, personal finance, and, most recently An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management (Duke, 2007).
Contact Information:
Randy Martin, Professor and Chair, Department of Art and Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, 665 Broadway, Room 605, New York, NY 10012; 212-992-8243
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Seminar 3.)
New Research in Cultural Studies
[Individuals interested in participating in this Cultural Studies Association seminar should contact Bruce Burgett: [log in to unmask] and Patricia Clough [log in to unmask] Deadline: 14 November 2008.]
Seminar Description:
This CSA seminar is designed for graduate students at or approaching the dissertation-writing stage of their doctoral programs and working on projects in or adjacent to the field of cultural studies. It is intended to provide a workshop environment for cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration on the development of those projects. One of its central goals is to break down the isolated institutional contexts in which those projects typically take place; another is to map the emerging landscape of cultural studies research today; a third is to situate those projects within a larger discussion of what cultural studies research can and should do.
Seminar Requirements:
Participants will be asked to submit in advance of the seminar a brief set of materials related to their existing or emerging research projects (e.g., an abstract, proposal, or chapter), along with a short (1-2 page) statement describing how they imagine those projects as fitting into a larger network of professional and life activities and ambitions, either inside or outside of university (teaching, engagement, activism, service, etc.). These materials will be circulated in advance of the CSA conference in April and provide the basis of the workshop at the conference itself. Other pre-conference readings may also be required, based on the suggestions of seminar participants.
Seminar Moderators:
Bruce Burgett is Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell, and adjunct faculty in the English Department at UW Seattle. He is a member of the executive committee of the CSA and the incoming vice chair of the national advisory board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. He serves on the editorial boards of American Literary History and American Quarterly, and is the co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press) and author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic.
Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. She is the vice president of the executive board of the CSA. She is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994); and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, (2007). She is currently working on Ecstatic Corona an ethnographic historical research and experimental writing project about the place where she grew up in Queens New York.
Contact and Proposal Information:
To apply to the seminar, please send a cv and short description (50-100 words) of your existing or emerging dissertation research to Bruce Burgett ([log in to unmask]) and Patricia Clough ([log in to unmask]).
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Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
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