Call for Seminar Participants
The following is the list of Seminars that will be held at the 9th Annual
Cultural Studies Association Conference. Seminars are small-group (maximum
15 individuals) discussion sessions for which participants prepare in
advance of the conference. Participants should contact the seminar leader(s)
directly in order to apply for a seminar. The deadline to apply for a
Seminar is Friday, December 17, 2010.
NOTE: Given the increasing importance of Cultural Studies within curricula,
we provide two seminars that take up the relationship between cultural
studies and curriculum: One focused on the relationship between Cultural
Studies and the Undergraduate curriculum ("Cultural Studies and the
Undergraduate"), the other focused on pedagogy ("Teaching Cultural
Studies"). Participants may choose to participate in one or both of the
seminars - the seminars will be held in consecutive time slots to facilitate
participation in both. Those participants planning to avail themselves of
the option of attending both seminars must apply individually to both.
SEMINAR DESCRIPTIONS
1. "Cultural Studies and the Undergraduate"
Seminar Directors:
Jaafar Aksikas
Associate Professor of Cultural Studies, Columbia College, Chicago,
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Donald Hedrick
Professor of English and Director of the Program in Cultural Studies, Kansas
State University,
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Seminar Description:
The seminar will consider the relation of cultural studies to undergraduates
and undergraduate education, using the issues raised by the seminar
participants. The focus of the seminar will be on the issues faced in
constituting an Undergraduate experience on a variety of fronts.
Participants will circulate among themselves short papers in advance, which
may be include any of the following: "position papers," provocations or
manifestos, classroom and course practices and experiences, broader
pedagogical or philosophical issues, political or ideological issues.
The following are meant to be prompt questions, not exhaustive, from which
the participants may generate their own questions if they wish:
* What is the proper focus on the field of Cultural Studies for
inclusion in an undergraduate curriculum?
* What is its relation to a "home" department, such as English? To
"Literature"?
* What is involved in generating a cultural studies program of study?
* What is its relationship to the other coursework of an
undergraduate? To other majors? To campus activism and issues?
* What is the role of theory, and to what extent should one regard
"coverage" of the field a priority? What is "the field"?
* What works? What is a minimal experience for the field?
* What is the role of popular culture in the coursework? Earlier
culture? Canonical inclusion? Its ephemerality (especially as the
instructor ages..) Film and the visual?
* To what extent is the cultural studies curriculum "useful" outside
academia? Nonprofits and social justice organizations? Advertising and
communications? Management? To what extent is a 'critical" approach
readily co-opted, and should that be a problem?
* To what extent does the history of the field matter? Its direction
and future?
* What kinds of undergraduates, what majors and interests, should one
hope to recruit? Should room be made for a possible "right-wing" cultural
studies? For a business orientation?
* What formal and informal relationships to faculty might there be?
What relations to graduate students in the field? To conferences and
professionalization?
* How are any of these concerns really all that different than they
would be for graduate students?
Application Process
Applicants should submit brief bios and statements of interest and intent to
both directors.
2. "Teaching Cultural Studies"
Seminar Directors:
Jillian Sandell
Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State
University
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Charlie Bertsch Writing Program, Arizona State University
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Seminar Description
A great deal of energy has been expended pondering what it means to do the
work of Cultural Studies. But much of it has been directed towards questions
of research and scholarship. In this seminar, we will consider what it means
to teach Cultural Studies in different settings. From graduate seminars
devoted to theory, to undergraduate media courses that fulfill general
education requirements, to first-year composition classes that focus on the
mechanics of critical thinking and writing, many of us "do" Cultural Studies
in the classroom on a daily basis. The focus of the seminar will be on
pedagogical and teaching practices.
While cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field, many of us teach and
research cultural studies in traditional academic departments -
Anthropology, English, Geography, History, etc. - while others work in
interdisciplinary programs with distinct histories and agendas - Ethnic
Studies, Reading and Composition, Women and Gender Studies etc. How do we
negotiate our ideological and pedagogical principles with institutional or
disciplinary demands and our teacherly intuition about what will be most
effective in the classroom? How can we balance the institutional demands of
these pedagogic settings with our desire to do Cultural Studies in the
classroom?
The juxtaposition of materials and assignments creates a framework and
narrative trajectory for a given course, one that inevitably changes through
the semester in relation to student needs, current events, or the cost or
availability of resources. Given the range of our institutional and
disciplinary affiliations, what strategies about resources, pedagogy, or
methods might we productively share with each other? Is there a core set of
principles, techniques or aspirations that we can agree upon regardless of
our training and curricular commitments? And, finally, how might we share
our insights on these topics with a wider range of instructors, from
professors with a casual interest in Cultural Studies to community college
and high school teachers keen on transforming their curriculum?
Prior to the Seminar, participants will share a position paper of 1000 words
that explicitly tackles an issue they have faced in teaching cultural
studies. We are particularly interested in papers that address the broader
concerns facing the field of Cultural Studies in the early twenty-first
century. Some suggestions for papers include, but are not limited to:
* How have you used your Cultural Studies research in your teaching?
What changes did you make in how you approached your topic when you brought
it into the classroom?
* How have your experiences in teaching Cultural Studies changed your
research and scholarship?
* How do the global flows of capital, labor, representations, and
desire impact and recalibrate not just the content of your teaching but also
your methods?
* How have material constraints of resources and equipment shaped your
teaching?
* How does the disciplinary or interdisciplinary department in which
you are teaching differently imagine or understand Cultural Studies?
Application process:
Applicants should email a short (1-2 paragraph) statement of interest
directly to both the Seminar Directors.
3."Mass Hysteria and the Body Politic"
Sponsored by the Division of Cultural Studies and Literature
Seminar Director:
Professor Helen Kapstein
John Jay College, CUNY
English Department
619 W54th St, Rm 752A
New York, NY 10019
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212.237.8591
Seminar Description:
Also known as collective exaggerated emotions or as epidemic hysteria (each
term has its own implications), mass hysteria is often associated with
schoolgirls and factory workers-according to the psychological literature,
episodes typically affect small, tightly knit groups in enclosed settings
such as schools, factories, convents, and orphanages. But this seminar seeks
to reframe hysteria as a potentially political move where the body politic
is fashioned through body politics. By inviting readings of both literary
representations of mass hysteria and real manifestations of the phenomenon
from any discipline, genre, era, or area, the seminar aims to bring together
literary and cultural studies to work towards an interdisciplinary model
that lends equal authority to different kinds of knowledge. Potential topics
include the intersections of hysteria with gender, race, sexuality, and
class; work; the postcolonial condition and nation-building; mobility and
access; discourse and narrative; and power and resistance, among many
others. The subject might be approached from the perspective of a specific
field of inquiry such as psychology or anthropology; from a theoretical
angle such as postcolonialism or feminism; or anchored in a specific text or
example.
Once accepted for the seminar, participants will be asked to read one or
more foundational texts in the field (details to follow) and to circulate
their projects (in the format of their choice) to the other participants. We
will aim to move back and forth between our theoretical readings and the
research projects in order to generate a deeper understanding of the
theories, experiences, and possible uses of hysteria for our respective
objects of critical inquiry.
Application Process:
To apply for this seminar, the prospective participant should submit via
email a brief (1-2 paragraph) description of the research project that
brings them to issues of mass hysteria. Include contact information with
email address, a brief bio, and any requests for audio-visual equipment.
4. "Racial Liberalism/Racial Neoliberalism"
Seminar Leaders:
Mark Driscoll, Associate Professor of International Studies,
Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Diane Nelson, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University:
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Description of Issues:
What the philosopher Charles Mills calls "racial liberalism," builds on the
feminist critique of patriarchal liberalism in showing how liberalism's
fundamental concepts-rational self-determination; universality; the
separation of public/private-were all installed in covert collaboration with
racial logics. As Denise Ferreira de Silva (2007) has forcefully argued,
liberalism's truth claims are inextricable from the global regime of race
established by EuroAmerican racial science of the late 18th and 19th
centuries.
In an exciting new work (2009) David Theo Goldberg has sketched out
something he calls "racial neoliberalism" where the force of racial power is
shifted from the public realm of the political and the juridical to the
private realm of "preference" and micro-choice. In the US context, the
disturbing return of racist symbolism to attack Obama-monkey; witchdoctor;
Muslim; etc.-can now be comfortably disavowed as the private preference and
personal expression of this or that Tea Party participant. Privatized racist
denunciations are now more readily available in the machinery of
"color-blind" neoliberalism because the state claims that its mandate can't
extend to the private realm of expression and consumption.
It seems to us that Goldberg's intervention might be considered a starting
point for further research most fruitfully taken up with the tools of old
(articulation) and new (affect; non-signifying language) cultural studies.
To do, that we propose thinking of racial neoliberalism both on a continuum
with racial liberalism (something Goldberg neglects) and as a divergence
from that.
Once accepted, participants will be asked to bring a one-page statement of
research to the seminar based on an engagement with some short texts by
Mills, Ferreira de Silva, and Goldberg. Participants may want to think of
the (racial) liberalism to neoliberalism transformation in terms of the
breakdown of symbolic regimes into micro-regimes of affect and intensity as
can be seen in the racial neoliberalism of the Tea Party movement, or in
terms of the public classification of a racial nomos giving way towards one
based on consumer genomics and race-based pharmaceuticals. Other ways of
configuring the problematic are welcome.
Application Process
Interested seminar participants should send a one-paragraph statement of
interest plus a short biography to the seminar directors.
5. "The Institutional Life of Cultural Studies"
Sponsored by the Graduate Student Division
Seminar Description
This seminar is intended for faculty and students in cultural studies
graduate programs, or in other programs (e.g. sociology, English, American
Studies) that support cultural studies scholarship. The seminar will
critically examine the institutional sites that produce cultural studies
scholarship and train future scholars. Rather than focusing primarily on the
challenges that individual graduate students or professors face in doing
interdisciplinary projects in a disciplined university, we will discuss the
broader context within which graduate programs prepare cultural studies
students to build a career based on their commitment to critical theory,
historical investigation, and political action. At a meta level, this
seminar will grapple with the place of cultural studies in the increasingly
privatized and profit-driven U.S. academy and the role of cultural studies
scholars as a flexible (and disposable?) labor pool within the humanities
and social sciences. We want to question how the varying structures of
cultural studies (i.e. self-standing units, research clusters, subsections
of disciplinary departments, reading groups, etc.) affect funding
opportunities, publication expectations, student training, and classroom
pedagogy. How can we work across institutional and (inter)disciplinary
boundaries to create an engaged and rigorous community of scholars within
and beyond the academy?
Seminar Requirements: In advance of the seminar, participants will be asked
to submit a brief set of materials that includes a 1-2 page abstract of
their current research project, a 1-2 page description of their
institutional location (this could include a description of their home
program/department and other research or reading groups that are important
for their work), and a 1-2 page discussion of the challenges and future
directions for cultural studies as a field. Participants will also be given
access to a blog where a brief selection of pre-seminar readings will be
distributed and where they will be asked to post their written materials two
weeks before the conference. The blog will additionally be used as a site
for keeping the conversation and thinking alive after the seminar.
Seminar Leaders: Abigail Boggs (UC Davis, Cultural Studies), Elizabeth
Bullock (CUNY, Sociology), Greg Goldberg (Wesleyan University, Sociology),
Sarah Rebolloso McCullough (UC Davis, Cultural Studies), Nick Mitchell (UC
Santa Cruz, History of Consciousness), Liz Montegary (UC Davis, Cultural
Studies), Georgia M. Roberts (University of Washington, English)
Application Process/Contact Information:
To apply to the seminar, please send a 1-2 page CV, a brief comment on why
you would like to participate in the seminar, and short description (50-100
words) of your existing or emerging dissertation research or current project
to Abigail Boggs at [log in to unmask]
Karen Lillis
CSA Office Coordinator
Cultural Studies Association (U.S.)
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Ninth Annual Meeting of the CSA (U.S.)
Columbia College
Chicago, IL
March 24 - March 26, 2011
NEW WEBSITE: http://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/
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