Call for Papers



Conference: “Radical Aesthetics and Politics: Intersections in Music,  Art, and Critical Social Theory”



9 December 2011



Hunter College, CUNY





In the past few decades, the study of sonic, visual, textual, and other 

media practices have emerged as productive areas of cultural analysis 

and critique.  Often constitutive of paradoxes and tensions within 

society, these aesthetic practices have prompted critical engagements 

with structures of power and knowledge.  Researchers and artists have 

sought to deconstruct particular relationships between aesthetics and 

power, creating renewed and emergent questions with which current 

social theory must engage.  For instance, how might we think about the 

“public sphere” in terms of nodes of encounters with the sonic, the 

visual, and the textual? What forms of political action and sociality 

emerge from civic engagements with visual, sonic, and textual culture?  

How are sonic and material landscapes engaged with as embodied 

practices?  What might this imply about the corporeality of the 

political, the ethical, and the technological?  What are the 

disjunctures and syntheses between artists’ and scholars’ 

concept-driven productions and the ways in which audiences interpret 

and construct life-worlds with these productions?



This multidisciplinary conference aims to explore these questions 

centering on the intersections between aesthetic practices and radical 

political action.  We invite papers that engage with any practices 

within sonic, visual, and textual culture, and that understand these 

not merely in terms of the symbolic or the ideal, but also in terms of 

the material relations embedded within these practices.  This 

conference will thus be concerned with the ideological lives of 

aesthetic practices. Rather than focusing solely on overtly politicized 

artistic expression, however, this conference interrogates the 

boundaries of the political in music and art (and vice versa).  We aim 

to take a radical approach to aesthetics and politics by getting at the 

root of knowledge systems and changing the concepts of contemporary 

political, ethical, and aesthetic debates.  This conference thus asks 

how we may think through and act on political commitments in art and 

music, and how social theory may displace and elaborate on the concepts 

of cultural and ethical debates.



We invite proposal submissions from scholars, students, musicians, and 

artists that address the following and related themes:



Visual/Sonic Publics

Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism

Ownership and Property

Feminism and Queer Theory

Governmentality

Performance

Consumption and Material Culture

Critical Race Studies

Affect, Sensation, and Embodiment

New Economies

Labor

Language, Speech, and the Voice

Technologies and Media

Space and the Environment



Please submit a 200-300 word proposal, including a title and full 

contact details to Portia Seddon ([log in to unmask]) by August 15, 

2011.



This conference is organized by Critical Studies in Expressive Culture (

http://chreculture.blogspot.com/) and by the Department of Anthropology 

at

Hunter College, CUNY (http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/anthro/).