Friday, May 21, 2010

Draper student Brian Ballard performing in Park Slope 5/28

Next Friday, Draper student Brian Ballard and friends will be performing self-described "progressive folk music with a twist of mythopoeia" at the Perch Cafe in Park Slope. Here are the details:

Who: Brian Ballard and friends
Where: Perch Cafe, 5th Ave & 5th/6th st., Brooklyn
When: Friday, May 28, 8pm
What: alternative folk music show

They would love to see you there!

Call for Papers: Biopolitics and the Humanities conference at Rice University

Call for Papers:

Biopolitics and the Humanities: States of Subjectivity
2010 Rice University Graduate SymposiumRice University in Houston, Texas

September 17th – 18th, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Timothy C. Campbell*

Submission deadline: June 15th, 2010.

Biopower, according to Michel Foucault, is the application and impact of sovereign power and governmentality on all aspects of political and biological life. The study of biopolitics invites interdisciplinary connections between various theoretical approaches and disciplines among the humanities. Since Machiavelli, the role of the sovereign and its ability to control and manage populations has led to conflicting understandings of biological matter’s relationship to political subjectivities. Looking at the ways in which biological bodies navigate, interrupt or are complicit in the sovereign power’s machinations of control can complicate both theoretical constructions of the body and also practical debates regarding the impact of authority.

We invite submissions that examine and play with connections between sovereign power, politics, biological and institutional subjectivities and identities from a variety of disciplines and approaches including: feminism, sexuality, gender, literature, history, anthropology, philosophy, architecture, performance, political science, linguistics, physics and mathematics.
Possible paper topics might include:

· Overlapping or competing claims of sovereignty and governmentality vis-à-vis biopower,
· Sexual identity roles and their institutional and political management,
· Enslavement and histories of subjectivity,
· Economic imperialism and the 3rd world,
· Literature as a laboratory for deconstructing ideology.
· Neoliberalism and the economy of biological bodies,
· Medicine and health care as a means of subject to government interaction,
· History of mental health,
· Graphic representations of populations to signifying biological relations to power,
· Global tourism and 1st, 2nd and 3rd world perspectives,
· The configuring of space to manage the biological body’s relation to power.

We are now accepting abstracts of 250 words or less to rice.symposium@gmail.com.

*Dr. Timothy C. Campbell will be joining us from Cornell University. Dr. Campbell’s book publications include Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi, University of Minnesota Press, 2006 and Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Roberto Esposito, University of Minnesota Press, 2007 (translation and introduction). His teaching and professional interests lie in biopolitics and contemporary Italian thought, fascist films, fascist bodies, modern Italian travel writing and perspectives in Italian culture.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Call for Papers: Recycling: Deadline Extended (June 1)

Recycling

The Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University is pleased to announce its inaugural graduate student conference will be held on Saturday, September 25, 2010 at the Stony Brook Manhattan campus. We are also excited to announce that Lisa Gitelman, Associate Professor of Media, Culture & Communication and Associate Professor of English at NYU, will be the conference keynote speaker.

The conference will be structured around the theme of recycling, such that we will not only invite
graduate students to present papers on recycling itself, but also make space for interactive projects that use recycling practices to alter the proceedings of a conventional conference. We are currently soliciting papers that explore the significance of recycling as a cultural practice and as a metaphor for understanding artistic and literary production. We also welcome creative modes of presentation, including performance art, short films, musical acts, visual art, collages, video games, and other expressive forms.

In recent years, “going green” has become an increasingly popular buzz-phrase. Advice on resource and waste management is ubiquitous, coming from such sources as credit card companies, Greenpeace, reality TV shows, the Environmental Protection Agency, car manufacturers, and Facebook applications. A successful generator of capital in its own right, “greening” has become a pop culture sensation in a world poised on the brink of environmental collapse. How do discourses of "reduce, reuse, and recycle" take shape in a corporate culture premised on planned obsolescence? Might our relationship to waste change as we search for new sustainabilities?

As we are called to be conscious of our resource management, how might we become conscious of our idea management? Taking the notion of recycling as an environmental concept and applying it to the cultural realm, we want to explore how old and new media forms navigate their own forms of recycling. How does the concept of recycling, the act of reusing materials and/or ideas once considered “wasteful,” apply to cultural, artistic, and literary production? What happens when we characterize a once-useful idea with waste? What strategies enable us to recover a supposedly wasteful idea?

Concerning the problem of idea management, we invite proposals covering topics such as:

- copying of themes, tropes and characters in literature
- literary translation
- the "remake" in popular film
- the digital music mash-up
- the televised rerun
- the video game engine
- fan cultures (including fan vids, fan sites, fan blogs, fan discussion boards, fan events)
- technology law
- literary genres
- bootlegging, piracy
- appropriation, plagiarism
- literary and film adaptations
- collage
- virtual lives (e.g. Second Life)
- recycling of history
- mutation of myths over time and across cultures

All of these topics gesture toward cultural practices that may be thought of by some as recycling and reusing or as appropriation and plagiarism by others. These are just some of the possible areas ripe for examining the implications and intersections of intellectual, creative, and environmental "recycling.” We welcome submissions that play with the theme of recycling in creative and unexpected ways.

Concerning the problem of resource management, we invite proposals covering topics such as:

- the history of the slogans “reduce, reuse, and recycle” and “going green”
- case studies of recycling’s environmental impact
- waste disposal
- the history and future of environmental movements
- environmentalism in the developing world
- land appropriation and reappropriation
- the branding of environmentalism
- capitalism’s co-optation of environmental movements
- recycling as a form of cultural reconstruction and its impact on communities
- political and cultural attitudes toward sustainabilities and conservation
- the rise of Green Parties across Europe and, to a lesser extent, in North America

Please submit abstracts of 250 words (for individual proposals) or 400 words (for panel proposals) to clcs.gradconf@gmail.com by June 1st, 2010. Please include your full name, contact information, and institutional affiliation. If submitting creative work, please explain how you plan to present your work (paper, performance, installation, etc.)

Individual presentations should be no longer than 15 minutes. Panels should be no more than one hour.

For more information, please see the conference website at
http://www.stonybrook.edu/complit/new/conference.html.