Call for Papers: Precarity, Labor, Gender, & Performance (Feb. at NYU, Co-Sponsored by Draper)

Dear Students:

Draper will be co-sponsoring the "Affect Factory: Precarity, Labor, Gender, and Performance" conference below with the NYU-based journal Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory this coming February. The conference organizers are encouraging paper submissions from our students. Please see below for the call for papers and more information.

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CALL FOR PAPERS
The Affect Factory: Precarity, Labor, Gender, and Performance

The New York University-based journal, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, will be hosting a conference on the NYU campus, February 10 and 11, 2012.

Life and work, and their dependence upon one another, are often imagined as increasingly precarious. At the same time, “creative capital” invests a kind of promise in precarity. The manipulation of affect is stock in trade for art production, theatrical and performance labor, and now constitutes everyday anxieties about work and living in the current economy. “The Affect Factory: Precarity, Labor, Gender, and Performance,” a two-day conference hosted by Women & Performance, reconsiders the feminist critique of the relation of time and work, material and immaterial labor, waged and unwaged emotional labor. Are we living in the affect factory?

These are timely considerations in light of the recent popularity of outsourced, delegated, and participatory performances, and their inclusion in traditionally object-oriented museum spaces. This conference will bring together scholars in visual art, performance studies, sociology, history, feminist and queer theory, critical ethnic studies, and transnational studies, for an interdisciplinary dialogue on precarity, labor, performance and affect as social and political, as well as constitutively relational or between bodies.

“The Affect Factory” conference is in concert with the upcoming special issues "Precarity" and "Precarious Situations," from TDR and Women & Performance respectively. Emma Dowling, Lecturer in Ethics, Governance and Accountability at Queen Mary's University in London, will be the keynote speaker.

Possible topics include:
• Labor, gender, and affect
• The impact of the experience economy and celebrity culture on arts institutions
• Dancers, performance artists, members of the public and amateur performers in delegated and/or outsourced performance
• Capitalism, affect, and aesthetics
• Sincerity, sentimentality, simplicity and/or antagonism in the imaginary of precarious situations
• Situations regarding labor in art and performance history from the Situationist International/Autonomia to the present
• Curation of outsourced performance and affective labor
• Critical ethnic and racial perspectives on outsourced performance
• Everyday affective delegation
• Resistance and precarity

Please send a 250 word abstract and CV to affectfactory@gmail.com by October 15, 2011.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Art & Public Policy, Comparative Literature, the Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program, English, and Performance Studies at New York University and the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University.

http://affectfactory.blogspot.com ~ www.womenandperformance.org