Thursday, January 7, 2010

Foucault Society Reading Group tomorrow

The Foucault Society, NYC
Winter 2010 Reading Group
Foucault(s) Beyond Foucault: Essays, Interviews, Lectures (1976-84)

Please join us as our Fall 2009 Reading Group continues into Winter 2010. The next meeting of the reading group will be on Friday, January 8, 7:00-9:30pm, at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5414.

We will discuss the following pieces:

Michel Foucault (1993 [1980]). “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self” in Political Theory, 21(2): 198-227.

Michel Foucault (2005 [1981-2]). The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Lectures I & II. New York: Picador.

For a limited time, readings are available to reading group participants on GoogleDocs. For access instructions, please send an e-mail to: foucaultsociety2009@gmail.com.

This reading group is open to the public. New participants are welcome; you do not need to have attended every meeting to join us. Please come prepared with a question or section of the text to discuss with the group. Suggested Donation: $5/meeting. No one will be turned away for lack of ability to pay.

*****

Reading Group Schedule: Winter 2010

**All meetings will be held at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5414.

Date: Friday, January 8, 2010
Readings:
--Michel Foucault. 1993 [1980]. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self” in Political Theory, 21(2): 198-227.
--Michel Foucault. 2005 [1981-2]. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Picador. (Lectures I & II)
Date: Friday, January 29, 2010
Readings:
--Michel Foucault. 2006 [1983]. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress” in Essential Works, Vol. 1. New York: The New Press.
--Michel Foucault. 2006 [1983]. “The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” in Essential Works, Vol. 1. New York: The New Press.
Date: Friday, February 19, 2010
Readings:
--Michel Foucault: 2006. “What is Enlightenment?” in Essential Works, Vol. 1. New York: The New Press.
--Michel Foucault: 1986 [1983]. “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution” in Economy and Society, 15(1): 88-96.

For more information or to register, please contact Reading Group Organizer, Aaron Weeks (Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center) at foucaultsociety2009@gmail.com.

For directions to CUNY Graduate Center, go to: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/about_gc/directions.htm

About the Foucault Society:
The Foucault Society is an independent, non-profit educational organization offering a variety of forums dedicated to critical study of the ideas of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) within a contemporary context. The Foucault Society is a 501 (c) (3) recognized public charity. As such donations are tax deductible under section 170 of the Internal Revenue Code.

E-mail: foucaultsociety2009@gmail.com

Website: www.foucaultsociety.org (Sorry -- not recently updated.)

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Introducing Theodore Hamm, Teaching 'Intro to the City, II' This Spring

Draper is delighted to announce that Theodore Hamm will be teaching "Introduction to the City II" this spring. Theodore Hamm is the editor of The Brooklyn Rail and an associate professor of urban studies at Metropolitan College of New York. His writings about New York City politics and culture have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Nation, and elsewhere. His books include The New Blue Media (2008) and Rebel and a Cause (2001).

A preliminary book list for Intro to the City II is available on Draper's Spring 2010 Course Offerings page and a syllabus will be available soon. Seats are still available in the class, and interested students are encouraged to contact Draper directly to enroll.

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Hamm to Draper!

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Draper Student Announcements!

It's been wonderful to hear of all the great things Draper students and alumni are up to these days. We hope you will continue to email us at draper.program@nyu.edu with your own news!

Here are the most recent items:


Hilarie Ashton
has been accepted to the following conferences:

April Pierce writes articles for the Examiner as the "Brooklyn Literature Examiner" and book reviews for Critical Flame. She's also submitting a paper to two conferences that might be of interest to Draper students: The Eighth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities at UCLA and The Philosophy and the Arts Conference at Stony Brook Manhattan


Yvonne Garrett will be presenting at two conferences this semester:
  • January 29th "Taking Up Space" at Duke University delivering a paper entitled, "Breaking Boundaries: a Study of Native American Literary Voice on & off the Reservation."
  • Feb. 10-13th @ Southwest TX PCA/ACA Conference in Albuquerque, NM presenting 2 papers. In the "American Indians Today" area/"American Indians and the Arts" section, a paper entitled, "This Ain't Rock'n'Roll, This is Genocide: Structures of Hybridity, Cosmopolitanism and the Silencing of the Native Subject in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues " (based on her Draper MA thesis of the same title). And in the "Punk Rock" area/Punk Literature: Philosophically and Rhetorically" section, a paper entitled, "Punk Rock Bitches: Exploring the Agency of Gender and the Punk Rock Aesthetic in the fiction of Kathy Acker."

Alumni Russell MacKenzie Fehr (class of Fall 2009) is now a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of California Riverside. He also attended the annual meeting of the American Historical Association this month.


Alumna Elena Landriscina (class of May 2009) just published an article in a peer-reviewed journal, Essex Human Rights Review, entitled "The Legal Obligation to Prosecute 'Rendition to Torture.' " It appears in a Special Issue (Volume 6, No. 1, December 2009) devoted to the topic of "Preventing Torture in the 21st Century." The article is available through the link above.


You may remember us posting about a benefit for The Organization for Visual Progression, a nonprofit co-founded by Draper alumni Ben Foley (class of August 2006). Since founding OVP in September of 2008, the organization, which is dedicated to helping social justice organizations create and utilize visual media in their advocacy efforts, has conducted a two-week video advocacy training in the Southern Philippines and collaborated with the Legal Action Center, non-profit law firm in New York City to produce a DVD that will give people leaving prison the skills and knowledge necessary to find jobs and prepare them for the challenges they may face in the reentry process. In 2010 they are conducting a 12-month video advocacy training project in Sri Lanka, and preparing for projects in Nepal, China, and the Philippines.


Finally, we wish to note all the students who participated in the recent Draper Student Organization Colloquium on Silence last December:

Rhyannon Rodriguez
“Silence & the Sound of Difference: The Narrative Qualities of Silence in Horror Cinema”

Jason Slaughter
“Three Unusual Instances of Silence in Music”

Alanana Smith
“Silence as Violence – Muting Politics in Humanitarian Discourse”

Tamara Day
“The Powers of Silence in Wide Sargasso Sea”

Congratulations, all!

Monday, January 4, 2010

New book from Draper's first City professor

Levent Soysal, Draper's inaugural professor in The City, has co-written a book entitled Orienting Istanbul, which will see publication in June of this year. The book follows a corresponding conference that happened in September of 2008, information about which is still available on the conference's website.

We congratulate Professor Soysal on these accomplishments!

Call for Papers: Quarantine (Due February 5)

‘QUARANTINE’
The 2010 Culture and Theory
Graduate Student Conference
Conference Date: Friday, April 30, 2010
Location: University of California, Irvine
Deadline for the submission of abstracts: February 5, 2010

Our conference theme was inspired by the cultural panics and anxieties that emerged out of the public discourse surrounding the H1N1 flu virus. Declared a national emergency by the Obama
Administration, our cultural imaginary on disease, health, and bodies has been become deeply
mired in discourses on inclusion and exclusion. These discourses are mobilized by racialized,
classed, sexualized, and gendered economies of representation that produce notions of who is
allowed access to the identities of ‘citizen’ and ‘national’. Our conference will look to the ways
that identities and bodies become sites of intense contestation both within these contemporary
discursive formations and through the pathologizing of racial, sexual, classed, and gendered
identities.

When thinking through the context of quarantine, some questions to consider might be: How
does biopower frame the conditions of possibility for quarantine? What affective transactions are
mediated by quarantine? How are bodies, desires, and sexualities pathologized in and through
practices of quarantine? How do modalities of closure and enclosure in discourses on the nation,
state, and belonging contribute to new mappings of identity? How are emerging technologies of
governance creating new methods and ways of thinking about quarantine?

Papers submitted to the conference do not need to directly address the H1N1 flu virus or its
discursive productions. Presenters are encouraged to ‘play’ with the theoretical possibilities that
a conference entitled ‘Quarantine’ allows. As Culture and Theory is a fundamentally
interdisciplinary program, we welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines, including but
not limited to: political science, literature/comparative literature, anthropology, sociology, visual
studies, studio arts, history, philosophy, area studies, Women’s and Gender studies, African-
American Studies, and Asian American Studies. Individual papers, panel proposals and joint
presentations are welcome.

Proposed topics/panels for the conference might include:

  • panic/anxiety surrounding the H1N1 flu virus
  • biopolitics, the regulation of bodies/populations, the disciplining of bodies/populations
  • disability studies
  • movement and displacement, migrations both voluntary and forced
  • studies of motility and orientation, or impediments to motility and orientation
  • the pathologizing of desire and sexuality
  • the phenomenality of disease
  • torture and prisoner abuse
  • the racialization, gendering, or sexualization of disease
  • illegal detentions or the practice of sequestering prisoners
  • the disciplining of ‘alien’ bodies
  • immigration control
  • contemporary practices of segregation – racial, sexual, gendered, national
  • citizenship and the nation, discourses on citizenship/inclusion and exclusion
  • linguistic identities and the nation, language and bodies, ESL/bilingual education
  • ‘walls’ – both figurative and literal (wall separating Israel and Palestine, U.S. and Mexico wall)
  • borders, national boundaries, imaginaries on borders/boundaries
  • theories of the state/state(s) of war/state(s) of nature
  • technologies of the post-human, how we define the ‘human’
Abstracts should be between 250 and 300 words long and should be submitted by Friday,
February 5th, 2010. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a draft of the conference paper
should be submitted by Friday, April 16th, 2010.

Abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or PDF/RTF formats and must include the following
information: a) Author; b) Institutional affiliation; c) Contact information and e-mail address;
d) Title of abstract; e) Abstract

We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted.

Please send paper proposals to:

Jen Kosakowski
Ph.D. Candidate, Culture and Theory
University of California, Irvine
jkosakow@uci.edu

or

Diana Leong
Ph.D. Candidate, Culture and Theory
University of California, Irvine
dianaml@uci.edu

Call for Papers: "Cycles" (January 15 Deadline)

The Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Stony Brook University Announces its 3rd Annual Graduate Student Conference

CYCLES
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Stony Brook University’s Manhattan Campus
CALL FOR PAPERS EXTENDED
Please email your 250-word abstract by January 15, 2009 to:
wstconf@gmail.com

Life is shaped by cycles. From patterns of migration and biological processes to the recycling of
ideas and objects in mass culture, forms of re-circulation define our experiences. Cycles explores
reiterations of gender categories, social movements, as well as what it might mean to have a
temporality opposed to a teleological notion of history. This conference provides a critical space to map the terrain of the cycle by approaching it from various theoretical, analytic, and disciplinary positions of feminism. How might this process inform science, visual culture, music, and literature?

Furthermore, can cycles as repetitions help us to negotiate the past by working through the
traumas and mistakes of history? Or are we destined to repeat the past without the possibility of
meaningful change?

This conference aims to generate an interdisciplinary and critical discussion about how gender and sexuality relate to the concept of the cycle. Papers are invited from all disciplines and theoretical positions. Some suggested topics include but are not limited to:

๏ Feminist and/or queer temporalities
๏ Trauma, repetition, and death
๏ Social movements and political change
๏ Technologies of reproduction
๏ Theorizing menstruation in literature and film
๏ Visual or textual strategies of repetition as an aesthetic or cultural politics
๏ The bicycle as an instrument of women’s liberation
๏ Migrations and geo-spatial movements
๏ Cycles of narrative: series, adaptations, remakes

Cycles Conference
wstconf@gmail.com
Women's & Gender Studies Program
Stony Brook University
105 Old Chemistry
Stony Brook, NY 11790-3456