CFP: Principals of Uncertainty, CUNY Grad Center (Comp Lit): Abstracts Due 3/1

“Principles of Uncertainty”
A Conference on Critical Theory
Keynote Speaker: Martin Hägglund

The students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center present the first annual interdisciplinary conference on literary and critical theory to be held Friday, May 4, 2012. This conference is being given in support of the CUNY Graduate Center’s proposed certificate for Critical Theory, which is dedicated to the study of literary and critical theory.

We invite papers from all disciplines focusing on works from any period that explore the theme of uncertainty as it pertains to literary and critical theory.
This conference welcomes papers centering upon any individual theorist, period, or school of critical theory, as well as comparisons of various theoretical approaches, including, but not limited to literary theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, gender studies, and political theory. Some of the questions this conference seeks to answer include, but are not limited to:


• How is the meaning of a text uncertain?
• Is this uncertainty purposefully placed within a text or a by-product of the act of reading?
• How is this uncertainty demonstrated in the relationship between author and reader?
• How can uncertainty be understood not only with respect to literature but in ethical, gendered, political, and/or social terms?
• How is identity shown to be uncertain?
• How does an “undecidable” future impact present ethical and political actions?
• How is history (whether of language, narrative, and/or society) destabilized and called into question?
• How does language contribute to the uncertainty of meaning and interpretation?
• How does the theorist’s own writing present the reader with an example of uncertainty?
• How does uncertainty function in the methodologies of interpretation and the making of meaning?
• Can a text have a stable meaning or is it always uncertain?


Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by March 1, 2012 to uncertaintyconference2012@gmail.com. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter’s name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests. We also welcome panel proposals of three to four papers.

This conference is co-sponsored by:

The Writer’s Institute at the City University of New York Graduate Center: an un-MFA program devoted to bringing together the country’s most talented writers and today’s most celebrated editors.

The Doctoral Students’ Council: the sole policymaking body representing students in doctoral and master’s programs at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Oct 21 Colloquium: "Arts of Resistance: Locating Black Women's Philosophies"

The Foucault Society, NYC
2011 Colloquium Series: New Research in Foucault Studies

Devonya N. Havis, Ph.D. "Arts of Resistance: Locating Black Women's Philosophies"

We are delighted to announce our first colloquium of this academic year. Please join us for an evening of critical dialogue and light refreshment.

Friday, October 21, 2011
7:00-9:30pm

CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5409
New York, NY

Abstract:
This paper works through Foucault to examine the parameters within which Black women's lived experience can be intelligible as philosophy. Toni Morrison characterizes the condition of Black women in the US as one in which they have "nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything." It is at the juncture of self-invention, which simultaneously contests and resists imposed categories, that Black women's philosophies emerge. As opposed to a static set of philosophical principles, Black women's philosophies are more aptly described as philosophical strategies that perform ethico-political interventions--doing philosophy from the posture of critique. In evoking the notion of "doing philosophy," the project calls attention to philosophy as a practice, or process of habituation, whereby one develops an active critical posture in which theory and action are necessary linked. My account enlists Foucault's analytic of subjugated knowledges, takes up his elaborations on genealogy (as outlined in Society Must Be Defended), and explores his discussions of critique and the "Aesthetics of Existence."

Speaker bio:
Devonya N. Havis (Ph.D., Boston College) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. Her research engages contemporary continental philosophy with critical race theory to promote social justice. Her current work develops a conception of auditory identity as a counter to the longstanding philosophical emphasis on the visual. Recent articles include "Blackness Beyond Witness" in Philosophy and Social Criticism (2010). Courses she teaches range from introduction to traditional Western philosophical concepts to explorations of the political implications of Hip-Hop theory. She is the Conference Site Coordinator for the Foucault Circle's 2012 Annual Meeting, taking place in Buffalo on March 30-April 1.

About the Colloquium Series:
The Foucault Society's Colloquium Series provides a forum for new research and works-in-progress, and offers an opportunity for both junior and senior scholars to share new work with a friendly and supportive audience of colleagues.

Open to the public. RSVPs are appreciated. E-mail: foucaultsocietyorg@gmail.com.

**As part of our on-going fundraiser, we will have Foucault's The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France, 1982-1983 (Palgrave, 2010) available for purchase.**

About the Foucault Society:
The Foucault Society is an independent, nonprofit educational organization offering a variety of forums dedicated to the critical study of the ideas of Michel Foucault (1926-1984). All of our events are open to the public. We welcome new participants who have an interest in Foucault's work and its impact on diverse areas of inquiry, including critical social theory, philosophy, politics, history, culture, gender/sexuality studies, and the arts.

Website: www.foucaultsociety.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/foucaultsociety/

E-mail: foucaultsocietyorg@gmail.com

For directions to the CUNY Graduate Center, please see: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/About-the-GC/Building-Particulars/Building-Access.

Former Draper Faculty Fellow at CUNY Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series (4/1)

Nicole Rizzuto, Draper's former faculty fellow in Literary Cultures, will be giving a talk as part of the CUNY Graduate Center's Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series on April 1st. More information is below.

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The CUNY Graduate Center Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011

Nicole Rizzuto

Oklahoma State University

Confession and the Juridical Crisis of the Colonial State in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967) circles around the Emergency in Kenya, a traumatic historical event of anticolonial insurgency and counter-insurgency. In detailing this period of indefinite detention and torture undertaken in the name of a benevolent civilizing mission, the novel states that the struggle over two specific losses suffered under British colonialism are at the heart of the Emergency. Those losses are land and freedom. And yet, the work’s formal strategies simultaneously challenge this direct statement by indirectly constituting the Emergency as an event whose losses exceed that of territory and control of the polity; the Emergency is staged also as a crisis of the juridico-legal order by which the category “human” becomes the contested site of, and justification for, exceptional state violence. Placing Ngữgi’s writing in conversation with Judith Butler’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of sovereignty and bare life in modernity reveals how the novel might displace a Euro-centered trajectory in Trauma Studies. By elaborating a state of exception in Africa under colonial rule, A Grain of Wheat both calls for and enacts what Michael Rothberg terms “multi-directional memory,” by which the insights of Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies illuminate each other while addressing the ethico-politics of responding to occluded pasts.

April 1^st at 2 p.m.

CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5409

All are welcome

Nicole Rizzuto is Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. She has published on issues of testimony and trauma in journals such as World Picture and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and is completing a book manuscript entitled Spectral Witnesses: Testimony, Historical Memory, and the Modern Novel.

The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students' Council. Please visit our website at www.opencuny.org/psg. Questions? Email Lily Saint at lsaint@gc.cuny.edu

"Foucault, Geopower, and the Transformation of the Earth" (3/3)

The Foucault Society, NYC

2011 Colloquium Series: New Research in Foucault Studies

Please join us for the first colloquium in our new series:

Stephanie Clare

"Foucault, Geopower, and the Transformation of the Earth"

Thursday, March 3, 2011

7:00-9:30pm

CUNY Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5409

New York, NY

Abstract:

This paper introduces an analysis of "geopower"--the force relations that transform the earth--by reading Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Security, Territory, Population alongside the archive of Canadian settler colonialism, specifically the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the nineteenth century. Geopower physically transforms the earth through techniques such as urban planning, architecture, engineering, agriculture, and surveying--as well as digging, logging, and marking territory. Its analysis demonstrates that power relations are not only operative between humans: multiple forms of life transform the earth. Although geopower subtends both biopower and sovereign power, it is a repressed presence in Foucault's writing, perhaps because it does not have humans as its target. This analysis therefore puts pressure on Foucauldian understandings of power.

Stephanie Clare is a PhD candidate in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her dissertation, "Earthly Encounters: Readings in Poststructuralism, Feminist Theory, and Canadian Settler Colonialism," touches upon feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory, twentieth-century French philosophy, and settler colonial studies. She has published articles in Hypatia and Exit Nine, and has received grants from SSHRC and FQRSC.

About the Colloquium Series:
The Foucault Society's Colloquium Series provides a forum for new research and works-in-progress, and an opportunity for both junior and senior scholars to share new work with a friendly, supportive audience of colleagues.

To RSVP, please send an e-mail to Shifra Diamond, Colloquium Chair, at: foucaultsocietyorg@gmail.com.

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.

Website: www.foucaultsociety.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12929420844

E-mail: foucaultsocietyorg@gmail.com

**For directions to the CUNY Graduate Center, please see: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/about_gc/directions.htm .

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and its Legacy: One Day Conf, CUNY (Free: Registration Required)

Out of the Smoke and the Flame: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and Its Legacy

March 24, 2011; 9 a.m. — 6:30 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10016

March 25, 2011, will mark the centennial commemoration of one of the most important events in the history of the U.S. labor movement, the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire. The Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies will cosponsor a one-day national conference that will assess the historical significance of the fire with a focus on its present day legacy, from *9 a.m.-6:30 p.m., Thursday, March 24 *. The conference is free and open to the public but registration is required due to limited space.

We hope you will attend the conference and also circulate this information to the members of your organization.

For registration, more details and the full conference program, visit .