Tonight! Launch Party for Anamesa Perception Issue

Anamesa Perception Issue Launch

Thursday, September 17
7 to 9 PM at Swift Bar
34 E. 4th Street
New York, New York 10003

NYU Postcolonial Colloquium: Wednesday, October 7

NYU Postcolonial Colloquium:
Open to all those with an interest in postcolonial studies

The Structuring Enemy and Archival War: on the Politics of Dead Memory
Allen Feldman (NYU)

Oct. 7 (Wednesday), 6:00 p.m., in the Languages and Literatures Building at 19 University Place, Room 222.

Allen Feldman is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research on the politicization of the gaze, the body and the senses in Northern Ireland, South Africa and the post 9/11 global war of terror. He teaches visual culture and philosophy of media at New York University. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago UP 1991) and of numerous essays on political violence as visual and performance culture, on political aesthetics, and political animality. His forthcoming book are Archives of the Insensible: War, Terror and Violence as Dead Memory (Duke UP 2010) and Tracks on the Anthropological Machine: Animality, Natality and Inhumanitas (Chicago UP 2011 ).

Call for papers - Human Development Conference at the University of Notre Dame

People, Power, and Pragmatism:
The Future of Development in Our Changing World

A Human Development Conference at the University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana USA • February 26-27, 2010

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

The Ford Family Program in Human Development Studies & Solidarity and
the Center for Social Concerns of the University of Notre Dame, in
collaboration with SIT Study Abroad, a program of World Learning,
announce a student conference on topics vital to human development to be
held at the University of Notre Dame on February 26-27, 2010.

All undergraduate and graduate students are invited to submit proposals
for papers to be presented at the conference. This conference is
intended to be an event in which students come together to identify and
share the current state of human development in their respective fields
through presentations of their research; analyze and assess the way
human development issues are being addressed across that wide spectrum
of topics; and then formulate a vision for the direction of human
development in the future. Students are encouraged to submit proposals
for papers that present the results of original research, both
qualitative and quantitative, and address issues that express a
relationship between human development and:

• Theories, concepts, and philosophies
• Ethics
• Governance
• Health
• Public Policy
• Gender
• Education
• Economics
• Human Rights
• Peace & Conflict
• Agriculture
• Engineering
• Technology
• Environment/Climate
• Culture
• Religion

Please submit proposals/abstracts (strictly 300 words or less), and
questions to aseelaus@nd.edu. Only proposals received by Friday, 
October 16 will receive consideration. Invitations for participation
will be extended by Monday, November 9. Students who accept
invitations to present at the conference will be responsible for
securing funding for travel, lodging and other related expenses. We hope
that you will be able to join us for this conference and the opportunity
to engage in conversation as we help build the next generation of
development leaders.

Call for papers - The Cultural Visualization of Hurricane Katrina

Students,

This was posted early in August but came to us again, so we are re-posting. If you already submitted something, please be assured that all the info remains the same.

Best,
Georgia

------

CALL FOR PAPERS

Invisible Culture: A Journal For Visual Culture

Deadline for Papers: October 15, 2009

Guest Editors: Nicola Mann and Victoria Pass, University of Rochester

 The Cultural Visualization of Hurricane Katrina

Over the past four years, various forms of visual media have focused their
lenses on the swathes of watery land that make up the Mississippi delta.  Since
Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in summer of 2005, the region and its
residents have been subject to intense televisual, filmic, artistic, and
media-based scrutiny.  From Geraldo Rivera’s tearful live reports from the
Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, to Kanye West’s frustrated declaration at
the NBC Concert for Hurricane Relief that “George Bush doesn’t care about
black people,” to the widely acclaimed documentary film Trouble the Water
(2008), images of the hurricane, the people it affected (and continues to
affect), and the land it ravaged have been projected into our living rooms
through a series of visual representations.

Much of the scholarship on this topic has focused on socio-cultural issues
including rebuilding strategies, the failure of homeland security, and
testimonial accounts of “survivors” or “witnesses.”   This issue aims to
analyze representations of Katrina and its aftermath using the methodologies of
visual and cultural studies.  We are interested in the ways that analyses of the
politics of representation, as exemplified in the case of Katrina, opens up into
a discussion the evolution of visual and cultural studies in the last ten or
twenty years.

We seek papers that consider visual representations of Hurricane Katrina in a
ways unimaginable at earlier points in the intersection between visual studies
and cultural studies.  From CNN.com’s award winning “Voices from the Gulf
Coast” podcasts, to the various discussion blogs that have emerged in the wake
of the event, to Google Earth’s satellite imagery overlays of the devastation
in the affected region, to the television show “Extreme Makeover: Hurricane
Katrina Home Edition,” we have seen in Katrina’s aftermath a plethora of new
modes of visual diffusion. Furthermore, the intensification of mass media, both
in terms of the sheer quantity of media outlets and in the reach of its
dissemination, has given rise to a new experience of historical time and
geographic proximity, in which we experience historical events through media
representations almost immediately as they happen and regardless of where they
occur.

Additionally, the interactivity of new media has reoriented the
producer/consumer binary of traditional media.  We are interested in the
representational politics of these new visual rhetorics and in the new and often
hybrid apparatuses through which we experience them.  For example, a critical
alternative to the mainstream news media’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina arose
across multiple platforms. When compared to more “traditional” documentary
forms of disaster representation such the Associated Press’ controversial
global dissemination of “looting” photographs, does the immediacy and
interactive nature of new media responses render their vision more absolute,
real, and perhaps most importantly, “true”?

Is the semiotic approach of, for example, Roland Barthes on photography—which
arose in relation to a very different mode of cultural production—still
relevant?  Can the even earlier model of Frankfurt School-style ideology
critique help us to understand popular culture and its capacity for social
change?  How might these now-familiar methodologies be refashioned for the
current culture?  Or what methods have eclipsed them?  One key concern of this
issue is whether technological shifts and advancements in the dissemination of
media over the past twenty years have changed the way we see beyond the
recognition of our interpretive paradigms.  If the object of visual studies has
changed, how might we adapt the discipline to engage with the current mode(s) of
cultural production?

Accepted essays will accompany the transcript of an upcoming roundtable
discussion between the founders of the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural
Studies at the University of Rochester’s co-founders, on the occasion of the
program’s twentieth anniversary (Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly,
Kaja Silverman, Constance Penley, and Janet Wolff; moderated by Douglas Crimp).

Possible avenues for the exploration include, but are not limited to:


Films:
-The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
- Trouble the Water (2008)
-When the Levees Broke (2008), Spike Lee
-Hellp, Darren Martinez

Blogs:
New Orleans Ladder
The Survival of New Orleans weblog
Nola blog

Televisual depictions of the hurricane and responses to it, for example:
-news coverage of “looting”
-Comic Relief (2006)
-House (May 16, 2006), FOX
-Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, “The Christmas Show,” (Dec. 4, 2006)
-The Daily Show

Artistic responses to Hurricane Katrina:
Prospect 1: New Orleans (international biennial)
News photographs
“Remembering Katrina,” the official Hurricane Katrina souvenir program.

Mainstream news journalism
Urban renewal efforts
Personal photographs

NOLA:
NOLA tourism
The disappearance of “authentic” indigenous NOLA culture
NOLA outside of Bourbon Street
Representations of local culture in New Orleans

Please send inquiries and completed papers (MLA style) of 2,500 – 5,000 words
to Nicola Mann (nmann2[at]mail[dot]rochester[dot]edu) and Victoria Pass
(vpass[at]mail[dot]rochester[dot]edu) by October 15, 2009.

In Visible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book and exhibition
reviews (600-1000 words). To submit book or exhibition review proposals please
email ivcbookreviews[at]gmail[dot]com. For a list of reviewable titles, see:
http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Reviews/review_copies.html

***********
Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture is a peer-reviewed
journal dedicated to explorations of the material and political dimensions of
cultural practices: the means by which cultural objects and communities are
produced, the historical contexts in which they emerge, and the regimes of
knowledge or modes of social interaction to which they contribute.

http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/

Draper Student News: Yvonne Garrett, Reader in Sixth Annual Marathon Reading of "Song of Myself"

On Sunday, September 6th, Draper student Yvonne Garrett participated in the Sixth Annual Marathon Reading of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." Yvonne writes about the experience below.

This past Sunday I was one of some forty New Yorkers who read aloud Walt Whitman’s epic poem “Song of Myself.” Organized by the Whitman Project, the reading was hosted by NYU Professor Karen Karbiener and took place aboard the tall ship Peking at the South Street Seaport Museum in Lower Manhattan.

Jack Putnam from the Museum started the reading with a brief historical background and Prof. Karbiener provided an introduction to Whitman and his work. Each of the readers was vastly different in reading style – some very straightforward and others highly theatrical. All ages and many accents – Manhattan, Brooklyn, Southern, some I couldn’t identify – were represented giving the reading a decided Whitman-esque quality. Although the day started out sunny and fair, by the time my sections came up (36 and 37), the wind had picked up, the sky was filled with ominous clouds and the temperature had dropped – a fitting backdrop for those sections which start, “Stretch'd and still lies the midnight/Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness..” Most of the readers read from the project-provided Dover Thrift edition although some used their own preferred version of the poem. Whitman was famous for his revisions (some claim that these revisions often did not improve the poem) and hearing the back and forth between the different versions gave the reading a unique depth that a straight reading can’t provide.

The reading itself took nearly three hours – an exhausting but also exhilarating event. This is my second year participating and the uniquely New York experience of hearing and reading this poem aloud with so many other New Yorkers in such an apt setting (the foredeck of a 19th Century barque) is one I highly recommend.