[Discussion] UPDATE: Cultural Studies Association (1/21/05; 4/21/05-4/24/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

THE THIRD ANNUAL CULTURAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION (U.S.) MEETING
Tucson, Arizona
April 21-24, 2005

www.csaus.pitt.edu

CALL FOR SEMINAR PARTICIPANTS

New at this year's CSA conference are seminars. Seminars are small-group
(maximum 12 individuals) discussion sessions for which participants
write brief "position papers" that are circulated to the other seminar
participants prior to the conference. The seminars are designed to
foster more exchange than traditional paper-reading sessions, and they
may allow the formation of networks of scholars who continue to
collaborate. Participation in a seminar will allow conferees to seek
financial support from their institutions. Paper length and deadlines
will be established by individual seminar leaders.

A list of seminars for the 2005 appears below. In order to participate
in a seminar, send an email message to csaus@pitt.edu with the words
<seminar request> in the subject line.

Your message should list up to three seminars, ranked in order of
preference, in which you would like to participate. (You will be allowed
to participate in only one seminar, but you may participate in a seminar
regardless of what other role you may have on the program.) Your message
should also include your name, contact information, and institutional
affiliation. Seminar requests should be sent by January 21, 2005.  You
will be notified of your seminar assignment by January 31, 2005.


1. Public Cultural Studies
Charlie Bertsch  Assistant Professor of English, University of Arizona

This seminar will consider the pros and cons of researching and writing
for a broad audience instead of scholars with similar points of
reference. At what point, if any, does striving for accessibility
compromise professional or political goals? Participants will discuss
the relationship between style and content, choice of publishing venue,
and the advantages and disadvantages of being polemical.

Participants will be asked to pre-circulate position papers of no more
than pages to other members by March 1, 2005.


2. What's Love Got To Do With It? Thinking the Estrangement Between
Studies of Reproductive Politics and Sexuality Studies
Laura Briggs  Associate Professor of Women's Studies, University of
Arizona; former staff writer for Gay Community News; and member of the
Reproductive Rights National Network
Dr. Barbara Herbert  Assistant Professor, Tufts University School of
Medicine

Studies of reproduction continue to be crucial to numerous kinds of
feminist scholarship, from historical studies of welfare rights to an
anthropology of reproductive technology, while sexuality studies is
vibrant interdiscipline particularly focused in, but by no means limited
to, queer studies. Why are these intellectual and political discourses
so often resolutely separate? Is it a given, for example, that Queer
Studies has nothing to say about deviant heterosexualities, or that
scholarship on the abortion wars cannot think through closely allied
issue of the right-wing's obsessive homophobia? This seminar will
address the ways that these political practices/ academic fields (for
they are both these kinds of hyphenated entities) have been
mutually imbricated, models for thinking them together, and the forces
and histories that cause us to conceptualize them separately.

Partipants will be asked to write a 5 page position paper addressing the
questions posed, by March 1st, to be precirculated to the other
seminar members.


3. Bush Won. What Next?
Eric Hayot  Assistant Professor of English, University of Arizona

Assuming that practical considerations keep most of us from moving to
Canada, what kinds of (intellectual, pedagogical, practical) acts are
possible within the institutional frameworks in which we find=20
ourselves? But also: what possible personal relationships can those of
us in the United States adopt to the fact of our geographic location or
our citizenship?

What kinds of resisting subject can emerge from that kind of complicity?

Participants will be asked to write short (3-5 page) answers to these
questions and distribute/read them in advance of the conference. Up to
30 participants will be accepted.


4. Sex, Race, and "Globalization" in the Early Modern Period
Kari Boyd McBride  Associate Professor of Women's Studies, University
of Arizona

Through the Sex, Race and Globalization stream, the conference=20
organizers "seek to explore the imbrication of sexuality, gender and
race with economic, political and informational processes across local,
regional, national and transnational scales." This seminar asks how such
processes functioned in the early modern era. How were bodies and
information trafficked in that period? How did markers of social
difference like race, gender, and sexuality inflect such exchange? How
were those categories constructed in the transactions themselves? How
did geography, place, and space both catalyze and distort individual and
national identities?

Participants will be asked to pre-circulate papers of no more than 10
pages to other members by March 1, 2005.


5. Family and Governmentality: The Question of Culture
Chandan Reddy  Assistant Professor of English, University of Washington
Gillian Harkins  Assistant Professor of English, University of=20
Washington

Seminar Description: This seminar will address the current animation of
family as a key figure for contemporary cultural studies. Recent
interest in the family has spawned claims about its centrality to a
remarkable range of intellectual and political domains, including
political economy, historiography, liberal rights, and social and
psychic formations. =A0These heterogeneous claims remark both radical
changes, as well as continuities, between residual and emergent systems
of power. This seminar invites scholars working in different historical
and social contexts who seek to engage Foucault's conception
of governmentality to investigate the seeming vibrancy of "family"
as a site of social and intellectual struggle.

Participants are asked to read Michel Foucault's essay "Governmentality"
and provide a brief written response to the essay and/or the seminar
topic (2-5 pages). =A0This written response should stage and respond to
key questions raised in relation to the participants' own research.
Questions could focus on methodology, archive, domains of culture,
domains of kinship, changes in state practice, etc.  These response
papers will be distributed to all seminar participants by March 1st.
Seminar leaders will pre-circulate a synthesis of key questions and
topics of interest based on these response papers.


6. Genders, Sexualities, and Muslim Worlds
Elif Shafak  Assistant Professor of Turkish and Women's Studies,
University of Arizona
Rudolf P. Gaudio  Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Purchase
College, State University of New York

This seminar deviates from and challenges the prevailing
Western-academic obsession with "Woman and Islam" by exploring gender
and sexuality in Islamic societies within a complexity of relations
that are both positive and negative, confining and liberating.
Questions to be considered include: How are categories of 'feminine'
and 'masculine', 'Muslim' and 'Islam' defined, negotiated and contested
in different social and geographical settings? How have diverse gender
and sexual identities been imaginatively fashioned in Muslim societies
in the past, how are they being articulated today? How and to what
extent are Muslims' gender and sexual identities facilitated and/or
constrained by different approaches to Islamic governance and
scriptural=A0interpretation?

Each participant will be required to write and distribute to other
seminar participants a 5-page essay in advance of the conference.


7. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice
David Shumway,  Professor of English and Literary and Cultural Studies,
Carnegie Mellon University

This seminar will address the intersection of theory and practice in
Cultural Studies, both as it has occurred up until now and how it might
be better implemented in the future. How has cultural studies practice
responded to theory? How should we as scholars bring "theory" and
"practice" together? Brief papers should address one or both of these
questions.

Participants will be asked to write short (5 page) answers to these
questions and distribute/read them in advance of the conference.


8. Cultural Studies: Curriculum and Methodology
Paul Smith, Professor, Cultural Studies PhD Program, George Mason University

As Cultural Studies comes to be institutionalised in more ways and in
more places, the demand for rigorous curricula and lucid methodologies
becomes paramount. The seminar will focus, then, on curricula and
methodology equally, and on the two as as necessarily inter-related. The
view will be toward forming some consensus on the pragmatic and
theoretical issues facing Cultural Studies in the university.

Participants are asked to send and distibute to other participants
beforehand a short (2-3 pp) position paper on curricular or
methodological issues, or on the relation between curricula and methodology.


9. Next Directions in Media Reception Studies
Janet Staiger, Department of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas
at Austin

Cultural and reception research in media studies has possibly hit a
plateau. Multiple theories and methods guide broad and specific studies
of interpretations and effects of film, television, and the internet.
What gaps exist in our field?=A0 What new directions need to be
explored? Where do we go from here?

Seminar participants will prepare a 1000- to 2000-word position paper=20
by March 15, 2005, to be circulated in advance.




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