[Discussion] UPDATE: Cultural Studies Association (1/28/05; 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

DEADLINE EXTENSION IN 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.

An expanded list of eleven seminars for the 2005 appears below (see the
last two, which are newly added).

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 28, 2005. You
will be notified of your seminar assignment by early February.


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 a
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 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
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 =A0Assistant Professor of English, University of
Washington

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. These
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). This 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. =A0Questions 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 interpretation?

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=20
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? What new directions need to
be explored? Where do we go from here?

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


10.  Globalization, Democracy and Cultural Studies
Wolfgang Natter, Professor of Geography, University of Kentucky

Under the banner of globalization from below, alternative models to
corporate globalization have strongly suggested the need to rethink the
function of the university. These have pointed to the particular
desirability of exploring new models for partnership between community
based scholars and their organizations and civic professionally-minded
academics supportive of participatory research and democratic planning.

This seminar seeks to bring together activists, artists and scholars
interested in exploring such ideas and in sharing specific practices
supportive of a scaling up of sustainability and social justice concerns
across the intermeshed sites of "the local" and "the global." What roles
can culture and art play in promoting such collaboration across
institutional and geographical divides or differences of identity and
interest? Which institutional forms and practices of academic
scholarship might best re-circuit and deploy notions of "expert
knowledge" toward democratic and sustainable goals?

Several essays will be made available to seminar participants.
Participants will in turn be invited to write 3-5 page papers by March
20 which will be distributed to other seminar participants. These papers
might describe and assess (successes and failures) a specific case in
which their authors attempted to a) increase diverse participation in
some project; or b) collaborate across institutional and geographical
boundaries; or c) deploy any aspect of "culture" to help achieve social
equity, sustainable economic or environmental development.

11.  Hijacking Authenticity: =A0Media Images, Resistance and Racialized
Innocence
Shari Popen, College of Education and Dept of Political Science,
University of Arizona;

Rosanne Kanhai, Department of English and Director of Women's Studies,
Western Washington University

This seminar will examine the current notions of authenticity (what is
innocent, worthy, natural), deployed in political and racialized
ideologies created by the corporate media. In particular we will examine
images and reports found in mainsteam news media.

Seminar participants will be asked to read a paper written by the
seminar leaders in advance of the conference and prepare a brief
response to be presented orally during the seminar session at the
conference.



 From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List