[Discussion] UPDATE: New Directions in Critical Theory (grad) (2/12/05; 4/7/05-4/9/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

New Directions in Critical Theory and the English Department at the
University of Arizona Present:

Intersections: A Cross-Disciplinary Investigation for New Meaning
April 7-9, 2005

Update: Deadline for submissions extended to February 12 and e-mail
address correction.

This year the New Directions in Critical Theory conference will host
two distinguished keynote speakers: Tania Modleski, the Florence R.
Scott Professor of English at the University of Southern California and
Victor Villanueva Professor of English at Washington State University.
A leading scholar in the fields of gender and popular culture,
Professor Modleski is the author of Loving with a Vengeance:
Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, The Women Who Knew too Much:
Hitchcock and Feminist Theory and Old Wives' Tales and Other Stories.
Professor Villanueva has contributed significantly to the study of the
interconnectedness between rhetoric, race and ideology. His Bootstraps:
  From an American Academic of Color won two national awards, and in
1999, he was named Rhetorician of the Year by the Young Rhetoricians
Conference.

The 2005 New Directions in Critical Theory Conference, an
interdisciplinary forum at the University of Arizona, will focus on the
role that intersections play in an increasingly complex and diversified
world. We believe that intersections represent especially promising
sites for exploration because they create new worlds and new meanings
that challenge dichotomous thinking, allowing researchers to wander
productively through areas existing outside of traditionally defined
disciplines. They invite academics to become intellectuals and
participate in the world beyond the confines of the ivory tower. We
imagine that intersections offer flexible methodologies where theories
inform practices, and history complicates theory, where the concept of
difference enables scholars to discern the internal heterogeneity
concealed by more monolithic representations of identity, producing a
filigreed image of subjectivities simultaneously interpellated along
racial, sexual, gendered and class lines. Researchers attuned to the
role of intersections will note the way globalization collides with
nationalism, producing new forms of the imagined community. They will
see how high culture learns from popular and popular from high, and as
educators, they will interrogate the role that technology plays in
their pedagogy. Where do you see intersections at work and how can you
formulate intellectual practices that incorporate their lessons and
that will be best suited for understanding the world in which we live?

We invite graduate students from any discipline to present
theoretically-oriented scholarship that puts intersections to
productive use, scholarship that juxtaposes, problematizes challenges,
blurs, and/or deconstructs existing domains of knowledge in any area of
cultural activity, and in so doing, opens up new possibilities for
understanding.

Presentation topics might include but are not limited to:

Theory and Practice
Theory and History
Theory and the Classroom
Theory and Activism
The Academy and Public Life
Activism and the Academy
Teaching in the Humanities
Technology and the Classroom
Technology and Reification
Technology and Nature
Literature and Ecocriticism
Community Intersections
Public and Private Realms
Marxism and Psychoanalysis
Representation and Power
Consumerism/ Media and Identity
Popular and High Culture
Film and Literature
Power and Sexuality
Performative and Substantial Identities
The Gendered/ Raced/ Classed/ Sexed and Differently-Abled Body
Sex and Economy
Women and Exchange
Feminism and Marxism
Feminist and Queer Theory
Heteronormativity/ Homosexuality and Transsexuality
Global and Local Politics
Globalization and Nationalism
Colonies and the Metropole
The Rhetoric of the Clash of Civilizations
Critical Race Theory
Hybridity, Identity and the Third Space
Nations and Language
Difference and Identity
Identity and Othering
Humanity and Monstrosity

We particularly welcome submissions attending to race, gender, class,
ethnicity, sexuality, material culture, media and film studies,
feminist studies, performativity, corporeality, and visuality. Please
submit 100-250 word individual abstracts or panel proposals, comprised
of a 100-250 word abstract for the entire panel and one 100-250 word
abstract for each paper. Include names, email addresses, institutional
affiliations, technology requests, paper titles with abstracts by
February 12, 2005 to:

Michael Parker and Sami Sansevere
Conference Co-Chairs
Modern Languages Building, Room 445
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
(520) 621-1836
uanewdirections2005@yahoo.com



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