[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Manufacturing Happiness Conference 9/26/09 (deadline 6/15/09)

[Gonul Pultar]

From:    "Dava L. Simpson" <davallyn at yahoo.com>


Manufacturing Happiness: Investigating Subjectivity, Transformation, and
Cultural Capital



The Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee at George Mason
University invites paper proposals for our 3rd Annual Cultural Studies
Conference.

The Conference will take place on Saturday, September 26, 2009
at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.


This conference considers practices, institutions, and products that
promise happiness, in a sense of inducing “the good life,” typically
expressed as self-realization or finding one’s purpose—borrowing 
Agamben’s term, subjective technologies that have a specific 
relationship to social and political forces. How do practices designed 
or claimed for such diverse purposes as personal stress management, 
recovering from colonization, parenting, global conglomeration, and 
corporate development work? What kinds of transformations do they bring, 
in terms of personality, power, and communitas? And what becomes of the 
living cultural traditions from which these practices are abstracted, as 
in the care of the psychotherapeutic practice of “western Buddhism,” 
which Zizek claims is the “hegemonic ideology par excellance of late 
capitalism?” From the transmission of packaged idealisms and practices 
with a putative relationship to traditional sources to the commodified
transactions for services and goods, the conference organizers seeks
papers that investigate the growing cultural industries, both global and
local, devoted to manufacturing happiness.

The wide-ranging contexts for our investigation include, but are not
limited to: the social positions within the family, home, workplace,
community, or nation-state; geographical and global considerations of
institutional development and affiliation; the political economy of
corporate training models; cultural capital and legitimation; media and 
mediation (print, television, DVD, Internet, radio, etc.); religious 
connections and origins; the confirmation and construction of identities 
(gender, physical, class, spiritual, national, sexual, and race) in 
social or political realms; and the rise and intensity of ecological 
subjectivities.

Examples:
•    Integral Institute, Integral Naked, and Ken Wilber
•    est Training
•    Shambhala Training
•    Eckhardt Tolle  and Oprah’s Book Club
•    Weight loss and Constructing Beauty
•    The “Human Potential” Movement
•    The Zen Alarm Clock
•    The Secret
•    Hollywood Kabballah  Centre
•    Transpersonal Psychology
•    The “Self-Help” Industry
•    Magazines such as What Is Enlightenment?

Please e-mail a 500-word abstract of your presentation along with a 
short CV to Michael Lecker (mlecker at gmu.edu) no later than June 15, 2009.