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Events
Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
Pre-proposal Networking
Welcome to the “pre-proposal networking” page for members wishing to announce possible session topics (“works in progress”) for the 2009 annual meeting to be held in Washington, DC, November 5-8. The entries received to date are listed below.
Members can continue to submit topics (“works in progress”) until the January 26, 2009 deadline for conference submissions. Interested members are invited to examine these “works in progress” and contact the authors to construct session proposals for the 2009 Annual Meeting. These proposed topics are an excellent way for both established scholars working in new fields and graduate students seeking panel members to find and network with interested colleagues.
After the suggested topics have been published, individuals can send abstracts or papers to the session organizer who will then be responsible for accepting papers for their proposal, finding a chair and commentator, and submitting the session for consideration to the Program Committee. In the recent past, the odds of acceptance of a complete session have been much higher than for acceptance of individual papers, which not only need to pass the test of excellence but also must fit with other individual papers to form a panel with internal coherence. Pre-proposal networking circumvents this problem.
The topic abstracts (“works in progress”) are posted on the ASA website as a service to the association’s members who are developing panel proposals for the annual meeting. But this does not imply endorsement of the proposals by the 2009 ASA Program Committee. In fact, the Program Committee will not review the “works in progress.“
If you do plan to post a topic abstract (“work in progress”), please be aware of your responsibility to inform each person who may submit an abstract or paper directly to you, in a timely and collegial manner, whether or not you intend to include his or her abstract in your proposal. This is important because each person is allowed to make and/or be listed as a participant on only one submission. The Program Committee reserves the right to eliminate from consideration those who submit and/or are listed as a participant on more than one proposal. In the past one individual was permitted to organize numerous sessions so long as they were only participating in one session in accordance with the participation guidelines. This policy has changed for 2009. SESSION ORGANIZERS ARE ONLY PERMITTED TO SUBMIT ONE PROPOSAL.
To submit your topic abstract (“work in progress”), you must use our generic announcement submission form at http://www.theasa.net/opportunities/submit_a_free_announcement/
To submit the final proposal, you must use the ASA’s online proposal submission system, which can be found at http://convention2.allacademic.com/one/theasa/theasa09/index.php? Do not submit “works in progress” through the ASA’s proposal submission system. If a topic abstract is mistakenly submitted there it would be automatically rejected as an “incomplete” proposal. The ASA submission site will open on December 1, 2008, and may be used only for the submission of final proposal.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Slots remain on both these proposals Ecological Citizenship, co-sponsored by the Environment and Culture Caucus and the Early American Matters Caucus; organizers: Joni Adamson, Arizona State University (Joni.Adamson@asu.edu) and Karen Salt, Purdue University (knsalt@purdue.edu) and Colloquy with Stephanie Smallwood on Salt-Water Slavery; organizer: Dennis Moore, Florida State University (dmoore@fsu.edu)
ASA Humor Studies Caucus Panel Proposals
DEADLINE: January 20, 2009
The newly-forming Humor Studies Caucus of the ASA is looking for participants in panels for the 2009 conference. We have three panels under construction currently, although we are open for new panel possibilities. If you have questions or comments (or would like to be included on our email list), please contact Tracy Wuster at wustert@gmail.com.
Panels under construction:
1) Political Humor in the post-9/11 Era: Papers on all aspects of political humor and satire are welcome: stand-up, visual and cartoon humor, film and television, etc. Focus should be on humor in the 2000s from an American or cross-cultural perspective. Comparative pieces discussing connections between another era and the 2000s will also be considered. Submit proposals to: jacobshu@usc.edu.
2) “The Assault of Laughter”: Mark Twain’s Humor in American Culture: Papers are welcome on the importance of humor in Mark Twain’s work and/or in American culture during the Gilded Age more generally. Papers focusing on cultural aspects are most welcome, although textual analyses will be considered. Submit proposals to: wustert@gmail.com
3) Roundtable—Humor Studies and American Studies: Presentations are welcome on any aspect of the role of humor studies in American Studies, specifically, or the academy, more generally. Discussions of theory, methodology, institutions, pedagogy, history, etc. will be considered. Presentations will be limited to 12-15 minutes. This panel will be the inaugural sponsored panel of the newly forming Humor Studies Caucus of the ASA. Contact Tracy Wuster with questions, comments, proposals,etc.: wustert@gmail.com.
CALL FOR PAPER PROPOSALS: GROTESQUE MASCULINITIES IN AMERICAN ART & CULTURE
DEADLINE: Tuesday, January 20th, 2009.
As a mode of artistic representation, the grotesque has a long and interdisciplinary history. A precise (and concise) definition of the grotesque is difficult to arrive at, but critics and theorists have tended to identify non-normative bodies and the ability to provoke both disgust and fascination as its key features. A key question in discussions of the grotesque has to do with its sympathies: does grotesque art re-affirm the status quo or does it upset it? Does it, as Wolfgang Kayser and Mab Segrest separately suggest, allow the ostensibly normal to confirm their sense of superiority by gawking at the ostensibly freakish? Or can certain types of the grotesque-as Mikhail Bakhtin and Patricia Yeager separately suggest-be a tool for the radical critique of prevailing norms?
This proposed panel aims to continue (and specify) this broad theoretical conversation about the grotesque by examining the grotesque’s relationship to representations of American masculinities. In art and cultural production, what types of masculinity have been deemed grotesque, and is the state of being grotesque a negative to be overcome, or a place of power and potential for critique? How have artists and performers (who need not be American themselves) used the grotesque as a means to highlight, praise, critique, depict, and/or produce American masculinities in their work? Yeager says that when male artists deploy the grotesque what emerges is a world where-any woman can be the grotesque, but only men can rescript its boundaries’ (Dirt and Desire, 218). Is that always true? How-and to what ends-have queer male artists and/or non-white artists used the grotesque in their work? What types of American masculinities emerge in the work of female artists? How does an artist or performer’s ability or disability affect their relationship to grotesque modes of representation? And drawing on Judith Halberstam’s observation that masculinity is never simply (just) what male bodies do, how do depictions of female masculinities in America relate to the grotesque?
One paper in the panel will focus on female performers in American professional wrestling (World Wrestling Entertainment and Total Non-Stop Action). The paper will examine how storylines in the male-dominated wrestling business have historically constructed powerful, athletic, and physically dominating women as grotesquely other, while the performances of some individual female wrestlers have pushed back against this tradition by creating and performing new kinds of female masculinities which have garnered praise and applause from wrestling fans.
Two other panelists are needed. Paper proposals which deal with the grotesque representations of American masculinities from any time period and in any form of art or cultural production are welcomed: literature (both canonical and not), video games, TV, film, music, theater, the visual arts, performance, etc., etc. Please email a 600-word abstract to Harry Thomas (at harryt@email.unc.edu) by January 20th, 2009.
Inventing American Exceptionalism. Solicitation for panel participants, ASA 2009
Deadline: January 24
With a note of mischevious irony, Ralph Ellison’s iconic narrator of Invisible Man communicates to his readers early in the novel that he is in the great American tradition of tinkers. That makes me kin to Ford, Edison, and Franklin. Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a “thinker-tinker.“ Juxtaposing his underground, invisible status with the canonical figures of American history and industry, Invisible Man invokes the folk-heroic image of the American inventor in order to place himself in a lineage of prestigious, do-it-yourself amateurs who overcome their obscurity with pluck, determination, and a keen feeling for satisfying a Western, and a particularly American, desire: to overcome nature by manipulating it to practical, useful ends. In the American imaginary, inventors embody several quintessentially American traits: individualism, pragmatism, and Emersonian self-reliance. Even when someone like Thomas Edison completely submits his efforts to the dictates of the American industrial complex, he remained, and still remains within popular culture, a kind of populist folk hero. It could be argued, as well, that Benjamin Franklin’s constant reinvention of himself, as described in his Autobiography, could be inseparable from the material objects and processes he helped to invent.
Yet the ease with which Invisible Man compares himself to these figures threatens to subvert their accomplishments, and more importantly, threatens to expose the myth behind the hero-as-inventor, the inventor-as-hero. This panel solicits papers that interrogate inventors and inventions in the same spirit. From Abraham Lincoln’s invention of an “Improved Method of Lifting Vessels over Shoals” to Franklin’s lightning rod, invention and inventor have long occupied a particular and sanctified location in the American imaginary. Even marginalized groups seek to buoy their own status by laying claim to their own inventors and inventions. Indeed, a nation’s, a race’s, and even an individual’s ability to invent practical, problem-solving, and time-saving objects, is often held up as a sign of their cultural, historical, and intellectual validity. A group’s collective citizenship, its sense of belonging to a nation, is often legitimized via its ability to lay claim to invented objects that represent their “advancement” into civilization.
This panel will attempt to make visible the practices through which individuals and groups “invent,“ and the means by which they legitimate themselves (as citizens, as subjects) through inventions. Of particular interest are papers that confront the argument, still waged to this day, but especially prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries, that inventions somehow function as a sign for, and evidence of, the “progress” of American civilization, especially given the fact that some of the most impactful American inventions have taken the form of “advanced” weaponry.
My own work involves placing invention and inventors in an epistemological and aesthetic framework alongside literary authors who both react and contribute to the cultural relevance of invention and experiment. Yet, since the American Studies Association is an interdisciplinary organization, I encourage work from any field including history, history of science, American studies, and the social and hard sciences.
I am also in need of commentators.
Relevant topics may include:
*invention, creation, and art
*inventions, use-value, and pragmatism
*inventors as embodiments of the populist intellectual
*the process of invention as it relates to scientific experiment
*invention as a material embodiment of “progress”
*inventors as folk heroes
*invention, patent law, and copyright
*‘tinkering” as an epistemological and intellectual process
Please submit 250-500 word abstracts, along with C.V., to Samuel Schwartz at (sam29@email.arizona.edu) by Friday, January 24th.
Embodiments of Progress: Technology, Machines and Belonging in Normalcy
DEADLINE: January 20, 2009
As technological innovations increasingly offer to enhance the human body in the name of “progress,“ we must question what role the changing body/technology interface has in (re)defining citizenship. In what ways do technological enhancements both reconceptualize the boundaries of bodies and reinforce traditional hierarchies, as not all bodies are seen as equally enhanceable? How do particular bodies, fused with biotechnology, function to maintain a way of life and how do unruly bodies, either without technology or with too much technology, threaten to disrupt the sustainability of dominant forms of citizenship? Our panel explores how scientific and technological progress overlaps with national progress through tech-bodies, exploring different forms of citizenship embodied through technological intervention with technological interventions, from disabled bodies enhanced in order to climb toward normalcy to the technological crafting of the extraordinary bodies of athletes. We demonstrate that enhancing bodies with technology and science is often a project of redefining and maintaining normalcy, specifically around race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. When technologically enhanced bodies are celebrated and named as “model citizens,“ the intersection of technological “progress,“ national “progress,“ and the maintenance of normalcy are co-constituted and worthy of American studies inquiry.
This panel seeks to demonstrate the deep importance for American Studies to examine how narratives of science and technology literally and figuratively make their way into bodies. By making this intervention, we integrate the science and technology studies theoretical concept of “biological citizenship” into American Studies to illustrate how developments in science and technology are increasingly incorporated into articulations of communities and demands for rights, from consumer genetics kits to patient-advocacy groups formed around specific gene markers. We wish to explore not only what bodies belong and how citizenship is sustained, but also how reterritoralization of bodies affects the systemic processes that maintain the nation through body politics. We wish to examine the price of these particular models of sustainability implicit in models of body normalcy—what is made unsustainable in the process of forwarding particular embodied ways of belonging?
Current papers in this panel draw from other interdisciplinary fields, including disability studies, science and technology studies and sport studies, with a history of integrating and critiquing knowledge from humanities, social sciences and “hard” sciences. Integrating these forms of inquiry offers the opportunity to connect American Studies to fields often considered distant from American Studies, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, bioengineering, and material sciences. Through this interdisciplinary work, we see an opportunity to engage in not just a critique of, but also a conversation with disciplines in the theoretical and applied sciences—a crucial step in the production of new knowledge around issues of concern to American Studies. Please send submissions to (smcc@ucdavis.edu).
Visual Productions of Citizenship in American Culture
DEADLINE: January 20
This proposed panel will analyze when and how visual culture has contributed to changes in and access to American citizenship, both formal and cultural. We are looking for papers that theorize the relationship between visuality and citizenship from within specific historical contexts. What role has visual culture played creating feelings and structures of cultural belonging? When and how have visual texts helped to document and resist the exclusionary borders placed around American citizenship? In turn, what are the political limits to the forms of inclusion visuality can produce? When is visual inclusion an imaginary ruse that substitutes for institutional and material change? When, how, and why do scholars of visual culture make distinctions between visual passageways to cultural belonging and the interpellations of spectacle and/or consumer culture? Please send 500 word abstracts and one-page CVs to Kimberly Lamm (klamm@pratt.edu )by January 20th.
Migration, Science and Technology
DEADLINE: January 12
This panel is intended to attract papers dealing with the many ways in which migration affects or is affected by developments in science and technology. My own work is concerned with the German rocket engineers and technicians (“rocket scientists”) brought to the United States under Project Paperclip after World War II. It focuses on the effects the decision to bring this group to the United States has had on transnational historical narratives in Huntsville, Alabama, where most of them settled in 1950. This research has prompted me to think more broadly about the implications of “importing” people from other countries based on temporary national scientific and technical needs. What effects do decisions about recruiting people with certain scientific and technical skills from other countries have on conceptions of race, ethnicity, class, gender for the migrants as well as for the communities to which or from which they move? How does the migration of people with scientific or technical skill sets become a vehicle for social change? For example, what social and cultural effects do migrants from India working in the US Information Technology industry have on the communities they move to? What effects do migrants from the United States working in countries in the Middle East have on communities there? Other aspects to focus on might be (but are not limited to):
* The use of science and technology for migration (websites, software applications, more accessible communication methods, etc.)
* The use of science and technology to create communities among migrants
* The use of science and technology to study migration (GIS data, internet sources, electronic surveys, etc.)
The research of our second panelist, Aiko Takeuchi, focuses on the transnational birth control and eugenics movements in the context of U.S.-Japan relations (1920s-1950s). It also relates to the development of human genetics as a scientific field and the application of its knowledge to society. Part of Takeuchi’s work looks at the Japanese scientists (geneticists, public health officials) who were invited to the U.S. for their knowledge and skills.
We are looking for one more panelist, a commentator and a chair. Please email a note of interest as soon as possible and a 500-word abstract and a short CV to Monique Laney at (monique@ku.edu) by January 12, 2009. If you are interested in being the commentator and/or chair for this panel, please email your note of interest as soon as possible and your CV by January 19, 2009.
Women and Belonging: Gender and Citizenship in the Realm of Public Memory
DEADLINE: January 10
How are women’s contributions to American public life represented in public memory? This panel will consider “official” sites of citizen recognition, such as national monuments and museums, a fitting concern as we meet in the U.S. capital. In addition, we welcome papers that interrogate gendered ideas of what constitutes “official” sites of history. What happens when women’s “memory” becomes “history”—what kind of differences do we see between personal and national efforts to honor women’s contributions to communities? How do ideas of what makes women important break down along lines of ethnicity, class, and sexuality—which kinds of women do we select as “important” citizens, and why? How does looking at public memory from a gendered perspective lead us to consider both the desire for inclusion in “official” sites, as well as greater recognition of more personal forms of memory, such as quilts, memoir, oral traditions, or memorials to loved ones? We welcome traditional proposals from academic scholars but we also encourage participation from museum professionals or community organizers. Papers analyzing or describing recent experiences in establishing (or trying to establish) both traditional and non-traditional sites where communities remember the contributions of women citizens are particularly encouraged. Please send a proposed presentation abstract of no more than 500 words plus a one-page cv to Maureen Reed (reedmaur@gmail.com) by January 10, 2009. This panel proposal will be sponsored by the ASA Women’s Committee.
America in the Middle East, Area Studies in American Studies
DEADLINE: January 10
This panel will stand exactly at the crossroads of American Studies and Area Studies, more specifically Near/Middle Eastern Studies. Despite inspiring calls for multilingual, border-crossing works, which have peppered American Studies meetings for over a decade, most of the work that has been done on the United States in the Middle East has tended to be monolingual and provincial in archive; much of it has been written by scholars who cannot read any Middle Eastern language. This panel asks that transnational studies of America in the Middle East take a cue from studies of the United States in Latin America and be prepared to look, not just at, but also from the other side. The paper topics are flexible. They should, however, exemplify the ways in which American Studies might belong in Middle Eastern Area Studies and vice versa. Scholars who are interested in participating can email an abstract of maximum 500 words and author information including name, affiliation, e-mail address to perin.gurel@yale.edu by January 10, 2009. If you are interested in chairing, please email your CV and a short note of interest and qualifications to (perin.gurel@yale.edu).
Call for Panelists: Video Gaming, Citizenship, and Civic Engagement in the United States
DEADLINE: January 10
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has found that 97 percent of children and 53 percent of adults in the United States play video games. These numbers suggest that gaming is quickly becoming ubiquitous. As video games have become a key part of mainstream popular culture in the United States, they have also become key texts through which notions of national identity are developed and deployed. This panel will look at games as sites of articulation for civic engagement, citizenship, cultural values and identity, asking panelists to consider how “American-ness” and “American values” are articulated through and around video games. All disciplinary approaches are welcome.
Potential topics might include:
*America’s Army and U.S. military recruiting and training as gameplay.
*Guitar Hero as it relates to American popular music
*The Sims’ ambivalent capitalist ethic
*Urban planning and gaming (Sim City, Scalable City, PlastiCity, etc.)
*The transnational nature of online economies and virtual wealth in MUDs and MMORPGs and the complexity of state intervention
*American-made video games in global culture
*Virtual and real-life crime as it relates to gaming
Other topics are encouraged, as these are included only as a non-exclusive jumping off point. Those interested in participating should contact Carly Kocurek at (carlykocurek@mail.utexas.edu) with a brief vita and an abstract of 250-500 words by January 10. Queries are also welcome.
High-Tech Sustainability and Socioeconomic Justice: Seeking Panelist or Chair/Commentator
If you ask a designer, a politician, a materials scientist, and a conservation ecologist to define sustainability, you will likely hear very different answers. Taking architect William McDonough’s three “E’s” (ecology, economy, and social equity) as primary considerations in our examination of this fundamental question, this panel explores historical and contemporary interconnections between equity, economy and ecology. Although most sustainability discourses and policies omit open consideration of social equity, we place equity front and center in order to better understand the threat it seemingly poses to current practice and to visions of long-term futures. Similarly, we examine this question within the discursive frame and production systems of the high-tech rather than, say, those of local agrarianism. In essence, we aim to restore the place of people in the theory and practice of the “green” “machine in the garden” -remade-as-city (remade-as-genetically-modified-garden-or-eco-city) to interrogate the ways in which historical narratives of “progress,“ the “new frontier,“ and manifest destiny elide with socioeconomic and environmental domination and injustice.
By focusing on high-tech sustainability and socioeconomic justice, we grapple with the American faith in the technofix as potential solution to problems stemming from our past and present reliance upon technology. We therefore aim to critically analyze this cultural narrative embedded in faith in “sustainable” design solutions. What does it mean to now call some technologies “dirty,“ and then turn our efforts to creating “clean” energy solutions? Do historical discourses of “purity” and “disability” figure into these imaginings? Where, in fact, do all kinds of people fit into new eco-cities built from scratch? What do we learn about our ethics of the value of life—human or otherwise—in relation to values of controlled production and consumption? Dare we go so far as to challenge the all-encompassing global capitalist system within which high-tech sustainability functions, by considering radical social ecological alternatives such as that posed by Murray Bookchin in the 1960s? Or do we turn to cyborg urbanism for innovative solutions to urban ecological problems?
All trained in American Studies, the panelists also bring particular disciplinary perspectives to this discussion. Damian White explores urban ecological theory from a grounding in science and technology studies, a field that has until recently viewed itself often at odds with the aims of environmental studies, exemplified by Julie Sze’s investigation of Dongtan, a proposed Chinese eco-city being built by global architectural engineering firm Arup. Coming from design, architecture and art history, Christina Cogdell explores the underlying colonialist moves inherent in the fashionable theory and practice of so-called “genetically-engineered” “sustainable” design, in which architects intend to literally “grow” buildings and cities through tissue and genetic engineering. Finally, these perspectives will be broadened by audience discussion of the ways in which these projects engage and potentially reconfigure the three “E’s” into a more equitable vision of sustainability.
If you are interested in being either a panelist or chair/commentator for this panel, please contact Christina Cogdell, (christina.cogdell@gmail.com) as soon as possible. Thanks.
Darwin in America: A Keywords Approach to the 150th Anniversary of Origin of Species and the Bicentennial of Darwin’s Birth
The year 2009 marks the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859), his most famous work. Celebrations and commemorations of these two events are being planned throughout the United States and the world. The American reception of Darwin is particularly noteworthy because of the enthusiasm Americans displayed for Darwinian ideas in the nineteenth century and the pervasive skepticism of evolution that has subsequently distinguished the response to Darwin in the United States. The ongoing debates about evolution, particularly regarding whether or not it should be taught in public schools, play out at the local, state, and national levels year after year, forcing us to consider what unites (or divides) us as Americans and what sustains our communities. During this important anniversary year, American Studies scholars can play a key role in contextualizing and historicizing the U.S. response to evolution, one of the most vexing issues in U.S. history, as well as suggest what these enduring debates means for questions of citizenship, sustainability, and belonging. This panel utilizes a “keywords” approach to reflect on America’s relationship with evolutionary theory over the past 150 years. We are especially interested papers that also engage the conference themes of citizenship, sustainability, and belonging. Confirmed panelists will discuss the keywords of “gender,“ “race,“ and “religion/community.“ We seek a fourth panelist, as well as a commentator and chair. If you are interested in participating in this panel, please contact Kimberly Hamlin at (hamlinka@muohio.edu).
CALL FOR CHAIR OF SESSION: Black Man, White Man, Commander-in-Chief: Barack Obama in Popular Visual Culture
Phil Nel (Kansas State University), Tanya Sheehan (Rutgers University), and Wendy Wick Reaves (National Portrait Gallery) have organized a session on the topic of Barack Obama and popular visual culture. They are currently seeking an established scholar with interdisciplinary interests in the fields of American, visual, and/or critical race studies to chair the session. In most cases the duty of the chair is to introduce the speakers at the conference and provide 5-10 minutes of critical commentary on and framing of their work. All other session organization will be handled by the speakers. A description of the proposed session is below. Anyone interested in chairing the session should email a statement of interest and cv to Phil Nel (philnel@ksu.edu) as soon as possible; the ASA’s deadline for complete sessions (with named chair) is January 26.
Real Estate and Resistance: Representing History in the Urban Landscape
During the twentieth century historical representations of buildings and landscapes in American cities proliferated. Restoration of aging buildings and streetscapes, house and garden tours, local historical studies, historic districts, signed walking tours, as well as photographic exhibitions and documentary films, all became staples of neighbourhood and citizen group activity. Historical depictions and designations have most frequently been deployed to buttress claims about the significance and identity of place. As such, they have been a vital strategic resource in efforts to promote the distinctiveness and locally specific character of neighborhoods and underpinned their social desirability and economic value. History and “historic places” have also been powerful tools for mobilizing opposition to conventional, capitalist, urban development and for promoting narratives of belonging and continuity.
I am most interested in papers that address one or more of the following questions:
- What is the relationship between historical representation and the social/economic re-evaluation of urban districts?
- How have historical representations helped citizen groups to resist or promote social change in cities?
- In what ways have historical representations underpinned affective identification with buildings and landscapes?
- What is the role of narrative in mediating visual or architectural representations of the past?
- How have perceptions of historicity been reshaped by the increased volume of representations of the urban past?
Case studies of particular cities, districts or neighborhoods in North America are welcome as are papers that address the subject thematically and draw on examples from a range of places both in North America and beyond. My own focus is on the twentieth century but paper proposals that have a wider historical range are also most welcome.
Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to Dr. Cameron Logan at clogan@unimelb.edu.au.
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