Featuring Lauren Berlant as Distinguished Keynote Speaker
Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago and author of The Female Complaint:The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture
The Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee (SOC) at George Mason University invites paper proposals for our 3rd Annual Cultural Studies Graduate Conference. The Conference will take place on Saturday, September 26, 2009 at George Mason University (Research 1 Building, Room 163) in Fairfax, Virginia.
Call for Papers
This graduate conference considers practices, institutions, and products that promise happiness or "the good life." This is typically expressed as self-realization or finding one's purpose, to use Agamben’s term. This includes 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 excellence 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 seek 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.
Please send a 500 word abstract of your presentation and a short CV to Michael Lecker (mlecker AT gmu DOT edu) by 15 June 2009.