A graduate conference | 18 October 2008 | George Mason University
Hosted by the Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee
Keynote Speaker: Robin Wagner-Pacifici
Gil and Frank Mustin Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College, author of The Art of Surrender, Theorizing the Standoff, and Discourse and Destruction.
Conference Theme and Topics
This conference will explore the ways in which violence is manifest in political, social and economic realms, and the various roles violence plays in the relation between these realms in any specific juncture, past or present. It will examine the ways in which violence is theorized, enacted, represented and obscured, and how we come to understand the role of historic violence in the construction of the contemporary cultural conjuncture, as well as how various histories influence the ways in which we relate to and theorize violence today.
Violence sits at the (often obscured) center of a broad range of topic areas, and many people working in various fields of cultural studies and related disciplines have to deal with the ubiquity of violence as a component of their research, and are therefore forced to theorize or at the very least deploy operational definitions of violence. These definitions, however, are often contradictory and reinscribe fundamental epistemological and ethical rifts within the discourse on culture and politics.
The 2008 Graduate Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee Conference seeks to cultivate a conversation among emerging scholars in cultural studies and related fields about the centrality and ubiquity of violence. To that end, our presenters and discussants will help to articulate the ways in which violence is encountered in lived experience and in the literature, and which will point towards possibilities for approaching, conceptualizing, and mitigating violence through future scholarship and other activities.
Guiding questions include:
- What counts as violence?
- How is violence disciplined, legitimated, monopolized, valorised, consented to, or pathologized in different contexts?
- In what ways does topical work on race, gender, postcoloniality, media studies, conflict resolution, political economy, etc., demand that violence be addressed?
- What roles have violence played in the construction of the contemporary cultural conjuncture, and how are those histories represented and received?