2021 CFP
The Performance Working Group calls for proposals in conversation with the 2021 Cultural Studies Association Conference theme of “Anti-Bodies.” The 19th annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association (CSA) will be held online, June 10-12, 2021. Proposals for individual papers, full panels, and roundtables that engage the conference theme through performance and performance theory are invited along with other activist and artistic interventions. In line with the conference theme “Anti-Bodies,” the Performance Working Group is interested in proposals that explore embodied subjectivities in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and global Black Lives Matter and anti-colonial uprisings.
Given this, how can digitally mediated and online forms of performances urgently address and historicize our present moment? How can such forms interrogate, problematize, resist, and/or construct gendered, racialized, sexualized, and (dis)abled bodies? How do corporeal-digital interfaces and assemblages alter and shape our understanding of (dis)embodiment, liveness, and intimacy? How can we address matrices of privilege and dispossession made manifest in relationship to the racialized and classed labor binary of ‘work/learn from home’ and ‘essential work’ and in the variegated access to health care and services across class and racial lines? How can critiquing neoliberal discourses of ‘self-care,’ ‘creativity,’ and ‘resilience’ deepen how we understand performances of labor or of quarantine? How do collective and embodied actions against anti-black violence, police brutality, and colonial conditions complicate prevailing discourse of isolation or mediated relationships in relation to Covid-19? How can performance practices help envision new futures, grounded in liberation and called for in phrases like ‘defund the police’?
The Performance Working Group encourages topics that include but are not limited to:
Please submit all required information through Easy Chair. Find the full conference call here, inclusive of instructions for submitting proposals for individual papers, fully constituted panels, roundtables, praxis sessions, and seminars.
Deadline for submission is December 15th, 2020.
If you have questions, feel free to email the Co-Chairs of the Performance Working group: Hui Peng ([email protected]) and Gwyneth Shanks ([email protected]).
Given this, how can digitally mediated and online forms of performances urgently address and historicize our present moment? How can such forms interrogate, problematize, resist, and/or construct gendered, racialized, sexualized, and (dis)abled bodies? How do corporeal-digital interfaces and assemblages alter and shape our understanding of (dis)embodiment, liveness, and intimacy? How can we address matrices of privilege and dispossession made manifest in relationship to the racialized and classed labor binary of ‘work/learn from home’ and ‘essential work’ and in the variegated access to health care and services across class and racial lines? How can critiquing neoliberal discourses of ‘self-care,’ ‘creativity,’ and ‘resilience’ deepen how we understand performances of labor or of quarantine? How do collective and embodied actions against anti-black violence, police brutality, and colonial conditions complicate prevailing discourse of isolation or mediated relationships in relation to Covid-19? How can performance practices help envision new futures, grounded in liberation and called for in phrases like ‘defund the police’?
The Performance Working Group encourages topics that include but are not limited to:
- Biopolitics and technology
- (Dis)embodiment, liveness, and intermedial/mediatized culture
- Digital intimacy and collective imagination
- Queer and queered mediated relationships
- Social justice and liberation
- Violence, dispossession, and the body
- Neoliberal labor
- Altering and emerging performances under social distancing (such as zoom performance, one-on-one performance, solo sound walk, or score-based art)
Please submit all required information through Easy Chair. Find the full conference call here, inclusive of instructions for submitting proposals for individual papers, fully constituted panels, roundtables, praxis sessions, and seminars.
Deadline for submission is December 15th, 2020.
If you have questions, feel free to email the Co-Chairs of the Performance Working group: Hui Peng ([email protected]) and Gwyneth Shanks ([email protected]).
