​Working Groups

The Cultural Studies Association is home to several research working groups. The aim of these working groups is to promote collaboration and advance specific projects of interest to the membership. Here, members gather to debate and discuss the latest questions, topics and theories, as well as host conference sessions, roundtables, and seminars. Each working group is entitled to organize two sessions at the annual meeting of the association. Use the navigation to the left to read more about each working group.

If you have any questions about the CSA Working Groups, please feel free to contact David Zeglen, Working Groups Coordinator and Wrangler, at workinggroups@culturalstudiesassociation.org.

If you have questions about a specific Working Group, please feel free to contact its designated chair and vice-chair.

Black and Race Studies

Co-Chairs
Christopher Chamberlin (cechamberlin@berkeley.edu) 
Patrice D. Douglass (patrice.douglass@gmail.com​) ​

​The Black and Race Studies Working Group centers blackness as a structural position from which to theorize the contemporary production of race. The group is dedicated to providing space for exploring black and critical race and ethnic studies not as coterminous fields, but as inhabiting an often vexed yet theoretically fruitful interrelation. Accordingly, we seek to create a forum for contemplating blackness as a problem for critical thinking, one that the feminist philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva contends “returns The Thing at the limits of modern thought.” We aim to foster work that critiques or radically dilates conventional approaches to the questions of “race” and “power,” that thinks through the racial as a limit concept and a concept of limit, and that explores new historical, theoretical, and methodological paradigms for expanding the study on race and blackness across the domains of science and art, culture and ecology, ethics and politics.
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​Critical Feminist and Queer Studies

Co-Chairs
Adrián I. P-Flores (aipflores@ucla.edu)
Jennifer Scuro (jenniferscuro@gmail.com)
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The Critical Feminist and Queer Studies Working Group dedicates itself to work that builds upon, even as it critiques, the institutions and practices of Women's and Gender Studies, focusing in particular on a historical and intersectional approach to feminism and feminist theory, transnational formations and movements, queer methodologies as well as critical feminist and queer politics, practices, and representations. We welcome work of emergent, interdisciplinary areas of inquiry in Cultural Studies including work rooted in Disability Studies and Transgender Studies. One of the aims of this Working Group is to open up a critical space for the ideas and initiatives of young scholars and junior faculty within Cultural Studies.

Critical Pedagogies

​Chair
Jaime Madden (madden@umd.edu)
Theodora Danylevich (td87@georgetown.edu)

The Critical Pedagogies Working Group includes a focus on culture and education, cultural pedagogy, and the curriculum of cultural studies. Pedagogy, broadly conceived and critically understood in this context concerns a wide range of issues taken up in cultural studies including but not limited to mass media, popular culture, subculture, public culture, nationhood, postcolonialism, political economy, identity, race, class, gender, sexuality.

Culture and War

Chair
Howard Hastings (aspinozist@gmail.com)

The CSA Working Group on Culture and War is dedicated to scholarly and activist work on the cultural aspects of war and militarism, encompassing rhetoric and language, news and mass media, fictional texts and representations, documentary film and video, new media and other cultural forms. The Working Group welcomes interventionist and critical work on wars past and present, as well as on the everyday militarization of society, from historical, theoretical, global and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Environment, Space and Place

Chair
Rich Simpson (rfs1881@gmail.com)

The ESP Working Group welcomes work grounded in traditional disciplinary approaches to nature and society, including anthropology, geography, and environmental history, as well as that which employs interdisciplinary frameworks to understand formations of and interactions between environment, space, and place. We invite theoretically, methodologically, and empirically diverse work from scholars, artists, and activists investigating the spatial and cultural dynamics of environment, space, and place, broadly conceived. The ESP highlights scholarly and activist work that illuminates the workings of nature and power, with an eye to building productive dialogue between cultural studies and such interdisciplines as eco-criticism, political ecology, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. In keeping with the political genealogy of cultural studies, the ESP especially encourages submissions that bring such explorations to bear upon contemporary concerns of environmental and social justice.
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​2022 CFP

Music and Sound Studies

Co-Chairs
Dan DiPiero (dan.dipiero@gmail.com)
Christine Capetola (ccapetola@fullerton.edu)

This working group seeks to provide a space to bring music and sound studies into conversation with interdisciplinary perspectives in cultural studies, broadly construed. We envision such conversations happening in a variety of ways, including academic papers, music criticism, and modes of engagement beyond the annual conference. In all cases, we prioritize the magic that can occur when disparate topics and methodologies collide within shared contexts and questions. Such methodologies include but are not limited to: critical race, feminist, queer, political economic, performance, affect, and decolonial studies, as well as musicology, popular music studies, and sound studies. What happens to music and sound when approached from such varied viewpoints? What happens to our understanding of culture when we pay attention to the sonorous or vibratory? In pursuing such comparative questions, this working group seeks to become a place where music and sound studies can continue to grow. We especially encourage submissions from graduate students, contingent, and early career scholars.

Film Studies

Chair
Anne Ciecko (ciecko@comm.umass.edu) 

The Working Group of Film Studies seeks to promote a critical understanding of film, television, and related media through research and teaching grounded in contemporary cultural studies, where these multiple media are situated in their larger social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts. Thus, the working group encourages all work and projects that approach and examine film, television, and related media from a variety of disciplinary, critical, theoretical, and analytical locations and perspectives.

Globalization and Culture

Co-Chairs
Katy Razzano (katyrazzano@gmail.com)
Lia Uy-Tioco (cuytioco@csusm.edu)

The CSA Working Group on Globalization and Culture is interested in providing a forum for the voices of the globalized. With the awareness that we are beginning en media res and that we are working with a binary system that currently is not capable of providing an accurate appraisal of either process nor product, this working group hopes to be able to provide support and forum for those interested in constructing a model for thinking globally, and exploring what that means, that works without reifying old distinctions.

Performance

Co-Chairs
Hui Peng (hpeng@gradcenter.cuny.edu)
Evan Moritz,  evan.moritz@mail.utoronto.ca
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The Performance Working Group investigates performance, broadly construed, as it comes to bear on cultural and social formations. The Performance Working Group is especially concerned with performances of race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, and the ways in which these performances resist, embrace, and define historical and contemporary politics. While the Performance Working Group favors mutually-constitutive intersectionality, a wide-range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches and methodologies are welcome.

The Performance Working Group is open to new members who are interested in exploring a scholarly performance paradigm. The group meets annually at the Cultural Studies Association Conference. 
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Theories of Cultural Studies

Co-Chairs
Mimi Yang (myang@carthage.edu)
Rob Carley (carley@tamu.edu)

As a field of study, Cultural Studies has always been committed to the necessity of theory and theoretical work. It is not committed to theory for theory's sake; it is rather interested in how theory and theoretical work can be deployed to better understand and transform specific historical conjunctures, contexts, and formations. This Working Group provides a forum where a multiplicity of theories and theoretical studies are explored, examined, and elaborated and where the places, uses, merits, and limits of specific theories in the field are interrogated and engaged.

Visual Culture

Co-Chairs
Caroline West (cwest410@gmail.com)  
Daniel Belgrad (dbelgrad@usf.edu)

The Visual Culture Working Group broadly considers the predominance of visuality: its particular forms, objects, histories, audiences and affective responses, and spaces of seeing as well as its theoretical and material interventions into structures of domination, oppression, and invisibility.  We ask not only about the ‘scopic regimes’ of seeing, but also about the development of particular visual technologies over time and how they have shaped and been shaped by spectatorial engagement. More theoretically, we welcome members that consider the contested terrain of the field of visual culture, its limitations and possibilities.

New Media & Digital Cultures

Co-Chairs
Jeff Heydon (jheydon@wlu.ca)  
Mark Nunes (nunesm@appstate.edu)

The Cultural Studies Association New Media & Digital Cultures Working Group concerns itself with matters of post-humanism, post-evolution, trans-humanism, cyborgism, and cyberculture in all its manifesta-tions. Technology related studies of mediated environments, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, identity, information, prosthetics, pharmaceuticals, medicine, genomics, distributed consciousness, and embodiment are among the particular contexts investigated.

2023 CFP

Literature

Co-Chairs
Helen Kapstein (hkapstein@jjay.cuny.edu)  
Michael Malouf (mmalouf@gmu.edu)

The Literature Working Group concerns itself with the juncture of literary and cultural production, placing text in context, and exploring the ways in which literature reflects and shapes its political, cultural, and historical settings. Cultural studies has its roots in literary studies, as Jonathan Culler reminds us: “Cultural studies arose as the application of techniques of literary analysis to other cultural materials. It treats cultural artefacts as ‘texts’ to be read rather than as objects that are simply there to be counted. And, conversely, literary studies may gain when literature is studied as a particular cultural practice and works are related to other discourses.” This WG supports literary analysis of texts of all kinds, in the belief that text matters, as it shows us material and imaginative realities. We invite emerging and established scholars, activists, and authors to imagine new ways to make these connections and to intervene in these fields.

2023 CFP