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 Lisa Daily, 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.
If you have any questions about the CSA Working Groups, please feel free to contact Lisa Daily, 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.
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Black and Race Studies
Co-Chairs
Christopher Chamberlin (cechamberlin@berkley.edu) Patrice D. Douglass (patrice.douglass@duke.edu) 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. Critical Pedagogies
Chair
Sara Mitcho (smitcho@masonlive.gmu.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
Co-Chairs
Howard Hastings (aspinozist@gmail.com) Marisa Brandt (marisarbrandt@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. Ethnography
Chair: currently open
The Ethnographic Working Group investigates how the ethnographic method can continue to shed light onto the field of Cultural Studies, as well discussing the practice of ethnographic research. As a working group, we are a resource for each other and those interested in ethnographic methods. We look to discuss and debate best ethics and practices, such as how to store and document research, navigate IRB, HSRB, and other institutional review boards, negotiate certain field sites, and conduct interviews. We see the ethnographic research method as collaborative cultural work. The researcher and those researched are both participants in attempting to understand the cultural landscape laying before them. How does the presence of the researcher impact the communities we are investigating? In turn how do these communities shape our own understanding of what constitutes “research”? We are interested in all type of ethnographic research such as: community-based ethnographies, auto-ethnographies, critical ethnography, feminist ethnography, and performative-ethnographies. Furthermore, the working group would like to explore creative and non-traditional approaches to the creation and dissemination of ethnographies in the field of Cultural Studies. The Ethnographic Working Group is open to new members who are invested or interested in exploring ethnographic methods. The group meets annually at the Cultural Studies Association Conference. We plan on hosting reading groups, roundtable discussions, and panels. 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
Stefanie A. Jones (sjones@gradcenter.cuny.edu) Gwyneth Shanks (Gwynn.shanks@gmail.com ) 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. 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. |
Critical Feminist and Queer Studies
Co-Chairs
Adrian Flores (adrianf@email.arizona.edu) Eloise Murphy (tuc69999@temple.edu) 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. Cultural Policy Studies
Co-Chairs
Sean Andrews (sean.johnson.andrews@gmail.com) David Rheams (david.rheams@gmail.com) The Cultural Policy Studies Working Group is concerned with the historical and contemporary processes and institutions regulating and supporting culture in public life. Bridging practice and theory, this division welcomes scholarly and activist work that addresses the wide range of government and industry policies that shape cultural institutions in global, national, and local contexts. Particular attention is paid to questions of social inequality and cultural justice. Environment, Space, and Place
Co-Chairs
Sophie Moore (slmoore5@wisc.edu) Ned Randolph (tnedrandolph@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. 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. New Media and Digital Cultures
Co-Chairs
Mark Nunes (nunesm@appstate.edu) Jeff Heydon (jheydon@wlu.ca) 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 manifestations. 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. Theories of Cultural Studies
Co-Chairs
Mimi Yang (myang@carthage.edu) Charles Thorpe (cthorpe@mail.ucsd.edu) Jaafar Aksikas (Jaksikas@colum.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. Literature
Chair
Helen Kapstein (hkapstein@jjay.cuny.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. |
