*CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
**Radical Intersections: Performance Across Disciplines
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student*
Submission Deadline:December 7, 2008
Conference Dates: April 24-26, 2009
Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies invites
proposals from graduate students whose research uses performance as theory,
method, or praxis to join us for panel presentations, performances, and
sustained dialogue. We also encourage proposals from graduate students from
across the social sciences and humanities whose research concerns cultural
performances, performance events, or performativity in everyday life.
Radical Intersections aims to interrogate junctures at which dissimilar ways
of being, doing, and thinking rub against one another. Such junctures have
the potential to disturb foundational concepts and disciplinary assumptions.
As Dwight Conquergood wrote, “Our radical move is to turn, and return,
insistently, to the crossroads.” With performance theory gaining currency in
a variety of disciplines, and performance studies itself interdisciplinary
in its subjects, methods, and analytics, performance scholars often inhabit
such crossroads. Graduate students, as the next generation of the academy,
would do well to pause at our present junctures and explore possible
directions. What choices do performance studies scholars face today, and
where should our scholarship go from here?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• How do collaborations of performance studies with particular disciplines,
sites, or public conversations provoke “radical” scholarship?
• Figuring the human body as a complex and dynamic site of radical
intersections of race, class, gender, sex, and sexuality;
• Queer bodies and queer spaces; communicating “trans” movements,
ontologies, and aesthetics;
• Going public: taking scholarship into the public, into pedagogy, and
translating scholarship into performance;
• Taking up space: finding, creating, and claiming space for our work;
• Collisions and collaborations of performance studies with cultural
studies, anthropology, theatre studies, ethnography, media studies, studies
of embodiment, and other fields;
• Making the comfortable uncomfortable: controversial subject matter, acts
of remembering, and using the body to enact scholarship and analyze culture;
• Creating rigorous scholarship while working from a place of feeling and
affect;
• “Performance anxiety” both within and out the discipline over
performance’s applications, its institutionalization, and its radical
potential;
• In a discipline that resists strict definition, where do our tensions lie?
What prevents us from doing particular kinds of work?
We welcome competitive proposals for individual papers as well as panels not
exceeding four presenters. Please submit a 300-400 word abstract and a short
CV or bio to Radical Intersections by Dec 7. (Proposals
for panels should include individual and panel abstracts.) Notices of
acceptance will be sent in mid-January.