Communal Studies: Dedicated to the Understanding and Study of Intentional, Contemporary and "Utopian" Communities
Conferences
The CSA holds an annual conference in the Fall. The unique feature of these conferences is that they always occur at a communal site. Conference locations have included Shaker Villages, Hutterite Colonies, Harmonist sites of Old Economy and New Harmony, and the Amana Colonies. Conferences often feature additional trips to contemporary intentional communities and historic communal sites. These trips offer conference participants an exciting opportunity to experience intentional community living.
Conference Calls for Papers and other conference information
2008 CSA Conference. The CSA conference in Estero, Florida, is October 2-4, 2008.
Mark your calendars now.
List of past and future CSA conference sites
The Society for Utopian Studies Conferences:
| Bridges to Utopia 9th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society University of Limerick, Ireland, 3-5 July 2008 |
The 9th International Conference of the Utopian Studies Society will be held at the University of Limerick on 3-5 July 2008. The conference will begin at 2:30 pm on 3 July and end at 4:30 pm on 5 July.
With the theme of “Bridges to Utopia,” the conference will examine a range of topics related to utopia and utopianism, in its historical articulation and contemporary realisation. Keynote speakers are Joe Cleary (National University of Ireland, Maynooth), Bernard Gendron (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Peadar Kirby (University of Limerick), and Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University).
Call for Papers
The Centre for Critical Theory
New Radical Subjectivities:
Re-thinking Agency for the 21st Century
The University of Nottingham, UK
Friday, September 19th, 2008
Keynote Speaker – Professor Peter Hallward (Middlesex
University)
Peter Hallward is the author of Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester, 2001), Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minnesota, 2003), Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (Verso, 2006), and most recently, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2007).
This one day conference for postgraduate students and early career
researchers explores recent articulations of subjectivity and
political agency in critical theory and cultural studies. The continued
ascent of neo-liberalism and economic globalisation, along with
postmodern and poststructuralist theorising around subjectivity,
potentially sets a dangerously de-politicised subject against the
expanding forces and inequalities of contemporary capitalism.
Over the last twenty-five years, theoretical writings on the left have
stressed the need to locate subject positions beyond the reductionism
of an orthodox Marxism, and the disabling extremes of liberal anti-
essentialism. Concepts which continue to posit some form of subjective
agency have attempted to respond to the human issues at stake in
contemporary political formations without compromising a theoretical
commitment to a discursively produced subject. From Gayatri Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ and Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘radical democracy’
to more recent articulations such as Hardt and Negri’s ‘multitude’ and
the Lacanian and post-Lacanian thought of Slavoj Žižek and Alain adiou,
these writers all stress the continuing importance of leftist theories
of the subject that can provide a theoretical antidote to the excesses
of relativist pluralism and identity politics.
Such thinkers as Fredric Jameson and Susan Buck-Morss therefore stress
the importance of posing agency at a trans-individual and collective
level. These positions emphasise the importance of opposition and
agonism in any radical politics, rather than consensual or ‘third way’
liberalism. Collective identities therefore continue to offer a crucial
grounding for Leftist (re)considerations of subjectivity as a necessary
form of agency for radical change, even if these groupings prove to be
only ever strategic or temporary.
We invite papers from researchers working in critical theory, cultural
studies, literature, film, the visual arts, history, politics and the
social sciences which explore, but are not limited to, the following
questions:
Is the subject still the locus for a radical left politics?
What forms of radical or oppositional agency are now emerging?
What roles can class, gender and ethnicity play for new subjectivities?
Does the left need to go beyond opposition and resistance towards the construction of new ‘subjective’ political spaces?
What aesthetic or cultural forms are currently engaging with and creating new subjective or collective agencies?
What contributions can Lacanian and post-Lacanian thought make to contemporary political subjectivity?
Are theories of subjectivity currently responding adequately to developments in a globalized resistance, such as the anti-globalization movement, the resurgence of the left in Latin America, and religious fundamentalisms?
Do changes in social production initiated by economic and cultural globalization offer a new potential for collective emancipation, or are they only ever complicit with a hegemonic global capitalism?
Do digital technologies offer new ways for rethinking agency?
What is the role of Utopia in new political formations?
Abstracts of 200-250 words should be submitted by e-mail as a Word attachment to newradicalsubjectivities@gmail.com by 30th May 2008 and should include name, affiliation, e-mail address, title of paper and 4 keywords.
