cfp.english.upenn.edu

***********************Extended Deadline*************************
Abstracts must be submitted no later than January 8th 2012

Bowling Green State University Presents the 7th Annual Battleground States Conference
3R: Response, Re/Action, Revolt
February 23rd – 26th 2012

Madison. Egypt. Ohio’s labor wars. Planned Parenthood. Iqbal Masih. Bayard Rustin. Convention at Seneca Falls. London’s Riots. Monsanto Protests. Aung San Suu Kyi. Public Enemy. East Timor Action Network. New York Collective of Radical Educators. The Pan Africanist Congress…

This is our time for Response.
This is our time for Re/Action.
This is our time for Revolt.

This is a call to scholars, activists, students, geographers, educators, artists, and gate-openers who project the voices that promote and progress knowledge and solutions. We seek productive and creative dialogues that invigorate human agency and reconstruct reality in the vision of its peoples. We have witnessed history, both draconian and radical: now it is time to inspire, teach, learn, and communicate solutions.

Response, Re/Action and Revolt can be spontaneous, systematic, militant, peaceful, theoretical, practical, historical, contemporary, passionate or ambitious. We welcome research, education, activism, and artistic production that investigates while complicates and expands the dimensions of economic, cultural, and political systems, and provides a unique insight into the reshaping of societies.

We are accepting proposals for panel and paper presentations, roundtable discussions, workshops, screenings, artistic displays or performances on the conference theme and including, but not limited to, the following questions and themes.

- How might the intersection of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, education, animality, agriculture, spirituality, and environmental issues etc. be used as an avenue of change?
- What are the similarities and overlaps between teaching/learning and activism?
- How can we empower the responses and re/actions that threaten global and capitalistic industrial complexes? Academic industrial complexes? Media industrial complexes? Military industrial complexes?
- What are the methods to balancing extremity and austerity?
- How do we position and encourage the representation and work of peripheral political movements?
- What are the means and solutions to fighting widespread ambivalence and apathy?

- Power dynamics within progressive groups and revolutionary systems.
- The effective methods to communicate responses, re/actions, and revolts.
- Historical responses to austerity, change, and productive thought.
- Burgeoning and established scientific, medical and environmental conduits of change.
- The cross section of regionalism, localism, and globalism as a seed of change.
- Popular culture and austerity.
- The art and music of activism or the activism of art and music.
- Popular culture, artistic production, digital technologies, animal, sports, food, literary and media relationships to capitalistic overproduction and progressive underproduction.
- The production and delineation of mainstream, underground, and guerrilla information/knowledge systems.

We recognize that contemporary discourses and practices engender a wide range of techniques that remodel theoretical, political activism, academic analysis and cultural production. We therefore welcome innovative and thoughtful presentations that this list lacks to encapsulate.

Abstracts of 300 words should be sent to battlegroundstates@gmail.com and must be submitted no later than January 8th 2012. Submissions should include media equipment requests and any special presentation requests. Panel, performance, and artistic display proposals are welcome and should include a 300-word abstract and contact information for all participants.