cfp.english.upenn.edu

The contemporary moment is fraught with the rhetoric of failure and decline. Daily, it seems, political, artistic, and entertainment outlets alert us to broken systems, policies, and promises. How might we rethink failure as an opportunity to engage in more ethical human and nonhuman relationships? Can the failures of democracy, the economy, the classroom, and of culture more broadly open up possibilities for success? How do we recognize our fallibility, learn from it, and cope with it?
In a moment when dysfunction is such a significant part of both private and public life, this conference will embrace an interdisciplinary approach to considering failure's destructive and productive aspects in historical and contemporary culture.

Topics may include:

-Failings of higher education
-Pedagogical success and failure
-Poetics of failure
-Failure in film, TV, art, and literature
-Rhetoric of failure in theory and criticism
-Feminism and failure
-The “queer art” of failure
-Economic failure and debt crisis
-Political or revolutionary failure
-Failed states
-Digital technologies and failure
- Digital humanities as a response to deficiency
- Glitches, and other technological failures
-Scientific advancements and failures
-Environmental disasters
-Legal failings, human rights, war, and genocide

Keynote: Jack Halberstam (USC, Author of The Queer Art of Failure)

The eighth annual Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC) will be held at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee February 15-16, 2013, in conjunction with the Center for 21st Century Studies

Please submit an abstract of 300 words or less outlining your presentation. Include your institutional affiliation, department, and whether you are an MA or PhD student.
Abstracts will be read blindly.
Deadline for submissions: December 1.
http://www.themigc.com themigc@gmail.com