University at Albany 12th Annual EGSO Conference:

TRANSACTION

March 28-29, 2014

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Anna McCarthy

Transactions are generally thought of as financial exchanges between two parties, but transactions can also be considered more broadly as any interaction between people, documents, ideas, and forces. In academic studies, transaction is a multidisciplinary concept that provides different areas of study for individual disciplines. From scholars in business who may be concerned with contracts, to students working in English studies who might concern themselves with the exchange that occurs between text and reader, from historians who may concentrate on the nuances of a type of transaction in a particular time period, to artists working toward formal innovations enabling new modes of transaction, the term "transaction" can provide a bridge between disciplines. For our 12th annual conference, we invite graduate students of all disciplines to submit critical papers and creative works that address transaction as a broad concept, considering both its ubiquity and its discipline-specific areas of study.

We are pleased to announce that this year's keynote speaker will be Dr. Anna McCarthy, professor at New York University. Dr. McCarthy is the co-editor of the journal Social Text. She is also the author of Ambient Television and The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America.

We schedule approximately 15 to 20 minutes for each presentation. For critical presentations, please submit a 250-word abstract to egsoalbany@gmail.com. For creative presentations, please send an email with a small sample of your creative work (.mp3, .jpeg, .tif, .avi, .mp4, or .doc files), as well as a 250-word description of your presentation to egsoalbany@gmail.com. We are particularly interested in creative works that are complemented by an explanation of how the author/artist sees his/her work contributing to critical discussions about transactions. Submissions are due by January 17, 2014.

Scholars might consider the following areas of interest:

• Commodity: market exchange, deals, contracts, negotiations, capital, e-commerce, value and labor, surplus
• Space: marketplace, online spaces, contact zones, ecology, private and public spheres
• Emotion and Affect: interpersonal exchange, trauma, community and rupture
• Psychology: analytical models; psychoanalysis: drives and desire, ideal-ego, ego-ideal and identification, jouissance, transference and intersubjectivity, gaze
• Body, Gender, and Sexuality: pornography, prostitution, disability, virtual bodies, gender performativity and social activism (trans-action)
• Medicine and Biology: genetics, immunization, transplantation, prosthesis, contagion, euthanasia, commodification of medicine
• Rhetoric and Communication: transactional rhetoric; translation; dramatic and theatrical transactions; relationships between author, audience, and text
• Textuality: print culture, intertextuality, publication, circulation, culture of letters
• Globalization: global English, languages of cultural exchange, cosmopolitanism and cross-cultural transaction, global scholarship
• History and Records: colonial and postcolonial transactions, inheritance and genealogy, memory and its media, promises and temporal transactions
• Subjects and Objects of Transaction: power structures, slavery and trafficking, animals and animality, marriage, transaction as tool
• Artist and Audience: collaboration, confession, expression, directionality of transaction, aesthetics in cross-cultural transactions
• Exclusion and Excess: leftovers, transactional gains and losses, black market, accessibility