Re/Inventions 2015: Consumption CSULB April 9th 2015

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California State University Long Beach English Graduate Student Association
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Re/Inventions 2015: Consumption
4th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Featuring Keynote Speaker: UC Riverside's Dr. Susan Zieger
April 9th, 2015

Abstracts Due: March 1st, 2015

Re/Inventions is the annual conference organized by the English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) of California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). Our goal is to provide a forum in which graduate students and advanced undergraduates may share their academic research and practice their presentation skills in a conference setting. Re/Inventions promotes interdisciplinary collaboration and engagement among students from Southern California and around the globe.

The theme of this year's conference is "Consumption." In the last few decades, scholars have addressed the concept of consumption in terms of the ways in which we consume food, politics, media, marketing, music, art, fashion, and more. We would like to extend this line of questioning. How have we historically consumed literature, and how do we consume it now? How does literature treat our forms of consumption? How do we produce, perform, and consume mass culture? Is there, and should there be, an ethics of consumption? How do our literal forms of consumption reflect or diverge from our figurative forms of consumption? In what ways does education combat ideologies of consumption, and in what ways is it complicit in those ideologies? What are the implications of using technology that increasingly consumes our lives? These are just some of the inquiries we envision this conference tackling.

This interdisciplinary conference encourages abstracts that explore the theme of Consumption from a wide range of fields and disciplines. While this forum is intended for the presentation of scholarly articles and/or projects, a limited number of creative and multimedia submissions will also be considered. Suggested topics and schools of thought include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Narratives of feasts, excess/gluttony/ indulgence, hunger, famine, poverty, disease, cannibalism, regurgitation, scatology, etc. (food studies)
• Class representations of consumption
• Pharmaceuticals and drug use
• Waste and waste management, including consumption and preservation of natural resources (ecocriticism and animal studies)
• Ideologies of the body (gender, queer, racial, and disability studies)
• Consumption/assumption of identity (and performance/performativity)
• Print and literary culture, and history of the book
• Literacy, education, and readership, and the production of knowledge (reader-response theory)
• Circulation of propaganda and defiant consumption
• Display and consumption of affect (affect theory)
• Mass media and pop culture, including fandoms of film and TV series
• Physical vs. digital consumption, including social media as an information source
• Interventions in traditional media (i.e., the role of amateur professionalism)
• Modes, cultures, and conflicts of production, of distribution, and of consumption
• Consumer culture and other social/economic systems
• Ideas of the "prosumer"
• Collection vs. consumption; active vs. passive consumption
• Public vs. private consumption (and consumption of the public vs. private spheres); individualized vs. communal consumption
• Dystopian imaginings of consumption and consumption of violence
• Consumption of commodities, and commodification of consumption

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and a current CV to egsa.csulb@gmail.com by March 1st, 2015. Please note any A/V needs. Presentations should run approximately 12 to 15 minutes.