Freedom: At What Cost and to Whom?

1st Global Meeting

Call for Participation 2017 

A Human Rights and Active Citizenship Project 

Friday 7th April – Sunday 9th April 2017

Lisbon, Portugal

As world events unfold, individual freedom is under threat in many regions, nations and contexts.

Writing that Shapes the World:
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

1st Global Conference
Call for Participation 2017

Tuesday 4th April – Thursday 6th April 2017
Lisbon, Portugal

Writing has been part of human history for 5,000 years, give or take a few hundred. It developed independently in more than one part of the globe which speaks to its fundamental quality as a truly human capability. And it has shaped cultures, thought processes, knowledge, and how all of these get transmitted from one person, one generation, one era to the next. Writing in a very real sense is reflexive of, and instrumental in the continuance of culture.

In the final week of January, 1977, the ABC miniseries Roots became the most-watched television program of all time. To the surprise of the show’s producers, Roots became not only a ratings windfall, but a cultural phenomenon, articulating an African-American counter-narrative of American history, provoking a dialogue about the legacy of slavery, and presenting African-American characters with a dignity and integrity that differed sharply from the caricatured representations common to television up to that time. In many ways, the response to the show by the media and the general public constitutes the first of many “conversations about race” that have punctuated the Post-Civil Rights era.

I <3 POP: An Interdisciplinary Conference

November 10-11, 2016. Keynote speaker: TBD

Department of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY; New York, NY

“If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?” –Susan Sontag

There seems to be no end to the anxieties, fantasies, pleasures, and possibilities of pop culture—how we consume it, avoid it, appreciate it, and allow it to inform our identities. Yet, can we theorize pop today? And if so, to what extent are we obligated to do so?

This conference seminar is part of the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, which will take place in Utrecht in the Netherlands, July 6th-9th, 2017. You will need to register at acla.org in order to submit your abstract.

This panel hopes to investigate affect as that which disturbs the binary logic structuring contemporary discourses on collectivity. What happens when, rather than thinking of affect’s circulation as “mediating” between subjectivity and collectivity, we allow affect to unsettle this dyad? What does it mean for affect to render undecidable the relation between individual and collective, or to orient us towards a relation possessed of no advance guarantees? How does negative affect—for example, Sedgwick’s notion that shame throws the question of identity into relief—augment normative notions of self-possession towards new understandings of relationality?

In 2006’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins defines “convergence culture” as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (2). In contemporary culture, we are no longer merely passive consumers of media: we are participants in the narrative to the point where fans often actively influence outcomes and storylines well after a primary text has been released. J.K.