Open call for panelist proposals: Reparative Turn in Practice and the Relativity of MonstersPlease submit proposals on or before: April 15, 2020

This open call is for submission of presentations that if selected, will be included in a full panel proposal which will be submitted for the 109th College Art Association annual conference set to take place February 10-13, 2021 at the Hilton New York Midtown, New York, NY

About the conference: “The CAA Annual Conference brings together over 5,000 art historians, artists, designers, and visual arts professionals in all stages of their careers.”-CAA. Further Information on the 2020 CAA conference available here for context.

Panel topic:

This call seeks proposals from those with reparative-based practices in fine art whose artistic research addresses issues of social justice in relation to constructions of gender, race, and/or sexuality. In Reparative Reading, Paranoid Reading (2003) Sedgwick proposed that a critical reparative-based approach offers promising, productive, and undiscovered potential to create individual and social agency that produces a move toward an exit from identity-based bias by reaching for pleasure rather than avoiding shame while also assimilating the violence and trauma that permeates these systems (Sedgwick: 2003; and Best: 2016). A reparative turn offers a constructive action, a re-making-inventing of an empowered-self narrative, an undertaking of a kind of surgery on wounds inflicted by systemic oppression, producing a hopeful exit from othering’s shadows in the context of a creative imaginary engaged with the many possible new existence(s) repair might produce. If accepted, this panel will foreground fine art research practices that consider reparative instead of paranoid approaches which currently dominate the fields of liberatory identity studies. This panel seeks to further Sedgwick’s proposal for investment in reparative work by offering critical analyses of artistic practices that enfold some facet of repair for the artist and/or the viewer. Specifically, this call seeks contributions foregrounding artistic practices that embody subversive imaginaries in revolt against hegemonic and social othering through a reparative turn towards agency and an exit from dynamics of bias. Constructions of bias and marginalization often work in tandem with monsterizing the targeted subject/object. Proposals focused on fine art research that utilizes monster theory and or monstrous practices in relationship with liberatory identity studies are strongly encouraged. When the monster is relative to the context of the viewers constructed conceptions, how and through what kind of practices, can or does art intervene through a reparative turn? Panelist proposals must be focused on fine art practices. Artists who work in traditional mediums, especially painting and drawing, are strongly encouraged to submit.

Brief guidelines on CAA and the panel format: 

All panel participants are required to be members of CAA.

All sessions are 90 minutes in length and are scheduled Wednesday, through Saturday of the conference in the following timeslots:

8:30–10:00 AM || 10:30 AM–12:00 PM || 2:00–3:30 PM || 4:00–5:30 PM || 6:00–7:30 PM-on Thursday and Friday only

Please follow the Chicago Manual of Style for your submission.

More details available in the CAA CFP FAQ’s.

If you would like to submit a proposal to present as part of this panel, please upload the information below via the 'submit proposal button' on this site http://www.shannonforrester.com/cfp no later than April 15, 2020

The application functionality will not allow for returning to or saving your application, so just have everything ready to upload before starting.

• Your email address

• Your full name

• Your affiliation and title

• Your CAA Member ID

• Presentation title (maximum of 15 words)

• Paper or presentation abstract (maximum of 250 words)

• Shortened CV

• You may include a link to one single image related to your proposal

• Professional website

  Thank you, I look forward to reviewing your submission