Call For Papers Mardi Gras Conference 2024: Legacies of Power and the Power of Legacies

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, February 1-3, 2024. 

Historically, universities and many other institutions have been contested sites for both progressive and reactionary forces seeking to agitate for equality or shore up social hierarchies. As these contests increase in modern times, longstanding institutions, especially universities, need to engage with their past and confront how the past has directly influenced their contemporary form. Indeed, imagining creative reforms to existing institutions or revolutionary alternative institutional structures first requires significant (re)consideration of the legacies of power and the power of legacies. Questions of the role of power and how power operates are at the center of numerous discussions around the university, government, education, and activist efforts. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to open those questions and discussions by focusing on legacies.

In particular, the conference seeks to interrogate legacies of power in relation to ideas about social, cultural, economic, political, and even religious progress in traditional academic understandings of scholarship and critical inquiry. A rigorous exploration of legacies of power could interrogate the idea of legacy in response to questions such as: What is legacy? How are legacies personified in positive and negative ways? How have marginalized groups navigated institutional legacies? How should oppressive institutions be historicized? What is the relationship between the histories of power and their contemporary manifestations? How do legacies speak to society's past, present, and future? How can thinking about legacies advance scholarly practice? How are legacies represented in literature? In what ways do the legacies of literary scholarship and criticism affect the field today? Are there legacies of genre/form/style? What is the relationship between legacies of power and canon formation?

The LSU Mardi Gras Conference is an interdisciplinary conference that solicits proposals engaging with any of the above and related questions. While this is primarily a conference for graduate students looking to share their research and ideas, we also welcome proposals from undergraduate students and emerging scholars. The conference is organized yearly by graduate students in English, but we invite abstract submissions from diverse disciplines and research areas that investigate and provide interesting case studies, historical perspectives, methods, and analytic approaches to understanding and engaging with legacies of power.

We welcome proposals for both academic and creative work addressing the theme and related topics. Other potential work could respond to the following:

How do legacies of power manifest in/through: Literature, Art, Music, Media, Performance, Education, History, Creative Writing, Race, Ethnicity, Ecology/Enviromentalism, Science, Philosophy, Religion, Pedagogy, and Culture. 

Proposals for individual papers (300 words or less) and panels (with individual paper abstracts at most 300 words) are invited until December 31, 2023. This conference will be held both in person and virtually. 

Contact Byron, Zach, and Denis at MGConf2024@gmail.com for inquiries and submissions.