Ann Arbor, Michigan / Zoom (Hybrid)
Deadline for abstracts: June 30th (up to 250 words)
Submission Form: https://forms.gle/9zENxMYi9i1Wotu67
Free and open to the public

The 2025 Charles F. Fraker Graduate Conference, organized by the Department of
Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, invites participants to
critically engage with the interplay of capitalism and desire.
The Anthropocene marks an era of profound ecological, economic and existential crisis.
Amidst climate breakdown —what Lucas Pohl and Samo Tomsic call “the ultimate surplus
product of capitalism”— we confront not only the devastation wrought by capital but also its
extraordinary libidinal grip. What, then, becomes of desire in a moment where the future of life
itself hangs in the balance? In other words, does desire as a concept still matter in the era of
climate crisis?

In this sense, we ask questions such as: how has the libidinal economy tied to extraction
and consumption deepened the ecological crisis? What forms of individual and collective
fulfillment might emerge in a society freed from the logic of capital accumulation? How might
we rethink desire not within the anthropocentric categories that enabled the current crises but
as a potential locus for imagining alternative futures?

In light of the current uncertainty surrounding funding availability at many universities
due to federal budget cuts, the conference will be held in a hybrid format. The acceptance of
presentations for Zoom panels will be more competitive.

We welcome papers that examines capitalism and desire from a variety of perspectives,
fields, themes and media, including, but not limited to:

• Accumulation and
• Dispossession
• Care and Commonality
• Cinema
• Crisis and Culture
• Critical Race Theory
• Democracy, Law, and Justice
• Disability Studies/Crip Theory
• Ecocriticism
• Gender and Sexuality
• Heritage Studies
• History and Historicity
• Illustration
• Indigenous & Afrodiasporic Studies Literature
• Museum Studies
• Narrative/Narratology
• Nation-state and Empire
• Performance
• Photography
• Science, Technology and Society
• Speculative Fiction
• Social Reproduction Theory
• Technologies
• Translation Studies
• Urban Studies
• Violence and Trauma