The Cultural Studies Student Executive Committee at Claremont Graduate University is happy to announce that it is has extended the deadline for the submission of proposals for its 2014 conference, Visual Communities: Struggles and Resistance. Scheduled for April 11, 2014, this conference seeks to highlight the unique theoretical, topical, and methodological aspects of Cultural Studies. We welcome and encourage submissions for all CGU students, alumni, and undergraduates from the Claremont Colleges.
The roots of Cultural Studies are deeply connected to the metaphor of struggle. We encourage submissions that engage with the various forms of struggle that emerge from local, global, textual, media, digital, visual, and intimate spaces. Some of the questions raised here include: How do these struggles become a vehicle for community and digital activism? Resist dominant forms of representation/ repression? Inform tensions of identity, race, sexuality, class, gender, disability? These questions point towards the unstable terrain of the multiple ways of knowing and surviving that can be found within activist practice, the academy, and communities, both local and global. These forces occupy a multiplicity of locales—memory, political history, literature, performance, and the visual are possible points of departure for the recognition/exploration of struggle and resistance.
The instability of this landscape is something we embrace in form as well as content. Not all projects are executed within traditional forms of writing; critical engagement may take a form not normally found in the classroom. Students with documentaries, art projects, performance, and any other form of hybrid/non-traditional project are especially encouraged to submit. Some key words that the conference seeks to illuminate: Narratives, Representation, Reflection, Media, Archive, Performance, Museum, Culture, Nationalism, Disability, Tradition, Practice, Sexuality.