[ecrea] CALL FOR PAPERS: Between Urgency and Abstraction: Cultural Studies After Stuart Hall

CALL FOR PAPERS !

BETWEEN URGENCY AND ABSTRACTION: CULTURAL STUDIES AFTER STUART HALL
June 2014 (exact date TBC)
Goldsmiths, University of London

“Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name 
is the point of cultural studies? … At that point, I think anybody who 
is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must 
feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little 
it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get 
anybody to do anything. If you don’t feel that as one tension in the 
work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.”
– Stuart Hall

We may allow Stuart Hall’s recent death to mark an opportunity for 
reflection on the history of the field of cultural studies, its 
inherited imperatives and future trajectories. Hall called for a direct 
engagement between the academy and the social world ‘outside’ of it, 
imagining cultural studies as the site of this interaction – and hence a 
site of both contestation and radical politics. Compared to fields such 
as sociology, this imperative was reflected in a methodological freedom 
that has been the basis of cultural studies’ flourishing and the crisis 
of identity which seems to continually confront it. Is this freedom a 
threat to cultural studies’raison d’être and character, once located in 
the sense of political urgency inherited from Hall, or does it now 
encompass a more abstract reading of the political as rhetorical and 
aesthetic production? Is this move away from its Marxist roots a 
denaturing of cultural studies, or a necessary move with the times? And 
what does the shift in cultural studies tell us about the shift in 
contemporary politics more generally?

This conference will involve a genealogical reading of the field of 
cultural studies, opening up to an interrogation of its contemporary 
orientation, aims and (anti-) methodologies. From its right to risk and 
experimentation to its urge to bring knowledge outside of institutions, 
we seek to explore cultural studies’ different iterations in order to 
reaffirm its contemporary relevance as both an academic field and a 
political force.

Contributions could include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

    * The relation between cultural studies and 
sociology/science/philosophy/fine art/digital technologies
    * History or historiography of cultural studies
    * Cultural studies vs. critical theory (Frankfurt School)
    * Cultural studies from a non-Western perspective
    * Gender politics in cultural studies
    * The relation between theory and practice
    * Critical perspectives on methodologies and disciplinary structures
    * Post-Marxism and cultural studies
    * The university as site for political struggle
    * Theory as ‘real abstraction’
    * The interplay between art, research and politics
    * Knowledge production under computation-based media technologies

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: 12th May 2014
Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words, for presentations of 
between 10-20 minutes. Please include a 100 word biography with your 
name, email address and institutional affiliation (where possible). 
Submissions should be sent to (goldculturalstudies2014 /at/ gmail.com). Please 
include the words “CFP: Urgency and Abstraction” in the subject title.



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