[Commlist] 2019 Neil Postman Graduate Conference in Media, Culture and Communication at NYU

Below is the call for papers for the annual Neil Postman Graduate 
Conference in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, 
which may be of interest to graduate students and scholars in your 
departments. The conference website with further information can be 
found here: http://postmanconference.org

*Come to Pass* | The 2019 Neil Postman Graduate Conference

*NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication*
*Conference Date: November 1, 2019*
_Abstract Deadline: June 15, 2019
_
*Keynote **Neferti X. M. Tadiar* 
<https://barnard.edu/profiles/neferti-x-m-tadiar>, Professor and Chair, 
Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University

What is coming to pass? How do we experience that which is passing us 
everyday? From coastal vantages, friends and lovers wish safe passage 
with the wave of a hand. In the berths of ships, this security is 
furnished both through documents of passage — visas, tickets, logbooks — 
as well as the logistics of oceanic travel and maneuvers of the ship.

Yet transversal, identity, and its mediations sometimes run athwart of 
each other. After failed attempts, user and password meet interface as 
impasse. Students get caught lolling in the hallway without a pass only 
to face the fury of administrators. No, safe passage is not guaranteed. 
It is a matter of strategy and planning. Taking on the clothes, 
haircuts, language, and gestures of gendered, sexualized, or racialized 
normativity, we inhabit forms of passing only to reject them in more 
familiar community.

Saying passage is a matter of survival is to point to both the quotidian 
and the crisis. One moment, we’re occupying the ethics of sociality. 
Someone says, “Pass the salt.” And the next, that someone has “passed 
on”. Passage directs us from one register to another, from one world to 
another. These are not merely euphemisms. Our rituals and rites of 
passage move us forward. They are not something we can pass up.

The 2019 Postman Graduate Conference invites graduate students, artists, 
and independent scholars to submit projects that attend to passage and 
acts of passing. Recognizing the mobility of the concept, the selection 
committee welcomes interdisciplinary responses, artist talks, and 
academic papers which meditate on passing and its possibilities as modes 
of inquiry and survival.

Possible topics include (but are by no means limited to):

  * Temporalities of passage
  * Borders, nation-states, securitization, and migration
  * Strategies of trespassing
  * The experience and aesthetics of passing
  * The materialities and measurements of sensation
  * Gendered and/or racialized performativity as “passing”
  * Risk, speculation, and logistics
  * Blackness and the Middle Passage
  * Debility, capacity, and technological mediation
  * Surveillance and policing of affect
  * Modes of evidence and witnessing
  * Biopolitics, necropolitics, sovereignty, and capital
  * Forms of political violence
  * Rites of passage and passage as religious motif
  * The passage and literature
  * Translations across languages, ontologies, and epistemologies

*** Please email submissions to (postman.nyu /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(postman.nyu /at/ gmail.com)> by _June 15, 2019_. Abstracts should be 
250-300 words in length, formatted as Word documents (.doc, .docx), and 
accompanied by a CV ***
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