[ecrea] CFP: Special Issue on "Oil Culture"

>Call for Paper Proposals: "Oil Culture," special issue under
>consideration with the Journal of American Studies
>
>Guest Editors:
>
>Ross Barrett, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
>(rbarre /at/ email.unc.edu)
>
>Daniel Worden, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
>(dworden /at/ uccs.edu)
>
>Petroleum has long been recognized to be a dangerously volatile
>commodity whose illuminative and propulsive capacities are inseparable
>from its destructive potential.  This catastrophic power has been
>reaffirmed by the succession of environmental disasters that have
>accompanied the global expansion of oil extraction--a series of
>ecological tragedies culminating in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon
>blowout--and the array of social antagonisms, global political
>conflicts, and chaotic economic cycles that have developed around the
>industry since its beginnings. Despite its disastrous implications,
>however, oil came to be embraced over the course of the nineteenth and
>twentieth centuries as an unassailable "fact" of everyday American
>experience, a core issue of national political platforms, and a reliable
>pillar of industrial and financial capitalism in the U.S.  While much
>work has been done to track the material and political processes that
>made the dominance of oil capitalism possible, relatively little
>scholarship has addressed the rise of oil as a cultural problem.
>
>For this special issue, we seek essays that explore the wide field of
>"oil culture" that has emerged around the American petroleum industry in
>the 150 years since its inception in northwestern Pennsylvania.  More
>specifically, we are looking for articles that examine how painting,
>sculpture, video and digital art, film and photography, popular visual
>culture and music, television programming, the print and digital news
>media, literature, advertising, and other forms of public culture have
>contended with the volatile material of oil and the systemic shifts that
>it has produced, and in so doing contributed to, or contested, the
>reorientation of modern American life around oil consumption.  We hope,
>ultimately, to assemble a roster of essays that elucidate the complex
>role that imaginative representations have played in the establishment
>of oil as the primary commodity underpinning modern economic expansion
>and a fundamental ontological construct shaping social and political
>life in the United States and beyond.
>
>Papers might address a range of subjects and problems, including:
>
>--artistic engagements with oil, the petroleum industry, and
>petro-carbon consumption
>--art, environmentalism, and sustainability
>--documentary photography and oil
>--cinematic and televisual interpretations of oil
>--oil in popular imagery and music
>--oil companies and cultural patronage
>--museums and the oil industry
>--oil advertising and marketing
>--petroleum at World's Fairs and Oil Expositions
>--architecture and the oil industry
>--the material culture of oil consumption
>--oil and the culture of automobility
>--race, class, and gender in the oil fields
>--oil, mobility, and subjectivity
>
>Proposal Process:
>
>Authors are asked to electronically submit an abstract of 500-1000 words
>and an abbreviated cv (two pages) to Ross Barrett ((rbarre /at/ email.unc.edu))
>and Daniel Worden ((dworden /at/ uccs.edu)) by September 1, 2010. Abstracts
>should articulate the central arguments, historical and/or theoretical
>implications, and methodological approach of the proposed essay, and
>situate the essay within relevant scholarly conversations.  The abstract
>and cv should be sent as Word documents or PDFs.
>
>After reviewing the proposals, the editors will notify the selected
>authors and submit chosen abstracts to the Journal of American Studies
>by September 8, 2010. Upon acceptance by the journal, authors will be
>asked to submit a full copy of their article to the issue editors by
>January 2011.  The full version of the article should not exceed 6000
>words, and should be accompanied by a short abstract (200-300 words).
>All articles will go through the peer-review process, and it is on the
>basis of these reviews that articles will be selected for publication in
>the special issue.
>
>For further information on the special issue, please see:
>
>http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=177429
>
>For further information on the Journal of American Studies, please see:
>
>http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AMS
>
>
>--
>Daniel Worden
>Assistant Professor
>Department of English
>University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
>1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway
>Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150
>(719) 255-4597
>(dworden /at/ uccs.edu)
>

----------------
ECREA-Mailing list
----------------
This mailing list is a free service from ECREA.
---
To unsubscribe, please visit http://www.ecrea.eu/mailinglist
---
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Postal address:
ECREA
Université Libre de Bruxelles
c/o Dept. of Information and Communication Sciences
CP123, avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50, b-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
----------------