CFP: "Intersections of Whiteness" (Deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2016)
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Type:
Call for Papers
Date:
January 11, 2017 to January 13, 2017
Location:
Germany
Subject Fields:
American History / Studies, Cultural History / Studies, European History / Studies, Humanities, Race Studies
Call for Papers: Intersections of Whiteness, Ruhr-University Bochum and TU Dortmund, January 11-13, 2017
Deadline: July 31, 2016
The
protests against racial profiling and racist police brutality in the
U.S. and Britain, Donald Trump’s alarming comments about Muslims, the
Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina, the all-white Academy
Award nominations, the organization “Operation Black Vote” feeling
compelled to urge people of color not to leave the political field to
white people in the wake of the UK General Elections, the reactions of
the European Union to the masses of refugees and many Europeans’
xenophobic reactions to those seeking refuge: the specters of whiteness
are still urgently haunting the western world. According to France
Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, Critical Whiteness Studies is
currently in its third stage, riding its third wave so to say,
questioning “the tendency towards essentializing accounts of whiteness
by locating race as one of many social relations that shape individual
and group identity” (2011: 3).
While the discipline has established
itself as an anti-racist academic and activist practice or mode of
intervention, it is still often object to scrutiny for spotlighting
whiteness and thus possibly contributing to the continuing dominance of
whiteness. In order to dismantle this dominance and to heed Steven
Garner’s call for awareness of the “pitfalls” of whiteness studies
(2007), we believe it is necessary to identify the intricacies of
whiteness in western society and culture from a decidedly
transnational/global perspective. The first waves of Critical Whiteness
Studies established the discipline as an almost exclusively US-centered
field of inquiry whose methodology and theory-building was consequently
to a considerable degree focused on US-American particularities, yet
whiteness has since the turn of the century become what Vron Ware calls
an “interconnected global system”: “it may be produced in one place, but
its effects are not containable by cultural or political borders”
(2001: 184). This conference aims at making whiteness visible (following
Richard Dyer and Valerie Babb). We will do so by discussing the current
position of the field and concrete examples that negotiate whiteness
with a regional, national and global focus.
We are especially interested
in the interplay of whiteness and other “social relations that shape
individual and group identity” and invite presentations from cultural
studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, sociology,
anthropology, etc. Whiteness, while it is considered a system of
privilege, is informed and created by its intersections with other
categories of the self and society. Questions we wish to explore, are:
Is whiteness intersectional? How is this intersectionality played out in
different disciplines, in different cultures, in different media? While
the obvious intersections between whiteness and class, gender,
sexuality are very productive, we wish to include questions of region,
nation, ability, the body, and religion.
Whiteness and …
• critical theory
• popular culture (including television shows such as Fargo, Sons of Anarchy, True Detective, Girls, Misfits, Being Human, but also film, music, reality television, etc.)
• comedy (e.g. American standup comedian Louis CK’s deconstructions of white male identity, South African comedian Trevor Noah and others)
• the nation (comparative perspectives: e.g. U.S. <=> U.K., England <=> Wales)
• the region (e.g. the American South, Eastern Germany, the English countryside)
• feminism (e.g. first- and second-wave, post-feminism, cyberfeminism)
• fatness, dis/ability, healthism
• Marxism
• queer identities
• social networks
• critical theory
• popular culture (including television shows such as Fargo, Sons of Anarchy, True Detective, Girls, Misfits, Being Human, but also film, music, reality television, etc.)
• comedy (e.g. American standup comedian Louis CK’s deconstructions of white male identity, South African comedian Trevor Noah and others)
• the nation (comparative perspectives: e.g. U.S. <=> U.K., England <=> Wales)
• the region (e.g. the American South, Eastern Germany, the English countryside)
• feminism (e.g. first- and second-wave, post-feminism, cyberfeminism)
• fatness, dis/ability, healthism
• Marxism
• queer identities
• social networks
Please
send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short biographical info
to the organizers Evangelia Kindinger (Ruhr-University Bochum, American
Studies) and Mark Schmitt (TU Dortmund, British Cultural Studies) at intersectionsofwhiteness@gmx.de.
The deadline for paper proposals is July 31, 2016. Speakers will be notified of their acceptance by September 1, 2016.
The deadline for paper proposals is July 31, 2016. Speakers will be notified of their acceptance by September 1, 2016.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Amanda D. Lotz, University of Michigan
Katharine Tyler, University of Exeter
Vron Ware, Kingston University
Matt Wray, Temple University
Amanda D. Lotz, University of Michigan
Katharine Tyler, University of Exeter
Vron Ware, Kingston University
Matt Wray, Temple University
Contact Info:
Evangelia Kindinger (American Studies, Ruhr-University Bochum/Germany)
Mark Schmitt (British Cultural Studies, TU Dortmund/Germany)
Contact Email:
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