CFP: Radical Intersections: Performance Across Disciplines (7 Dec; 24-26 Apr; Northwestern [Chicago])

I don't remember who might be doing performance studies, but this is close and there's a chance of getting travel money directly from the conference--in addition, of course, to EALC, EAPS, etc.

Call for Contributions: Radical Intersections: Performance Across Disciplines
A Graduate Student Conference with Keynote Speaker Sue-Ellen Case and Keynote Performance by Teatro Luna
Submission Deadline: December 7, 2008
Conference Dates: April 24 - 26, 2009
Location: Northwestern University (Evanston, IL)

Northwestern University's Department of Performance Studies invites proposals from graduate students whose research uses performance as theory, method, or praxis to join us for panel presentations,performances, and sustained dialogue. We also encourage proposals from graduate students from across the social sciences and humanities whose research concerns cultural performances, performance events, or performativity in everyday life.

Radical Intersections aims to interrogate junctures at which dissimilar ways of being, doing, and thinking rub against one another.Such junctures have the potential to disturb foundational concepts and disciplinary assumptions. As Dwight Conquergood wrote, "Our radical move is to turn, and return, insistently, to the crossroads." With performance theory gaining currency in a variety of disciplines, and performance studies itself interdisciplinary in its subjects, methods, and analytics, performance scholars often inhabit such crossroads. Graduate students, as the next generation of the academy, would do well to pause at our present junctures and explore possible directions. What choices do performance studies scholars face today, and where should performance scholarship go from here?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
· How do collaborations of performance studies with particular disciplines, sites, or public conversations provoke "radical" scholarship?
· Figuring the human body as a complex and dynamic site of radical intersections of race, class, gender, sex, and sexuality
· Queer bodies and queer spaces; communicating "trans" movements,ontologies, and aesthetics
· Going public: taking scholarship into the public, into pedagogy,and translating scholarship into performance
· Taking up space: finding, creating, and claiming space for our work
· Collisions and collaborations of performance studies with cultural studies, anthropology, theatre studies, ethnography, media studies,studies of embodiment, and other fields
· Making the comfortable uncomfortable: controversial subject matter,acts of remembering, and using the body to enact scholarship and analyze culture
· Creating rigorous scholarship while working from a place of feeling and affect
· "Performance anxiety" both within and out the discipline over performance's applications, its institutionalization, and its radical potential
· In a discipline that resists strict definition, where do our tensions lie? What prevents us from doing particular kinds of work?

We welcome competitive proposals for individual papers as well as panels not exceeding four presenters. Please submit a 300-400 word abstract and a short CV to gcmitchell at northwestern.edu by Dec 7. (Proposals for panels should include individual and panel abstracts.)

Notices of acceptance will be sent in mid-January.

Northwestern University will provide double-occupancy hotel accommodations for all presenters residing outside the Chicagoland area. (You may request a specific roommate or be paired at random with someone of the gender[s] of your choice.) There is no registration/admission fee. We also anticipate providing some additional financial assistance for travel costs for presenters.

Gregory Mitchell