Submissions Due: February 1, 2016
2016 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) Conference
Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association (US)
Villanova University, Villanova, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2-5 June, 2016
“The theme, Policing Crises Now, is prompted by and departs from the rich and diverse innovations and provocations of ‘Policing the Crisis’ (1978), a groundbreaking work generated by a collective of scholars, including and facilitated by Stuart Hall. Those innovations and provocations include the collective nature of the research, the conjunctural/structural mode of analysis, the attention given to race, gender and sexuality in political-economic dynamics, as well as the analysis of intertwined statistical representations, media representations, legal proceedings and, of course, policing by police, as a response to a “crisis of hegemony.
Taking up Policing Crises Now, in the current conjuncture, requires fresh theorization both of policing, in light, especially, of the potential elasticity of the metaphor, and of crisis in light of its diverse deployments in critical analysis, dominant political-economic practice, and popular culture. By pluralizing crises, we aim to open the scope of inquiry at this conference to include the full range of social, cultural, natural, political, and economic phenomena to which the term crisis has been attached. We also aim, under this rubric, to develop conversations engaged during our last conference about the structure of university work and employment, the ways knowledge production is constrained and enabled by austerity politics, neoliberal entrepreneurialism, the prominence of debt and risk, and the university as a site of policing of thought and political activism. It is our hope that this conference both builds from and enables collective knowledge production and research practices.” Read more…