This list is of the 12 program areas and their corresponding abstracts/chairs. Questions about a particular program area should be addressed directly to the area chair.

Critical Pedagogy & Cultural Studies

We invite paper presentations, as well as interactive and performance sessions that engage a variety of issues, questions and concerns related to critical pedagogy. We especially encourage papers or panel sessions that link critical pedagogy to both structural issues and lived cultural experiences as these relate to race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexualities. Given the international scope of the conference, we hope to draw scholars, teachers, researchers, popular/labor educators and educational activists from a variety of countries. Among others, these include the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, as well as the U.S.

In particular, the area sessions on critical pedagogy hope to reinvigorate the spirit of Paulo Freire, who in his life long work sought to rewrite the world. During a relatively brief time since the catastrophically tragic attacks on 9/11, we in the US and the UK have begun to relive the horrors of Vietnam. Despite a nearly worldwide consensus to the contrary, the US and the UK launched an unsanctioned war on Iraq and illegally occupied its territory. As a direct consequence of these actions, these nations are losing a soldier a day to war. The sessions hope to al least partially interrupt the manipulative rhetoric of the war metaphor and affect pedagogical change, both at the sites of instruction in the global classroom and at the places of the discourses of policy making. We invite sessions that concretely address the complex issues of military violence and the politics of misinformation.

The major purpose of these conference sessions is to help lay the groundwork for infusing new life into international dialogues linked to particular philosophies and practices of critical pedagogy around the world today, and its possibilities for the future. Selected papers and performance sessions (eg. poetry, theater, etc.) will also be considered for inclusion to an anticipated Special Issue on critical pedagogy in the journal Cultural StudiesóCritical-Methodologies. Please submit proposals to both area chairs (note: mailing address is the same for both).

Chairs:
Luis F. Miron (email: lfmiron@uiuc.edu)
Antonia Darder (email: adarder@uiuc.edu)

Address:
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
366 Education, mc-708
1310 S. Sixth St.
Champaign, IL, USA, 61802

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The Political & Cultural Studies

"The political and cultural studies" area seeks panel and paper proposals that explore the basic assumptions and values that inform the political dimensions of collective life. We are interested in theoretical or empirically oriented research; in each case, we want projects whose aim is not only to describe the realities of violence and injustice, or political action and social change, but also to interpret and evaluate the practices and institutions that abet or challenge those realities. We welcome contributions that skillfully illuminate the ways theoretical questions and conceptual issues resound in the great dramas and quotidian realities that arise among people living together. Contributions might analyze specific political, social, economic or cultural aspects of globalization or address "the global" more theoretically by exploring the causes and consequences of given or possible ways of envisioning the world. Likewise, contributions might explore the implications of global inequalities for our understanding of basic political concepts such as equality, democracy, rights and property, or consider the principles and goods that we value and why we do or should value them. Obviously, these suggestions are hardly exhaustive of the possibilities. But, in keeping with the stated mission of the conference, we encourage all proposals to articulate the connections between their research and the causes and consequences of political life.

Chair:
Melissa A. Orlie (email: orlie@uiuc.edu)

Address:
Melissa A. Orlie
Department of Political Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
361 Lincoln Hall, mc-452
702 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL, USA, 61801

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Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Pedagogy

The events of 9-11 have had a profound impact on a range of theoretical and political debates: about the changing nature of the so-called ‘new world order’; about the new configurations in the global movement of capital, ideas and people; about postcolonial theory’s claim to institutional authority; and about issues of pedagogy consonant with certain structural transformations in history. From a postcolonial perspective, it has been argued that the historical processes of globalization articulate with colonialism, imperialism and Eurocentrism in a range of contradictory ways; and that the local and the imperial global are interconnected phenomena and act upon one another to construct indigeneity and racialized identities in ways that engender inequalities, restrict human rights, and infringe the democratic and civil rights of the marginalized and the disenfranchised. At the same time, these processes permit conditions of resistance for the creation of counter-hegemonic ideas, expressions, social practices and institutional structures. In such oppositional work, pedagogic work, both institutional and community-based, is important. This section of the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference invites papers that focus on the interconnections between postcolonialism and globalization as they affect the nature and possibilities of critical pedagogy. Papers reporting case studies of resistance and agency of people at the margins, and analyzing projects of critical pedagogy are particularly encouraged

Chair:
Fazal Rizvi (email: frizvi@uiuc.edu)

Address:
Fazal Rizvi
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
377 Education, mc-708
1310 S. Sixth St.
Champaign, IL, USA, 61820

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Race, Identity, & Representation

This program area is proposed against the backdrop of important changes in social dynamics taking place on a global scale. These dynamics have profound implications for racial affiliation and “its” cultural and social uses in the new century. What had appeared in the early 1990s as emergent cracks in the racial order and the scholarly paradigms that had been advanced to understand these developments had by the end of the last century grown into a full-blown metamorphosis in the terms and conditions in which race could and would be articulated and struggled over. No longer can scholars comfortably “place” culture with race into predictable multicultural slots. Culture and identity has been dirempted from place and the cultural porosity precipitated by the movement of people, economic and symbolic capital, and the proliferation, amplification and circulation of images across the globe has deeply unsettled ethnic enclaves, even the dominant Eurocentric preserves. This is the moment in which we live—a moment of radical reconfiguration and re-narration of the relations between centers of power and their peripheries. Nothing has more powerfully illustrated and underscored this for us than the radical historical and earth shattering events of September 11, 2001. The critical events of that day—the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crescendo of the fall out attendant to these extraordinary acts—and their implications for the taken-for-granted organizing categories such as “race,” “nation,” “state,” “culture,” “identity,” and “Empire” threaten to consume us all.

In the language of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), it is striking how fragile modern forms of center-periphery arrangements of imperial rule are. Indeed, in addition to all the destabilizing effects and modulations taking place within the US metropolis itself—the declaration and prosecution of the war on terrorism, the war on Iraq and the attendant pacification at home, the extension of the policing powers of the state, economic tremors of recession, etc.—there are extraordinary ripple effects around the world. We see new, very tenuous alliances built under the symbolic umbrella of the flag and patriotism sucking in excluded racial minorities such as African Americans and Latinos along with traditionally hegemonic Anglos into a newly expanded cultural dominant built around the flag and service to country. In certain contexts, this process of new temporal configuration is effectively displacing others—namely Arab Americans, for instance, who are now being declared in a wholesale manner as the newly conspicuous enemy within. We have seen, too, with the war on terrorism, the war with the Taliban, and with Iraq, greater extension of regulation and surveillance at home in the US as concerns and alarms are raised about the security of our borders, particularly the one to the South shared with Mexico.

All of these developments have complicated the matters of race, identity and representation considerably. The central purpose of this Area, then, is to bring critical theoretical, methodological and policy reflection to bear on this present historical conjuncture characterized by new dynamics associated with racial formation and structuration and their broader connections to the crises in the accumulation, legitimation, and boundary maintenance functions of modern states.

**Note: Email submissions only**

Chair:
Cameron McCarthy (email: crossroadsrace@yahoo.com)

Address:
Cameron McCarthy
Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
228 Gregory Hall, mc-463
810 South Wright St.
Urbana, IL, 61801

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Performative Cultural Studies

This set of sessions privileges the performance turn in the human disciplines. We inhabit a performance-based, dramaturgical culture where the dividing line between performer and audience blurs, and culture itself becomes a dramatic performance. This is a gendered culture in which nearly invisible boundaries separate everyday theatrical performances from formal theater, dance, music, MTV, video, and film. Performance texts are situated in complex systems of discourse, where traditional, everyday, and avante-garde meanings of theater, film, video, ethnography, cinema, performance, text, and audience al circulate and inform one another.

The current historical moment requires morally informed performance and art-based disciplines that will help people recover meaning in the face of senseless, brutal violence. In our post-9/11 moment, we have a greater need for a militant utopianism to help us imagine a world free of conflict, terror, and death than at any other point in recent history. We need an oppositional performative social science—performance disciplines that will enable us to create oppositional utopian spaces, discourses, and experiences within our public institutions. In these spaces and places, in neighborhoods, in experimental community theaters, in independent coffee shops and bookstores, in local and national parks, on playing fields, in wilderness areas, in experiences with nature, critical democratic culture is nurtured. Building on the work of Manthia Diawara, this performative approach will create a multiracial cultural studies. In doing so, it examines, narrates, and performs the complex ways in which persons experience themselves within the shifting ethnoscapes of today’s global world economy (McCall, 2001, p. 5).

Performance texts that take up the project of advocating for a radical progressive democracy are therefore strongly encouraged. Papers that build on the work of performance scholars such as Bryant Alexander, Art Bochner, Dwight Conquergood, Carolyn Ellis, Norman Denzin, Manthia Diawara, Stephen Hartnett, Mary Weems, and the like will also be strongly considered.

Chair:
Norman K. Denzin (email: n-denzin@uiuc.edu)

Address:
Norman K. Denzin
Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
228 Gregory Hall, mc-463
810 South Wright St.
Urbana, IL, 61801

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Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies

The commitment to imagine a more democratic society has been a guiding feature of cultural studies from the very beginning. The discourses of a critical cultural studies methodology are basic to any effort to reengage the promise of the social sciences and the humanities for democracy in the 21st century. The mandate of this block of sessions is to move methods talk in cultural studies to the forefront, into the regions of moral discourse. We therefore seek works that connect critical emancipatory theories to new forms of social justice and democratic practice. We encourage submissions that stand at the intersection of experimental, interpretive methodology and cultural criticism. We will also consider submissions that deal more broadly with new trends in cultural studies methodologies; discuss the institutionalization of cultural studies; are in dialogue with or speak to cultural studies theorists; and the like.

Chair:
Conference Committee (cfp@crossroads2004.org)

Address:
attn: Crossroads Conference
Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
228 Gregory Hall, mc-463
810 South Wright St.
Urbana, IL, 61801


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Neo-liberalism. Governmentality, & Cultural Studies

I. The term "neo-liberalism" is used in various national and regional contexts, often to refer to significantly varied developments. The European conception of neo-liberalism, for instance, has often referred to a somewhat different formation of political and economic government than has been the case in the U.S. Yet some writers, across various geographic contexts, have emphasized the relation of "neo-liberalism" to "globalization". Furthermore, there seems to be little consensus about whether or not "neo-liberalism" refers primarily to an economic formation. Writing about governmentality, for instance, pursues a somewhat set of questions about liberalism, policy, and citizenship in these times than have the more narrowly economic accounts of neo-liberalism. Some have rejected the term because of its epochalist overtone.. Finally, within the writing about "neo-liberalism," there has been a lack of clear consensus about its relation to cultural formation and cultural governance. This block of panels therefore welcomes paper submissions that contribute to a discussion about the current directions in studies about neo-liberalism (and/or neo-conservatism) and about their relation to contemporary cultural studies.

II. Over the last fifteen years, the writing and lectures of Michel Foucault about governmentality have had considerable impact on a wide variety of research and theory, including cultural studies. The debates surrounding a "critical" or "cultural-policy study" often have considered Foucault's work to be a theoretical and polemical framework for rethinking the orientation of British Cultural Studies (and its uses or avoidance of this vein of Foucault's writing) during the 1970s and 80s. Foucault's and others' writing on governmentality have emphasized the multiple sites and scales, the various techniques, programs, and technologies, of governance in contemporary societies, and thus have become part of emerging kinds of research that also are engaged with cultural studies. In writing about governmentality, however, there has been no clear consensus about what culture means or how it matters . This block of panels therefore invites paper submissions that consider the implications of literature about governmentality for contemporary cultural studies. Papers and panels also or alternatively might address the changing and geographically specific (or uneven) relation between culture and governance, culture and policy, culture and citizenship.

Chair:
James Hay (email: jameshay@uiuc.edu)

Address:
James Hay
Department of Speech Communication
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
244 Lincoln Hall, mc-456
702 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL, USA, 61801


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Sport & Cultural Studies

As we have become all too well aware, the Bush administration’s socio-political trajectory is not limited solely to geo-political domination. Increasingly, a revitalized neo-conservative agenda has gained momentum in the US with respect to popular forms culture—especially sport—as the current regime carries out mind-numbing assaults on Title IX and affirmative action, and likewise uses the master trope of baseball as a myopic rallying cry to foster nationalist sentiments that ring hollow the patronage of “Freedom” and “Democracy.” We witness also the sport-media complex’s response to the events of 9/11, where both the Super Bowl and World Series directly following it became havens for nationalistic fervor and rampant expressions of jingoistic patriotism, complete with war slogans and military leitmotifs.

Not to be outdone, however, popular sporting institutions themselves continue to remain beholden to a politics of representation that reverberated throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s inasmuch as perpetuating racial, sexual, and gender stereotypes as sutured into the fabric of the (fictional) meritocratic American dream. From the global marketing of so-called “ghetto ballers” and “urban” culture as encapsulated by NBA star Allen Iverson to the corporate commodification of youth culture by Disney as represented in its sport-themed films (especially the Mighty Ducks trilogy), we continually witness the power of sport to act hegemonically in co-articulating race, class, gender, and sexual identities within and against local, national, and (especially) transnational contexts. In the broader (post)-Clinton/Bush II moment (of which “9/11” is but one aspect) it is important for us to confront such disquieting developments head-on, doing everything we can to unmask the unequal power relations at play that are concerned with the regulation, management, and manipulation of populations in general via technologies of containment, surveillance, and subjectification.

Papers/sessions that address these and other topics related to sport and cultural studies—especially with respect to national/transnational identity, globalization, cosmopolitanism, marketing/advertising, and gender/sexuality—are most welcome.

Chair:
Michael D. Giardina (email: giardina@uiuc.edu)

Address:
Michael D. Giardina
Department of Kinesiology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
219 Louis Freer Hall, mc-052
906 S. Goodwin Ave.
Urbana, IL, USA, 61801


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Asian/Asian-American Studies

An increased commitment to interdisciplinarity is taking place in the field of Asian American Studies. Historians are borrowing from literary theory. Literary scholars are borrowing from theatre and performance studies. Political science scholars are drawing on community studies. Perhaps in response to the racial profiling climate before and after 9/11, perhaps because of a recognition of common concerns across racial and ethnic groups, Asian Americanists have, once again, retraced a well-worn path of doing scholarship that crosses disciplinary fields. The Asian/Asian American Cultural Studies program area invites papers focusing on cultural studies, interdisciplinary scholarship, contemporary cultural politics, and activism. Essays on transnationalism, diaspora, class, intra- and inter-racial studies, mixed race studies, feminist studies, queer studies, critical race theory, and popular culture that fall under of the rubric of Asian/Asian American Studies are especially encouraged. Note: e-mail submissions will not be accepted for this Program Area; please submit proposals via postal mail.

Chair:
Kent A. Ono

Address:
Kent A. Ono
Asian American Studies Program
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
1208 West Nevada Street
Urbana, IL 61801-3812.

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Media/Cultural Studies

Distinctions between Media Studies and Cultural Studies often fall by the wayside, yet there are many important differences, primarily based on differing methodologies and critical goals, between the two fields.  Not all qualitative media studies work takes a cultural studies approach (e.g., formal film analysis, some audience research, frame analysis), and not all cultural studies work looks at media (e.g., ethnographic or political economy research, critical theory, critical race theory).  Nevertheless, there are many important intersections and creative tensions between media studies and cultural studies.  Cultural studies, arguably, has reinvigorated media studies, offering new methodologies for asking questions about media in relation to social meaning, political action, and cultural transformation and encouraging interdisciplinary work that challenges the boundaries of "film studies" or "television studies" or even "communication studies."  And, media studies offers cultural studies models for understanding cultural representation and its materiality in a complex and theoretical way.  We invite paper submissions that take these intersections and tensions seriously, exploring various relationships between  the two fields in terms of theory, history, historiography, and/or methodology.  We are also just as interested in detailed examples of cultural studies work on media.  For example, papers might explore the meaning of media criticism and pedagogy in the current global climate of violence; media activism; the intersections and specificities of media representations of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nationality as social categories of meaning; industrial, economic, and cultural interrelationships of multiple media (e.g., radio and film); the relationship between marketing to youth and youth use of media; or other relevant topics.

Chair:
Sarah Projansky (email: sprojans@uiuc.edu)

Address:
Sarah Projansky
Women’s Studies Program
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
911 S. Sixth St., mc-494
Champaign, IL 61820

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Latino/a Cultural Innovation at the Crossroads

Current Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino/a cultural scholarship prioritizes the radical revisiting and/or revising of globalization as a systemic and destructive moment in the development of capitalism which has precipitated a hemispheric reconfiguration of identities and subjectivities. Cultural studies explores and theorizes resistance by localities to the erasure induced by cultural imperialism; oppositional and transformative strategies to stifle the destructive effects of neoliberalism on historically situated subjectivities; social movements to oppose state mandated attacks on human and civil rights, the creation of transnationalities as new forms of community. The scope of Latina/o critical cultural studies is hemispheric and transnational and its discourse is anti-hegemonic and transformative. It postulates that violence in its multiple dimensions and forms is an integral element of transnational capital’s quest to dominate production, trade and investment on a global level, and intensify the level of human exploitation. A virulent male centric militant nationalism that elides its racist moorings is the state’s ideological weapon of choice.
How has the “no-place-ness” of mestizaje and transnationalism abetted or hindered strategies and techniques of liberation ?We invite proposals that explore the cultural dimensions of Latina/o identity as forms and practices of resistance to globalization, which interrogate gendered and racially constitutive nationalisms, which expose how national and global gyno- and homophobias operate to inhibit grass roots challenges to state policies. We also invite proposals that explore the multiciplicity of Latina/o affirmative and adaptative cultural responses to violence. These includes street politics, conceptual performance and politics, grassroots cultural programs, activism and the academy, trans-latinidades and social movements, millennial genderscapes, embodied knowledge/performed memory, audio solutions interrogating border-sonics, cinematic prospects, and paradigms in U.S. Latino/a domestic exile.

Chairs:
Pedro Caban (email: pcaban@uiuc.edu)
Paloma Martinez Cruz (email: pmcruz@uiuc.edu)

Address:
Latina/Latino Studies Program
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
510 East Chalmers
Champaign, IL, 61820

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“Open” Topics

If you wish to submit a paper, but do not think that it fits within one of the predetermined program areas, or does not fit into one of the already-accepted session proposals listed here [LINKED], please submit your proposal directly to the conference committee.

Chair:
Conference Committee (cfp@crossroads2004.org)

Address:
attn: Crossroads Conference
Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
228 Gregory Hall, mc-463
810 South Wright St.
Urbana, IL, 61801