CFP: Radical Aesthetics and Politics (CUNY, New York, 9 Dec 11)

Call for Papers

Conference: “Radical Aesthetics and Politics: Intersections in Music,  Art, and Critical Social Theory”

9 December 2011

Hunter College, CUNY


In the past few decades, the study of sonic, visual, textual, and other 
media practices have emerged as productive areas of cultural analysis 
and critique.  Often constitutive of paradoxes and tensions within 
society, these aesthetic practices have prompted critical engagements 
with structures of power and knowledge.  Researchers and artists have 
sought to deconstruct particular relationships between aesthetics and 
power, creating renewed and emergent questions with which current 
social theory must engage.  For instance, how might we think about the 
“public sphere” in terms of nodes of encounters with the sonic, the 
visual, and the textual? What forms of political action and sociality 
emerge from civic engagements with visual, sonic, and textual culture?  
How are sonic and material landscapes engaged with as embodied 
practices?  What might this imply about the corporeality of the 
political, the ethical, and the technological?  What are the 
disjunctures and syntheses between artists’ and scholars’ 
concept-driven productions and the ways in which audiences interpret 
and construct life-worlds with these productions?

This multidisciplinary conference aims to explore these questions 
centering on the intersections between aesthetic practices and radical 
political action.  We invite papers that engage with any practices 
within sonic, visual, and textual culture, and that understand these 
not merely in terms of the symbolic or the ideal, but also in terms of 
the material relations embedded within these practices.  This 
conference will thus be concerned with the ideological lives of 
aesthetic practices. Rather than focusing solely on overtly politicized 
artistic expression, however, this conference interrogates the 
boundaries of the political in music and art (and vice versa).  We aim 
to take a radical approach to aesthetics and politics by getting at the 
root of knowledge systems and changing the concepts of contemporary 
political, ethical, and aesthetic debates.  This conference thus asks 
how we may think through and act on political commitments in art and 
music, and how social theory may displace and elaborate on the concepts 
of cultural and ethical debates.

We invite proposal submissions from scholars, students, musicians, and 
artists that address the following and related themes:

Visual/Sonic Publics
Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism
Ownership and Property
Feminism and Queer Theory
Governmentality
Performance
Consumption and Material Culture
Critical Race Studies
Affect, Sensation, and Embodiment
New Economies
Labor
Language, Speech, and the Voice
Technologies and Media
Space and the Environment

Please submit a 200-300 word proposal, including a title and full 
contact details to Portia Seddon ([email protected]) by August 15, 
2011.

This conference is organized by Critical Studies in Expressive Culture (
http://chreculture.blogspot.com/) and by the Department of Anthropology 
at
Hunter College, CUNY (http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/anthro/).

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