Conference Opportunity in San Antonio in February

I have no time in a busy conference schedule for the Spring, but this looks to be a good, cheap conference to attend. When I first arrived here the ACA/PCA National Conference was in San Antonio: fun city to visit.

Intersections: Identity and Ideology 3 February 2017 English Graduate Program Texas A&M University- San Antonio One University Way San Antonio, TX 78224

Deadline for Abstract Submission: 15 December 2016

The English Graduate Student Committee at Texas A&M University-San Antonio is pleased to announce their second annual graduate and undergraduate English conference. This year’s conference theme is “Intersections: Identity and Ideology.” The conference will take place at Texas A&M University-San Antonio on 3 February 2017.

Patricia Hill Collins defines intersectionality as “the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities.” Collins further points to intersectionality as a broad-based knowledge project that speaks to and from groundbreaking knowledge projects across many disciplines. In doing so, she calls our attention to the necessity of a multifaceted approach to the questions of how identities intersect and clash with ideologies.

As both graduate and undergraduate students, we have the opportunity to reflect on the formation and performance of identity as our voices shape and reshape the scholarship of our disciplines. At the same time that we are reflecting on the shifting intersections of identity around us, our conversations must also turn to the voices that have gone unheard and the barriers that remain for these voices.

This conference welcomes papers exploring and engaging the intersections of identity and ideology in any time period. Additionally, we welcome papers that address these concerns in film, television, literature, and pedagogy. Graduate and undergraduate papers from across disciplines are welcome. We will gladly consider papers that address concerns related to such questions as:

● How can discussions of intersectionality inform our understandings of identity? ● What ideological trends do we find shaping identity construction in contemporary film and television, and how are these intersections represented? ● How can an interdisciplinary approach strengthen conversations about intersectionality, and how is this metacognitive work informing our understanding of the relationship between ideology and identity? ● How has the hyper-capitalism and globalism of the 21st century shifted the way we understand intersectionality? That is, in what ways have these processes complicated what we understand as intersectional concerns? ● What role does translation play in the production of identities across national literatures and time periods? How has the act of translation recreated national identities in spaces beyond the work’s original locus? ● What is the 21st century canon, and who continues to make decisions about what texts are included in this canon? That is, what ideological forces, both commercial and institutional, control the canon, and how are disenfranchised voices resisting marginalization? ● How is intersectionality shaping the pedagogies we enact in our classrooms and the partnerships we forge between institutions and the communities that support them? ● How did the feminist and queer poetics that emerged in the mid-century United States reshape the national poetics of identity, and how does this intersectionality look different in the transgendered poetics emerging in the 21st century?

The above list is in no way exhaustive; rather, it is meant to show the breadth of engagements we are hoping to see at this conference.

Presentations should be limited to a maximum of 15 minutes. Please submit your abstract of no more than 250 words at http://bit.ly/IdentityAndIdeology.

Abstract submission deadline: 15 December 2016

You will be notified via email if your abstract has been accepted. Notifications will be sent out 10 January 2017.

Registration Fee: Registration is $15.00. Students and alumni of Texas A&M University-San Antonio will receive a discounted rate of $10.00.