17th Annual Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference

Departmental Event

Start Date: Mar 07, 2025 - 12:30pm
End Date: Mar 08, 2025 - 12:30pm

Location: (03/07) SUB Acoma A & B & (03/08) SUB Fiesta A & B

17th Annual Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference 

Networks of Power, Visibility, and Technicity

Keynote lecture to be delivered by: Professor David Bates, UC Berkeley

 

The 17th annual Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference at the University of New Mexico invites graduate students to examine the manner in which networks of power, visibility, and technicity shape contemporary forms of social organization, ideological formations, and cultural narratives. This interdisciplinary conference calls for critical reflection on the ways media and technology intervene in configurations of identity, articulations of culture, and modes of community in a globalized world.

As media and digital technologies increasingly shape the way we see and are seen, they become central to how power is enacted, performed, and resisted. Our networks have become sites of proliferation of authority, slow violence, and trauma. Digital age globalization speeds up and intensifies our relational responses while simultaneously providing us with the tools to document, and strategize alternatives out of existential necessity. We are examining and making public our individual and collective intergenerational traumas like never before. Counter-networks allow us to record, exchange, and bear witness; construct social responses to trauma, and rewrite histories.

We invite graduate students to offer new perspectives on the interchange between visibility, technology, and power in an increasingly digital world. We aim to explore the grids of vision and influence produced through media and technological platforms, and how such networks of technicity enforce, reinforce or challenge hegemonic and ideological formations. By interrogating social responses to and integrations of technology, as well as its role in perpetuating or disrupting cultural hegemony, we seek to foster a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of power and collective trauma within global systems. We welcome papers from the fields of literary, cultural, cinema, visual, and emergent digital media studies.

Contributions that come from the disciplines of Philosophy, Classical Studies, History, Anthropology, and Political Science are equally welcome. Participants may consider technically mediated cultural and linguistic imperialisms, their effects on marginalized communities, as well as the interplay between technological change, the subject, and the polis. They are invited to rethink established frameworks, expand boundaries, and contribute to the evolving discussions within the humanities and social sciences, all the while considering the broader implications of their research in today's technologically mediated society.

 

Possible session topics include, but are not limited to:


  • Networks, machines, mechanisms, apparatuses, and techniques (of vision and visibility,
    ideology, hegemony, information, soft power, coercion, violence, warfare, and trauma)
  • Networks, machines, mechanisms, apparatuses, and techniques (of counter-violence,
    strategic interventions, resistance)
  • Counter-networks, counter-apparatuses, and counter-techniques (of testimony, witnessbearing, documentation, survivor accounts)
  • Artificial Intelligence, Virtual or Augmented Reality

  • Classical conceptions of technology
  • Techniques/Technicities of self
  • Technicity and the environment
  • Technicity and modes of ability and capacity
  • New media and new social arrangements
  • Emergent forms of community and collectivity
  • New media and new modes of political life (tekhnè, bios, and polis)
  • Representations of any of the above in literary, cinematic, and cultural texts or the plastic
    arts

 

Conference Structure: The conference will be in-person, consisting of an interdisciplinary roundtable, panels, and the keynote address. Panel presentations will be 20 minutes in length, plus discussion time (10 minutes).

To submit your proposal, please send a 500 word abstract along with a brief biographical statement to csconference.unm@gmail.com by January 30, 2025. Selected participants will be notified by February 9, 2025.

Click here to see the flyer

Event schedule coming soon!