04 November 2013

Check out the following CFP for the ACLA Conference 2014 in New York:


CFP: Knowledge, Capital, Critique: The University and the Humanities in the
Ongoing Transformation of Capitalism (Deadline: November 15, 2013)


ACLA 2014

March 20 – 23, 2014

New York University

Deadline for Abstract Submission: November 15, 2013.


This seminar aims to periodize contemporary relations among capital,
knowledge production, and social critique in the United States.  It focuses
on connections between concurrent transformations of global capitalism and
of the public research university, with emphasis on the shifting status of
the humanities within these processes.  While remaining wary of rhetorics
of crisis and decline, the purpose of this stock-taking—economic,
institutional, disciplinary—is to assess conditions of existence and work
within the university, and to outline possibilities for social critique in
the present.  Historicizing, comparative, and global perspectives welcome.

· How is the ongoing transformation of the U.S. research university as a
site of knowledge production also transforming it as a site of social
critique?

· How are more specific aspects of this transformation, e.g., the rapid
rise of so-called digital humanities or an understandable pragmatic
attitude among many undergraduates, placing particular pressure on the
humanities?

· How was the economic and governance structure of the post-WWII research
university a central condition of possibility for the emergence of postwar
critical theory, and how is the transformation of one reshaping the legacy
of the other?

· How have the contradictory dynamics of knowledge production and value
creation—increasing specialization and disciplinary differentiation vs.
deskilling and the standardization of intellectual labor—played themselves
out within current social restructuring?

· To what extent have the humanities enabled an oppositional stance to
capital, e.g., in Raymond Williams or Edward Said, and to what extent have
they been complicit, e.g., as in William Spanos?

Please submit abstracts (max 250 words) through the ACLA website: *
http://www.acla.org/submit/* <http://www.acla.org/submit/>.  When prompted,
select the seminar title from the drop-down menu.

For questions on the seminar, please contact Stephen Carter at:
scarter2@uccs.edu

Seminar Keywords: Capital, Critique, University, Crisis, Humanities, Public
Education, Intellectuals, Periodization