Call for Papers: New Biopolitics: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

New Biopolitics: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
Saturday, February 24, 2018
Keynote Speaker: Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Pomona College

Conference Information, from Georgetown:

Michel Foucault defines biopolitics as “this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has
the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge and apparatuses of
security [or dispositifs] as its essential technical instrument.” Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze,
in turn, describe the “biopolitical turn” as “a proliferation of studies, claiming Foucault as an
inspiration, on the relations between ‘life’ and ‘politics.’”

As scholars have further engaged with and complicated the concept of biopolitics, new trends
have emerged from its lineage – from necropolitics to the global proliferations of surveillance to
biomanufacturing.

To revisit and expand conceptions of biopolitics, the English Graduate Student Association at
Georgetown University seeks proposals from various disciplines and theoretical approaches,
with an emphasis on how the humanities and social sciences have approached this field. Some
possible lines of inquiry include: How have body modifications like reading glasses and walking
canes or scarification and subdermal implants redefined feeling and experience? With Europe's
recent court cases on the "right to be forgotten" in mind, how does the inability to have our
presence die on the Internet extend our boundaries of life? In what ways has literature or film
redefined conception and birth with our society's focus on reproductive rights? Refuting
traditional notions of the human-animal binary, how has technology reified and/or complicated
our distinctions between the human and the other?

While certainly not comprehensive, papers addressing any of the following are welcome:

• The ontological turn
• Affect studies
• Ecological approaches/ the Anthropocene
• Law and literature
• Materialisms
• Temporality
• Digital humanities
• Boundaries of the human
• Pop culture
• Biotechnology
• Cyborg studies

Please submit your 300-word abstracts to newbiopolitics@gmail.com by December 15th, 2017,
Submissions should include your proposed paper title as well as a short bio (100 words), giving
your name, institutional affiliation, and department.

As always, remember that if you decide to submit proposals to any conferences, be sure to consider applying for funding. See the Graduate Studies Office’s webpage on Conference Travel Funding. And remember that you have to apply for the funding before you attend the conference. (In recent years, the funding has tended to run out early in the spring semester.)

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