Presidential Plenary at Cultural Studies Association 2013 Conference. Introduction by CSA President Bruce Burgett with responses to the prompt, “Cultural studies should be…,” by Rob Gehl, Christina Nadler, Jamie Skye Bianco, Megan Turner, and Stephen J Luber.
Plenaries
Plenary talks from the annual Cultural Studies Association conference.
Cultural Studies Should Be… Unsettled
Bruce Burgett, the CSA president, asked CSA members to contribute to the plenary by responding to this prompt:
Cultural Studies should…
Cultural Studies is…
Cultural Studies could…
I approached this with my own idiosyncratic biography, anxieties, and hopes in mind.
Undisciplined
Cultural studies should be a political act against the institutionalizing processes of becoming disciplined
Q3C
Cultural Studies would, could, should, must, will, and does begin queerly in the middle of things.
Queer
Creative
Critical
Compositionism
Academic
Cultural studies should be a deliberate site of sustained and sustainable struggle.
Cultural Studies Should Gamify
I’ve created GamifytheCSA.org, an experiment in gamifying the academic conference. Gamifying the CSA will enhance serious play in discourse and practice and expand the scope of the conference, with models in business and social networking with programs such as FourSquare, and extending to health and fitness, with programs such as Zombies, Run!, and the list goes on.
Spontaneous Acts of Scholarly Combustion
The future of academic publishing, as well as its ability to create and sustain publics, rests upon its willingness to take up the protection, maximum use, and enjoyment of “personal energy under personal control. This will also mean understanding that the other critical term here, in addition to freedom, is responsibility. Someone, or some distributive collectives of someones, which might also form a nomadic para-institution, or “outstitution,” needs to take responsibility for securing this freedom for the greatest number of persons possible who want to participate in intellectual-cultural life. A publisher is a person, or a group, or a multiplicity, who is responsible.
Queering the Archive
This CSA plenary talk discusses a performance based on oral histories collected in the author’s book, ‘Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History’
PNAP Talk
This plenary talk discusses the author’s experience working with a college in prison program at Stateville Prison in Illinois.