Schedule

Friday, October 16, 2009

Registration & Continental Breakfast
Friday, October 16th, 9:00 – 10:00 a.m., Campus Center, Eighth Floor Lobby

Panel 1 - Passions, Perspectives, and Realities from Kindergarten to Graduate School
Friday, October 16th, 10:00 – 11:30 a.m., Campus Center, Room # 803

Position Paper Prompts: Briefly consider the strengths and weaknesses of the pedagogical theories and approaches with which you are familiar. What are some of the important underlying assumptions that inform these theories/approaches? Please also consider different educational models such as “pedagogies of the home”, or the metaphor of teacher “companionship”, with special consideration of the needs of students from differing racial, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds.

Facilitator:  Associate Professor Mari Casteñeda, Communication Department, UMass Amherst

Judith Flores Carmona, University of Utah, Fixing the leakage: Three projects, three possibilities

Jeremy D. Franklin, University of Utah, Sense of Belonging: An Unseen Promise in Education

Luis E. Ramirez & Daniela Torres-Toretti, UC Davis, Performing the language of the “we”: How can we do this together to make our education more powerful?

Razvan Sibii, UMass Amherst, Metaphors of Teacher Immediacy in College Pedagogy

Panel 2 - Passionate Objectivism
Friday, October 16th, 10:00 – 11:30 a.m., Campus Center, Room # 805-09

Position Paper Prompts: One prominent dichotomy that appears in much discourse about passion is the pitting of logic or reason against passion or affect. The dichotomy enters discourses about pedagogy in the form of arguments for formal logic in the classroom vs. passionate attempts at persuasion. It enters discourses about journalism and media in the form of rather passionate claims that journalism ought be objective which somehow precludes passion. It enters discourses about communication in the form of scholarship that would theorize passion and communication as separate entities. In your position paper, drawing from the abstracts you submitted, your own or others work, and your particular theoretical position, please elaborate your thoughts on this prominent dichotomy. How are we to understand the relationship between “reason” and “passion” that pervades academic scholarship and everyday discourse? Are they separate entities or emergent from the same social processes? What are the consequences of maintaining such a dichotomy? Where might we go from here? In what ways has this dichotomy informed your own work, or in what ways has your work sought to challenge it?

Facilitator: Professor Donal Carbaugh, Communication Department, UMass Amherst

Jay Brower, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Passion, reason, and responsibility in Arendt’s account of judgment

Professor Vernon E. Cronen, UMass Amherst, "Passions" in joint action with special reference to life in the academy

Visiting Lecturer Michael McEachrane, & Associate Professor Nick McBride, UMass Amherst

Martin Merccouri, UMass Amherst, Our Business in the Humanities?

Lunch
Friday, October 16th, 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
On your own

Panel 3 - Arts and Technologies for Social Change
Friday, October 16th, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m., Campus Center, Room # 803

Position Paper Prompts: What opportunities do artistic or technological mediums provide for social change that the unmediated oral channel does not? What about the particular medium’s specificity that you examine make it a viable means for social change? Are all artistic mediums and technologies equally endowed with this capacity? How do certain mediums presume, enact, or facilitate particular configurations of communities or publics?

Facilitator: Associate Professor Anne Cieko, Communication Department, UMass Amherst

Robin Anderson, UMass Amherst, Solidarity in the Digital Age

Emily Polk, UMass Amherst and Thanu Yakupitiyage, UMass Amherst, Tracing the trajectory of rhetoric from periphery to core: How do the margins go mainstream in the public sphere?

Gyuri Kepes,

Panel 4 - Race and Privilege
Friday, October 16th, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m., Campus Center, Room # 805-09

Position Paper Prompts: In what ways do your own positionalities of privilege and/or oppression inform your research? In your own work and interpretations, what moves a text/performance/interpretation beyond the “merely cultural” and into the realm of activism and change? In your analysis of the texts you are confronting, can you distill the contingent elements that are most (in)effective in disrupting racial hegemonic processes? As a researcher, how do you determine when racial representations are significant objects of analysis?

Facilitator:  Assistant Professor Demetria Shabazz, UMass Amherst

Hari Stephen Kumar, UMass Amherst,

Helen Morgan Parmett, University of Minnesota, ‘Blackish White’: The Vermont Reggae Festival and the Global/Local Politics of Race

Timothy Sutton, UMass Amherst,

Panel 5 - Campus Activism and Racial Discourse
Friday, October 16th, 2:45 – 4:15 p.m., Campus Center, Room # 803

Position Paper Prompts: Please reflect on the following questions: 1) How does your research address the relationship between political commitment, critical pedagogy, and social movements? 2) How do/might campus communities negotiate tensions between their commitments to freedom of expression and to diversity and pluralism? 3) How might campus communities fruitfully engage in dialogue about racial privilege?

Facilitator: Tim Sutton, Communication Department, UMass Amherst

Professor Leda Cooks, UMass Amherst; How does race matter? An invitation to conversation

Associate Professor Kevin Howley, DePauw University, Campus Activism, Racial Discourse and a Commitment to Communicative Democracy

Jillian Marty, UMass Amherst,

Panel 6 - "Where the Wild Things Are": Locating Wildness in Place, Experience, and Discourse
Friday, October 16th, 2:45 – 4:15 p.m., Campus Center, Room # 805-09

Position Paper Prompts: How are discourses of the “primitive,” of wilderness and urban, the ancient and modern, ecstacy and inhibition, best approached in our hyper-technological society? The “primitive” is arguably no longer confined as it once was to critical critiques through the lenses of post-colonialism and race theory, as it is now constantly reformulated, re-sited,  parodied, and invoked to various discursive ends. How are these pervasive themes best treated? How are they related to the alienation effects of a mass consumer and technological society? What do they say about our relation to various spaces (urban and rural) and the “natural” world?

Facilitator: Brett D. Ingram, UMass Amherst

David Avishay, UMass Amherst, Into the Wild” – “Wilderness” as a Cultural Metaphor in the American Popular Discourse

Matt Ferrari, UMass Amherst, Wildness, the Primitive, and Masculine-Centered Media Discourses

Jason Mohaghegh, Northeastern Illinois University, Posthumanist Ecstasies: Literary Delirium and the Outsider Identity

Brion van Over, UMass Amherst

Reception
Friday, October 16th, 4:30 – 5:30 p.m., Campus Center, 10th Floor, Amherst Room
Hors d’oevres and cash bar

Keynote Address: Dr. Rey Chow, Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, How Critical Thinking Becomes Obscene

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Registration & Continental Breakfast
Saturday, October 17th, 9:00 – 10:00 a.m., Campus Center, Ninth Floor Lobby

Panel 7 - Media Effects/Affective Media
Saturday, October 17th, 10:00 – 11:30 a.m., Campus Center, Room # 904-08

Position Paper Prompts: How is the "affective economy" of media images from film, television, advertisements, and their accompanying digital technologies, best considered? Perhaps, in terms of passionate or dispassionate responses? How is the viewer/consumer's seduction by media texts and products based in novel sensations and disposable emotional stimulation, or conversely, by generic repetition and consumer literacy and savvy? What are the communicative processes by which mediums are able to affect arousal in an audience? By what criteria do you select an appropriate methodology for critical inquiry into subjective media arousal and seduction?

Facilitator: Professor Michael Morgan, Communication Department, UMass Amherst

Chris Boulton, UMass Amherst, Ads as Entertainment

Erica Scharrer, UMass Amherst, Media effects as passions or dispassions

Rachel Thibault, UMass Amherst, Affective Economies and Cruel Optimisms: The Seduction of Facebook.

Toks Oyedemi, UMass Amherst

Panel 8 - Public Policy & Inequality
Saturday, October 17th, 10:00 – 11:30 a.m., Campus Center, Room # 917

Position Paper Prompts: Drawing from your research experience and methodologies, discuss how social perceptions of, and public sentiment toward, certain groups are variously constructed and manipulated to either stymie or facilitate public policy initiatives? More broadly, discuss how public policy constructs and reinforces inequality in society, and how it may be a means to foster social justice and equality. What is the role of the academic in the latter effort? How might scholars collaborate with other sectors of society to pursue these goals?

Facilitator: Anilyn Diaz

Fadia Hasan, UMass Amherst,

Patricia Sanchez-Connally, UMass Amherst, The Struggle Continues: Salvadorans and the Fight for Legal Status

Assistant Professor Emily West, UMass Amherst, From Welfare Queen to Health Care Glutton: Cultivating Anger in the Health Care Reform Debates

Buffet Deli Lunch & Performance: Wanted: Freedom! Dead or Alive by Daryl Harris & Aretta Baumgartner, performed by Daryl Harris and Kim Popa, University of Northern Kentucky
Saturday, October 17th, 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m., Campus Center, 10th Floor, Room 1001

Panel 9 - (Mis)representation, Identity, and Authorship
Saturday, October 17th, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m., Campus Center, Room # 904-08

Position Paper Prompts: Given the panelists common interest in issues of representation/recognition of the self or others, please reflect on the following questions: 1) What is the role of choice in representing and (mis)recognizing selves? Whose choice is it anyway? 2) What is the significance of the public-private dialectic in constructing representations of identity? 3) In what ways might matters of (relative) power and equality enter your work on authorship, representation, recognition, and identity?

Facilitator: Assistant Professor Shawn Shimpach, Communication Department, UMass Amherst

Chloe Hanson, Syracuse University, The Pleasures of Misrecognition

Zachary McDowell, UMass Amherst, Towards a Prophetic Advocacy

Adrienne Shaw, University of Pennsylvania, Rethinking Representation from an Audience Perspective

Panel 10 – Performance
Saturday, October 17th, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m., Campus Center, Room # 917

Participants in the "Performance" panel have not been asked to write position papers in acknowledgement of the claim that the performance itself functions as a legitimate knowledge claim. This premise, the content and outcomes of the performance, and a variety of other contemporary issues of performance, including the relationship between performance and social change, its role in the academy, and its place in contemporary communication theory will be possible topics for engagement during the discussion period following the performances.

Facilitator: Professor Leda Cooks, Communication Department, UMass Amherst

R.J. Barrios, UMass Amherst, Growing up gay-sha: An experiment in blurred genre and dual voice

Assistant Professor Claudio Moreira, UMass Amherst, When janitors dare to become scholars: A betweeners’ view of the politics of knowledge production from decolonizing street-corners

Dawn Lovegrove; UMass Amherst, The Rice

Panel 11 - Construction of Knowledge in the Academy
Saturday, October 17th, 2:45 – 4:15 p.m., Campus Center, Room # 904-08

Position Paper Prompts: Please reflect on the following questions: 1) What is the role of personal experience in the Humanities and Social Sciences? 2) What criteria should be used to measure the value of scholarly work? 3) What are the philosophical and theoretical assumptions that inform your responses to the preceding questions?

Facilitator: Assistant Professor Claudio Moreira, Communication Department, UMass Amherst

Ellen Correa, UMass Amherst, A small helping of arroz

Bela Gligorova, Nova International Schools, Of matters performative, of Spalding Gray: externalizing passions?

Eve Ng, UMass Amherst, Rearticulated Passions: Popular Fandom and Distinction in the Academy

Panel 12 - Sex, Silence, and Yuan Fen: Constructing Relations in Cultural Practice
Saturday, October 17th, 2:45 – 4:15 p.m., Campus Center, Room # 917

Position Paper Prompts: Panelists in this session all investigate particular social practices, whether a group gathering in silence together, non-monogamous sexual encounters, or the invocation of cultural terminologies, as constitutive of relations between groups, individuals, and “non-living” objects. Given this approach, can the communicative practice you investigate be treated as exclusively authoring of social relations given other powerful forces like history, systems of capital, or political structure? Can any communicative practice be constitutive of social relations? In what ways does the practice you investigate move from "mere behavior" to constitutive of particular relationships? What are the necessary conditions in order for your practice to accomplish this? Also, please briefly elaborate the methods and theoretical conceptualizations you find most useful for addressing issues of communication's abilities to shape our relationships to one another, the divine, or “non-living” objects.

Facilitator: Associate Professor Benjamin Bailey, Communication Department, UMass Amherst

Brittany Griebling, University of Pennsylvania, Ethical non-monogamy as a communicative practice

Elizabeth Molina-Markham, UMass Amherst; The Gathered Meeting for Worship Among Friends

Sunny Lie, UMass Amherst, Yuan Fen as a Chinese social practice