CFP: University Spaces, Academic Bodies: New Approaches to the Corporate University

April 4th, 2008
New York University
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Program in American Studies

Neoliberal and corporatist logics are increasingly reconfiguring bodies in and around universities. The work of “diversifying” the academy imposes a disproportionate burden of labor on faculty, students, and staff marked by multiple forms of difference; the pressures of professionalization anticipate and authorize narrow standards of bodily capacity; and precarious modes of transnational expansion involving institutions of higher learning fortify and retrace imperial circuits of acquisition in land, bodies, and knowledge. This calls for a critical account of how neoliberal processes dismantle and rearticulate various sites of the university as well as the contours of bodies allowed to function within it. Our conference will thus engage debates surrounding embodiment within the university as it pertains to the overlapping structures of access, difference, and power. We especially invite papers that address embodiment with primary attention to the historical complexities of sexuality, race, nation, gender, labor, and ability.

As conference organizers, we conceive of the body/university relationship as materially and historically contingent; that is, universities are not simply places where bodies live, labor, die and haunt, but they are also mobile, shifting sites where the substantive body intersects with, is reconfigured by, and defies various histories of regulation. Thus we ask: How are access and ability, marginal bodies and minority status, disciplinary boundaries and hierarchies of authority, produced and policed by academic institutions? How are bodies (dis)placed in relation to remote learning programs, high tech and virtual classrooms, campus security/surveillance, and other reorganizations of higher learning spaces? How are individual and collective bodies affected by the proliferation of global campuses and transnational academic networks? We envision our conference as a platform for academics, students, staff, and faculty to engage in a multidisciplinary discussion that builds on existing debate surrounding the corporate university by placing embodiment at its center.

In an effort to foster new conversations, we encourage not only formal academic presentations but also creative, multimedia, and unconventional modes of address that query or challenge the limits of standard academic discourse.

Possible topics of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:
- Corporeality, difference, and labor practices in and against the university
- Strikes, labor organization, cultures of protest
- Campus security, surveillance, and violence
- Migration, empire, and learning
- Bureaucratization, rational institutions, recruitment, professionalization
- Access, excess, process, praxis
- Disciplinarity and departmentalization
- Advertising space, corporate presence on campus
- Alternative mappings of academic spaces

Please send abstracts of no longer than 250 words to EmbodimentConference@gmail.com by Friday, March 7th, 2008. Visit our website www.EmbodimentConference.blogspot.com for additional details and updates.