UdS American Studies Graduate Forum

This year’s UdS American Studies Graduate Forum will be organized together with our DAAD Eastpartnership group “The Bio-Politics of Borders in Times of Crisis,” bringing experts in the field of Cultural Border Studies from Petro-Mohyla-Black Sea National U, Mykolaiv (Ukraine) to Saarbrücken.

In the context of the continually evolving field of Border Studies, the UdS American Studies Graduate Forum 2018 offers a setting in which a decidedly humanities-driven, cultural approach to borders will be discussed. Focusing on aesthetic practices, this workshop seeks to investigate various cultural borderlands in North America and Europe. In particular, it aims at carving out a politics of borderlands aesthetics.

Following Jacques Rancière, politics is aesthetics when it constitutes a challenge to dominant social perception. Aesthetics, in turn, is also political. It is precisely this dynamic relation that aesthetic practices engage in which will be of interest for us in our explorations of cultural borderlands.

Topics can include but are not limited to:

representations of borders in literature, films, TV series, performance art
border performances
theoretical interventions in the field of Cultural Border Studies
border epistemologies and ontologies

Keynote Speakers:
Johan Schimanski (University of Oslo)
Astrid M. Fellner (Saarland University)

CfP

Presentations should be approximately 20 minutes in length and will be followed by a discussion and feedback round with all participants and experts.
Saarland U will seek to offer assistance in travel funding to selected presenters; recipients of the funding will be selected based on their proposals.
In order to submit a proposal, please send an email, including a title, a 250-word abstract and a short biographical note to amerikanistik(at)mx.uni-saarland.de by September 30, 2018.