EcoMaterialisms Conference CFP

The inter-UC EcoMaterialisms Collective has released the CFP for its 2016 graduate conference “EcoMaterialisms: Scales of Matter(ing)” to be held at UC Davis:

EcoMaterialisms: Scales of Matter(ing)

University of California, Davis

May 13-14, 2016

Keynote: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (George Mason University, English)

Scales delineate zones, trajectories, bodies, spaces, and intensities. Whether scales are large or small, go up or down, they form territories with fractal properties that disrupt the traditional relations between inside and outside, macro and micro, friend and enemy. Simultaneously incongruent, fragmented, and interrelated, scales complicate questions of legibility, knowledge, and power. Rather than the pre-given contours of matter, scales are constructed and performed by the various actors for whom they matter. Making scales is about creating, inhabiting, and containing worlds, and the ways those worlds build up on one another and in one another – worlds that are situated, vulnerable, experimental, and never innocent.

With this in mind, “EcoMaterialisms: Scales of Matter(ing)” will bring interdisciplinary graduate work to bear on questions of scale in new materialist discourse and practice. As this field attempts to think the relation between matter and meaning, we ask: how are scales structured and negotiated through discursive and material practices? What kinds of scales do these practices produce? What kinds of beings, relations, and affective states do particular forms of scale enable or exclude? What kinds of politics do different forms of scale make possible? Submissions may address the following topics, but are by no means limited to:

• Histories and theories of the organism, of ecologies, and of cosmologies
• Racial, sexual, and psychological difference and normative scaling
• Spatial and temporal scales and the ethics and politics thereof
• Scales of embodiment: measurement and visibility
• Rhetorics, practices, and philosophies of science: critical perspectives
• Scales of sensory perception
• Phenomenology after ‘the human’
• Scale and knowledge production
• Scales of environmental disaster and response
• Humanist and post-humanist scales
• Scale: topologies and topographies
• Ontological scales and ontologies of scale-making

We are accepting abstracts for individual presentations as well as panel proposals for 3-4 presenters. Individual abstracts should be no more than 300 words and include your name and institutional affiliation. Panel proposals should be no more than 750 words and include a description of the panel topic and title as well as the names and institutional affiliations of each participant.

Submit abstracts and proposals to EcoMaterialismsCollective@gmail.com by Friday, January 29th, 2016.

Los Corridos de Jimmy Santiago Baca: Community in the Refrain

The corrido is a popular genre in nineteenth and twentieth century Mexican literature and social practice. Used in the oral and printed transmission of information, education, and, at times, subversive politics, corridos often take the form of narrative song, ballad, and/or poem and deal with oppression, history, and the day-to-day of rural life. Many academic studies of the history and form of the corrido — e.g. Vicente T. Mendoza, Américo Paredes, and Merle E. Simmons — treat it as a genealogical object. Whether that genealogy can be effectively traced —  that is, whether there is a broken or unbroken step-by-step development from Spanish romance ballads to Mexican corridos through the resemblance of formal attributes  — is a topic of debate, but missing from this conversation are Chicana/o appropriations and deployments of this form, whether in the Chicano nationalism of the 1960s and 70s, or the postmodern and post-nationalist chicanisma/o of the 80s and 90s. A result is the impression that the corrido is, post-1930,  static or, even, dead.