Call For Papers:
As the Department of English Language and Literature, Yaşar University, we are delighted to announce our second Conference in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies. The title of the conference is “Labour,” and it will be held in Izmir, Turkey on May 3rd and 4th, 2018.
The organizers would also be happy to receive proposals for contributions in an alternative format, such as workshops, exhibitions, installations, etc. A more detailed description of the conference and a list of possible topics are below:
In this era of outsourcing, offshoring, casualization and digital production, does labour still work in accordance with the conventional paradigms for its analysis? At a time when traditional left-wing politics and organized labour have, in diverse places, experienced an enduring sense of crisis, do we need to insist once again with redoubled urgency on the critical unearthing of the exploitation of labour as the occluded infrastructure of our social and cultural systems, the obscured motor of history itself, or must we rather start again from a new historicization, novel forms of cultural and sociological analysis which explore the complexity, variability and multivalency of the very concept of work? This conference aims, from an interdisciplinary perspective, to re-examine the status and usefulness of “labour” as a term of analysis within literary and cultural studies.
In the wake of the interventions of feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory, among other strands of radical critique, can labour any longer—if it ever could—be seen as a single category, a universal underlying bedrock to be struck in the analysis of diverse cultural formations? How have alternative paradigms within the social sciences for the analysis of biopolitics, the reproduction and regulation of bodies, displaced the concern with labour, and how have they opened up possibilities for a richer account of labour and gender, labour and libido, the organization of leisure and laziness, the “race-ing” of labour, the work of ethnicity? In the light of such challenges, can the figure of the worker or the notion of the working class function as anything other than a residual and nostalgic fantasy? What remains to be said of the work of fantasy itself, the work of the literary imagination and of cultural creativity and activism? Is “labour” still effective as a rallying point for an oppositional political imaginary? Is the “work” evoked in contemporary accounts of psychological tasks such as mourning or memory compatible with a materialist account of labour?
If socialist feminism in particular has long drawn attention to overlooked sites of labour and (re-)production, including the home as a workplace, how do re-organizations of social space demand renewed examination of the location of work? While globalization has enabled new forms of mobility—including the profitable smuggling of bodies across borders—how has the entanglement of space and production wrought new forms of segregation, new geographies of difference, opportunity and exploitation? What novel forms of dispossession stem from work which appears to have no material place or product, such as the labour associated with information and communication technologies? How can literary and cultural studies examine their own entanglement in the organization of labour, including the question of the university as a place of work?
Precisely because of our emphasis on the mobility, variability and complexity of the putatively singular concept of “labour,” and the critical pressure we want to place upon its transferability across academic disciplines and fields of analysis, we hope that this conference will offer more than a series of independent scholarly interventions. We invite proposals for 25-minute papers from all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, and we plan to organize opportunities for response, discussion and workshops, which we hope will promote space for comparative and interdisciplinary debate and dynamic encounters between alternative paradigms.
Possible topics include:
Literary Labours
Labour, Leisure and Laziness
Digital Labour and Digitization as Dispossession of Labour
Segregation and Inequality in Modern Labour
Sex Work: Labour, Libido, Commodification
The Production of Urban Space
By Hand and By Brain: Intellectual and Cultural Labour
Pre-Modern and Early Modern Production
The Labour of Ethnicity and the Race-ing of Labour
Housework and Its Value(s)
Labour, Habit, Ritual
Labour and Mobility
Biopolitics and/or the Commodification of the Body
Reproduction
Memory Work and the Labours of Mourning
The Myth(s) of the Labouring Classes
Students and Instructors as Workers
City, Class and Gentrification
Re-working: The Labour of Translation and Adaptation
Proposals for papers are welcome by January 20th, 2017 and should be sent to clcs@yasar.edu.tr.
Contact Info:
Esen Kara, Yaşar University Department of English Language and Literature, Izmir, Turkey
Contact Email: clcs@yasar.edu.tr
