2014 English Graduate Student Symposium

POST-ING: A SYMPOSIUM ON WHAT COMES AFTER

The George Washington UniversityFebruary 7, 2014

CFP deadline: September 01, 2013

Keynote speaker: Roderick A. Ferguson, Professor of Race and Critical Theory at the University of Minnesota and author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004) and, most recently, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012)

Recent scholarship has proposed that we are living in an era of posts: post-raciality, post-humanism, post-feminism, to name a few. However, as Neil Badmington reminds us, the post is always already intrinsically tied and haunted by that which it is post-in. To “post” is to reference and simultaneously repel the past which it is trying to think and exist beyond. Embracing this (im)possibility as a generative space of productivity, we hope to explore the potentialities that lie within those literary, historical, artistic and cultural productions that depict the desire of “post-ness.”

In this symposium on the “post,” and the future it suggests after the hyphen, we hope to explore the current focus in the academy on the desire to live and think beyond: beyond the body, beyond definitions of the canon and literary productions; and in a post- world: post-race, post-human. Therefore, the GWU EGSA board is proud to announce its Fourth Annual Graduate Student Symposium entitled Post-ing: A Symposium on What Comes After, taking place on February 7, 2014. We invite panels and papers that explore subject matters on race, space, nationality, humanism, queerness, disability/the body, and all things/subjects that explore the desire to exist beyond. Moreover, what are we trying so desperately to escape in our attempt to “post”? What type of painful processes must take place in order to exist beyond that which we are “post-ing”? What, indeed, comes after, if anything at all? In this symposium, we hope to further the conversation between presenters and participants across concentrations and disciplines through the intersections of current graduate student work that explores the notion of “post-ing.”

To encourage innovative dialogues, we welcome papers from diverse disciplines, including, but not limited to the following topics:

Animal Studies
Bioethics
Canon, disciplines, and interdisciplinary practices
Critical Race Studies and post-raciality
Cultural Studies
Cyborg Studies, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality
Deconstructionism
Digital Humanities
Disability Studies
Embodiments and identity
Gender Studies
Globalization
Humanism, post-humanism, transhumanism and antihumanism
Queer Theory
Temporality
Utopia and dystopia

Panel Submission Guidelines
The GWU EGSA board will be accepting panel submissions for our symposium first, then individual panel organizers will be accepting paper abstracts.
Please send your 300 word panel submissions, along with your contact information, to Maia Gil'Adi at mgiladi@gwu.edu by September 01, 2013. Please include the words “EGSA Panel Submissions” in the subject line of your e-mail.
Information on how to submit abstracts will be soon to follow.