Call for Papers (CFP) for the 2013 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) Conference

May 23 – 26, 2013

Chicago, IL

Panel Title: Beyond Begging, Borrowing, and/or Stealing: Cultural Studies and Innovative Ethnographic Research Methods

Call for Papers:

Drawing on the 2013 CSA meeting theme of Beyond Disciplinarity, this session asks what it means to do ethnographic research within and beyond cultural studies. This panel seeks to foster a critical and generative conversation about the role of ethnographies as one methodological approach among many within cultural studies. By re-initiating conversations that have continually underpinned cultural studies imagination, we ask, what kind of disciplinary boundary crossing are we engaged in while doing fieldwork? As practitioners of cultural studies and ethnographers of everyday practice, we are continually challenged to participate in and understand the fluid, complex networks in which institutions and people are embedded. This relationship between cultural studies and ethnography is not new; nor is it as deeply entrenched as a formalistic tradition. Yet, as Dick Hebdige, Richard Hogart, and Paul Willis, to name a few, have shown us, the examinations of a lived reality drawing from fieldwork is not only a method but also a deep commitment to cultural studies’ aim of accessing the materiality of subjects, space, and culture.

For this panel, we seek papers that foster a robust conversation about the relationship between cultural studies scholars and their methods of ethnographic research. How do we as cultural studies scholars negotiate the complexities of community-based ethnographic research or research that connects our lives as academics to our lives as activists? How does this differ from and bear similarity to approaches in other fields and disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology? What does cultural studies contribute to the use of ethnography, and what might ethnographic approaches contribute to conversations in cultural studies? Does thinking critically about ethnographic fieldwork open up a space to move beyond disciplinary divisions? We welcome multiple and interdisciplinary approaches and definitions of ethnographic methods, including but not limited to modes influenced by feminist and postcolonial theory, literature on embodiment and the senses, science and technology studies, community-engaged approaches, design, etc.

Abstracts Due by: Friday, January 25th, 2013

Email Abstracts to: nsheoran@gmu.edu AND smcc@ucdavis.ed

Panel Organizers:

Nayantara (Tara) Sheoran (Cultural Studies, George Mason University)

Sarah Rebolloso McCullough (Cultural Studies, University of California, Davis)

---

---