Call for Papers
“VISIBLE DESIGNS: The Arts of Race and Capitalism”
Interdisciplinary Symposium
University of Chicago
October 12-13, 2023
Plenary Panelists: Ashlee Bird (University of Notre Dame), Aston Gonzalez (Salisbury University), Silas Munro (Vermont College of Fine Arts), Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton University)
We are seeking paper proposals for Visible Designs, a symposium that is bringing together researchers in History, Literature, American Studies, and allied fields (e.g., design studies, art history, others) who are studying the aesthetics of racial capitalism in the United States from the seventeenth century to the present day. Central to our discussion is design as a category for analyzing how people use race to make (and unmake) social lives in spaces of economic production, exchange, consumption, and waste. Our goal is to interrogate the centrality of visual and material culture to better understand how racialized capitalism functions, when it shifts over time, and where it manifests across a multitude of social sites in the American empire.
We welcome proposals for presentations from graduate students, earlier career scholars, and contingent faculty in all areas of the humanities, social science, and the design professions. The conference is organized to foster conversations between established scholars and emerging researchers. Our program will consist of four panels composed of invited faculty and emerging scholars; presenters will be matched with invited faculty according to broad methodological and thematic affinities. We encourage graduate students to propose presentations which reflect ongoing dissertation research. Presenters will be given funding to support travel and accommodations nearby the University of Chicago.
Sponsored by the Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture and supported by the Terra Foundation of American Art, Visible Designs will mark the ten-year anniversary of “Invisible Designs: New Directions in the Study of Race in American Consumer Capitalism,” a conference held at the University of Chicago in October 2013. Whereas our first conference emphasized the “hidden” dimensions of racial discrimination and inequality in the consumer economy, our sequel probes the overt, spectacular, and artful ways that Americans have crafted racial identities, maintained systems of racial domination, and built anti-racist social movements.
Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:
- The social lives of racialized commodities (iconography, furniture, cuisine, clothing, etc.)
- Racial divisions of labor in craft traditions and artisanal manufacture as well as newer industries of design, advertising, architecture, marketing, and social media
- The lived experience(s) of technologies, algorithms, and systems of racial inequality
- Concepts of work, value, matter, energy, and waste in racial discourses and critical race theory
- The narrative, graphic, and architectural forms that govern the archiving, writing, and curation of histories of racial capitalism
- The administration of race relations and/or racial conflict in cultural industries and institutions
We invite you to submit a 250-word abstract for 20-minute paper presentations, along with a one-page CV, to conference organizers Chris Dingwall (dingwall@wustl.edu) and Korey Garibaldi (Korey.G.Garibaldi.4@nd.edu) by no later than July 28, 2023. Successful applicants will be informed in early August.
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