Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Research Area „Cultural Identities“ (Web)

Date: January 23-24, 2014
Venue: Gießen
Deadline for Abstracts: October 31, 2013

Identity, both as a whole and in relation to categories of social difference including, but not limited to, race, class, ability, sex/gender, sexuality, indigeneity, citizenship, etc., has been an increasingly contested concept in academic criticism, aesthetic practice, and political activism over the past quarter century – longer, if we consider experimental creative texts or the poststructuralist challenge to the subject. In political contexts, identity is framed, at times, as potentially reductivist and, at others, as necessary for self-positioning within networks of oppressive power and privilege. In aesthetic and performance practices, identity is divergently approached as crucial for interpellating potentially marginalised subjects into a sense of community/recognition and criticised as, again, reductive, insular, and/or tied to a dated notion of … read more (Web)