https://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/conference.html
The Cultural Studies Association (CSA) invites proposals for participation in its twenty-third annual meeting, which will be held, in person, at California Institute of the Arts in the city of Valencia, California. Proposals on all topics relevant to cultural studies will be considered, with priority given to those that engage this year's theme, Imaginary Futures: Utopias, Dystopias & Protopias of Cultural Studies. How can we as cultural studies scholars make sense of different possibilities for the future, through both optimistic and pessimistic lenses, and the ways in which culture shapes those possibilities? And to what extent can theoretical imaginings structure praxis and make actual these potential futures? The keywords provided by this year’s theme offer some directions: While a utopia denotes a static state of cultural and political perfection—a society when it has become as good as it possibly can get—a dystopia can be defined as a space wherein people are stuck in a kind of recurring pattern of suffering. Alongside these more familiar framings, to what extent can cultural studies imagine a protopian world-in-becoming: a more carefully stated dream of transformation that involves not only making visible existing potentials, possibilities, and capacities, but also actualizing those mutually desirable potentials to reduce social harms and enhance human dignity