Post-ing: A Symposium on What Comes After
Don’t miss out on the EGSA‘s 4th Graduate Symposium Friday, February 7th, 2014!
This year the topic is “Posting: A Symposium on What Comes Next”
This year’s EGSA symposium focuses on scholarly work that explores the “post”: of race, space, nationality, humanism, and queerness. We will attempt to answer difficult questions such as, 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.”
Below are a few of the panels taking place Friday (February 7th):
“Losing Sight of Race: Past, Present, Future” co-organized by English PhD student Molly Lewis and American Studies PhD student Justin Mann, which will explore the proliferation of color-blindness aspirations within American culture and Americans’ protestations for equal opportunity that “reveal the following affective investment in race-neutrality: the hope for a post-racial world.” This panel will explore the ways in which the desire for a “post-racial” world has been a persistent one throughout history, and how such desires have been represented as “remembered” and/or “imagined” in contemporary discourse. Ultimately, this panel asks: What is so important about losing sight of race?
“Harrowing Transformations,” a co-organized panel by English PhD students Haylie Swenson and Alan Montroso, will investigate narratives of transformation from an ecological and/or posthuman orientation, asking: “How might narratives of transformation and becoming challenge our beliefs about a stable and harmonious universe? Are the processes by which we aestheticize breaks and ruptures determined by humanistic ways of thinking?”
There are many other wonderful panels taking place during the symposium, such as English PhD student’s Patrick Thomas Henry and Shyama Rajendran’s “‘The Time is Out of Joint’: Post-Temporal,” and Leigha McReynolds’ “What Comes After the Conference Paper: A Series of Ignite Talks on ‘Post-ing.’”
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| Roderick Ferguson |
As a way to conclude our symposium, Roderick Ferguson, professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, will giving the plenary talk, titled, “To ‘Post’ the Nation: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Not-Yet-Imagined.”
These events are free and open to the public. Please make sure to RSVP to Maia Gil’Adi (mgiladi@email.gwu.edu) as seating is limited, or visit the symposium website for more details!
