NCA sponsored a summer conference titled, “Communication and Cultural
Politics,” July 13-15, 2000. The conference sessions were held on the campus of
the University of Iowa, and housing was provided at the Sheraton City Plaza in
downtown Iowa City.
The conference provided participants with up-to-date research on the conference theme, with specific
topics ranging from Cultural Studies to Postcolonialism.
Four plenary speakers headlined the conference by speaking on issues related to the
conference theme. The four speakers were Rosa Linda Fregoso (University of California,
Davis), Dilip Gaonkar (Northwestern University), Herman Gray (University of California,
Santa Cruz), and Lawrence Grossberg (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).
Two kinds of papers were sought for the conference: 1) Competitive Papers and 2) Seminar
Position Papers. Conferees can present only one paper at the conference (either one
competitive paper or one seminar position paper). Submissions for both calls
were received by March 1, 2000. Notification of acceptance or rejection of all submissions
was by made by April 1, 2000.
Competitive Papers
Three panels composed of four papers were held during the conference. The
audience for these panels consisted of all conference attendees. The papers delivered
on these panels were exemplary research projects within a Communication and Cultural
Politics framework by scholars at all levels (graduate students, junior faculty, and
senior faculty). Panelists sent drafts of papers before the conference
in time to be read by conferees. Presenters each had 20 minutes each to present their
papers.
Position Papers
The conference also sponsored seminars on four important areas of Communication and
Cultural Politics research—Critical Race Theory, Cultural Studies,
Postcolonialism,
and Transnationalism. A total of eight seminar sessions were held. A seminar on each
topic was held twice, once on Friday and again on Saturday, with a different leader
(or leaders) running the seminar on each day (see descriptions below). Those who wished to
write brief 8-10 page papers for a given seminar sent four copies of a one-page
single-spaced abstract (plus bibliography) to the relevant seminar leader.
Each seminar leader or seminar leaders chose eight
participants for his/her or their seminar. Participants
interested in listening but not presenting positions papers were welcomed.
Cultural Studies Seminars I and II (Seminar Organizers: Ron Greene and
Lenore Langsdorf) Papers submitted for these seminars focused on one of the several
directions that now are, and/or could be, pursued under the general heading of
“cultural studies”: e.g., critical, environmental, ethnographic, feminist,
global, multicultural, national, pedagogical, performative, philosophical, political,
regional, and/or rhetorical cultural studies; cultural studies of institutions, media,
technology; history of cultural studies.
Critical Race Theory Seminar I (Seminar Organizer: Lisa Flores) Papers
were invited that address the potential connections between Communication and Critical Race
Theory (CRT). Of primary interest are the insights CRT offers Communication in theorizing
and analyzing “race,” in disrupting the black/white racial binary, in attending
to the intersections of “race,” class, gender, and sexual orientation, and in
uncovering the workings of “race,” class, gender, and sexual orientation in
discourse, popular culture, law, and policy.
Critical Race Seminar II (Seminar Organizer: Jennifer Willis-Rivera)
In his essay “Storytelling, counter-storytelling and ‘naming one’s own
reality,’” critical race theorist Richard Delgado (1995) states that stories
told by a dominant group “remind it of its identity in relation to
outgroups, and
provide it with a form of shared reality in which its own superior position is seen as
natural” while “(counterstories) of outgroups aim to subvert that reality”
(p. 64). This seminar sought submissions relating to this notion of narratives and
counternarratives as they relate to critical race theory.
Postcolonialism Seminar I (Seminar Organizer: Raka Shome) Papers
were invited on topics and theoretical perspectives that are central to current postcolonial
scholarship such as (but not limited to) subalternity; politics of global and local;
gender and globalization; citizenship, nation and national identity; sexuality and
colonialism; diaspora and culture. In addition, this seminar encouraged papers that offer
new theoretical directions for postcolonial research (including problematizing or
expanding current concepts in postcolonial studies).
Postcolonialism Seminar II (Seminar Organizer: Wenshu Lee) Papers
were invited on topics and theoretical perspectives that are central to current postcolonial
scholarship such as (but not limited to) subalternity; politics of global and local;
gender and globalization; citizenship, nation and national identity; sexuality and
colonialism; diaspora and culture. In addition, this seminar encouraged papers that offer
new theoretical directions for postcolonial research (including problematizing or
expanding current concepts in postcolonial studies).
Transnationalism Seminar I (Seminar Organizers: Radha Hegde and Sujata
Moorti) Papers for this seminar addressed the multiple ways of conceptualizing the
transnational in communication research and methodology. Papers addressed one or more of
the following themes: the transformative potential of transnsationalism, in terms of
cultural flow, identity, and epistemological processes; questions of mobility and how this
reproduces social hierarchies of race, class, and gender; the creation of
deterritorialized communicative practices; and theoretical critiques enabled by the
technologies of transnationalism.
Transnationalism Seminar II (Seminar Organizers: Rona Halualani and
Aimee M. Carrillo Rowe) The forces of globalization are reconfiguring social, economic,
and (geo)political relations. Intellectuals and activists are grappling to understand and
organize within the complexities of late capitalism and the “condition of
postmodernity” that mark this current era. Theories of transnationalism attempt to
revamp prior understandings of production, consumption, culture, nation, identity, and
resistance, taking into account the ways in which transnational modes of capitalism
reconfigure cultural production and consumption, spatial and temporal possibilities,
identity formation, and a broad range of socio-cultural sites for subordination and
resistance.
