Events

International Conferences

The Subaltern- Popular Conference 1(March 8-9, 2004)

Past Faculty Workshops

The Subaltern-Popular Faculty Workshop 4:

Techniques of Mobilization

Garden Room, Upham Hotel, Santa Barbara
September 28-29, 2008

The 2008 Subaltern-Popular Faculty Workshop will focus on subaltern forms of knowledge production and dissemination. This is an opportunity to rethink some of the recurrent themes in our conversation in the last four years: representation, legibility, legitimacy, location, mobility, aesthetics. We will have round-table discussions on pre-assigned readings, with each roundtable discussion preceded by a talk by an invited speaker. The roundtable topics are: Archive/Legibility, Insurgency, Violence, Political society.

Workshop Schedule

The Subaltern-Popular Faculty Workshop 3:

Legitimacy and Legibility

Garden Room, Upham Hotel, Santa Barbara
November 3-5, 2007

Questions of representation and recognition have been fundamental to discussions of subalternity and popular culture.  They are intimately tied to legitimate expressions of the political.  We are struggling to find a vocabulary to describe new formations of power and resistance, to read the historical archive with a new awareness of language and lexicon, and to communicate across disciplines, theoretical formations, and historical experiences.  In continuation of last year’s conversation, this year’s workshop has two objectives. First, to use the “keywords” exercise, proposed at last year’s workshop, to think through the problems of language, legibility, and legitimacy.  This will require unlearning some concepts and redefining/extending others.  In addition, we plan to address the problem of legitimacy and legibility – political, social, cultural – by focusing on the concepts of aesthetics, space, agency, (il)legality.

Format of conversation: plenaries as structured discussions and paper presentations. Papers need to be sent to George Flaherty (gflaherty@umail.ucsb.edu) for the website no later than Oct 15.  Time for paper presentation: 20 min + 40 min discussion time for each paper.

The Subaltern-Popular Faculty Workshop 2:

Space, State, and Statelessness

Garden Room, Upham Hotel, Santa Barbara
November 4-6, 2006

Workshop Schedule

Plenary Questions

The November 2006 Subaltern-Popular faculty workshop proposes to address the locational problem of subalternity. This is a continuation of the conversation among the group in the last two years, and also prompted by the political developments in the Middle-East this year.

One of the problems of the literature on subalternity is the indifference to the location/mobility of subaltern groups - both their physical location, and
cultural and political proximity to other communities. This is, at least, in
some measure responsible for the difficulties of thinking beyond the logic of
the state, and the state-capital-territory nexus. Unless the spatial geography
of subalternity is taken into consideration we risk missing out on crucial
conditions of access, movement, and territory that shape political identities.
These are some general questions we plan to address:

1. What is gained from retaining the notions of nation and state in imagining the political?
2. Can we imagine a non-statist form of political community? What would such a formation mean in terms of getting entry into an international political community? How would the subaltern and the popular relate to such non-statist formation?
3. What are the forms of spatial practice that reside beyond the domain of the state? Can we formulate a spatial vocabulary that describes such alternative spatial practices?

The Subaltern-Popular Faculty Workshop 1:

The Body

McCune Conference Room , HSSB, UC Santa Barbara
May 14-15, 2006

If the subaltern and the popular are two approaches to the social, the goal of this faculty workshop is to formulate ways of thinking the “body” at the conjunction of these terms.  Broadly speaking, issues may include sexuality, labor, law, representation, media, and social justice.

These are the opening questions for our discussion:

1. Subalternity is bodily marked -- encoded in gestures, dress-codes,
   skin-color, sexual identity, bodily proxemics. and labor.  If the body is also a mnemonic device to perpetuate cultural and political memory, how resilient are such markings?
2. What is the role of different regimes of description in encoding the body of the "citizen-subject," the "subaltern," the "damnés", and the "people?" When do these reach the limits of representation (in the sense of both depiction and political participation)?
3. If subaltern resistance is performative (not just locutory and/or amenable to textual reading), how does the body "figure" in such resistance?
4. How is the body "managed" in the switch/slide from subaltern to popular? Do we need to come up with a new framework for thinking about the body to understand this switch/slide?
5. "Where" does the subaltern body appear, and where is it made to
   disappear? How might we deploy social theory to demarcate the domains of the popular (popular media, education, justice, political action)?
6. What idioms of the disenfranchised subject's body can be found in
   popular culture? How might such idiom be translated in scholarship to address questions of social justice?