The Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago
and Feel Tank Chicago
2004 Conference
CALL FOR PAPERS
DEPRESSION: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
March 12-13, 2004 at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Depressed? Anxious? Confused?
This conference starts with the premise that these questions are not
merely the province of talk shows and late-night TV commercials. It
asks, instead, how we might use the experience of depression as the
very index of our current political climate and as a key to future
political thinking. We see depression as including such related "bad"
feelings as hopelessness, apathy, anxiety, helplessness, fear,
numbness, despair, ambivalence, insecurity, confusion, indifference,
resignation, paralysis, and powerlessness. We suspect that depression
in its many forms has come to suffuse the daily lives and endeavors
of a wide range of people, generating important social and political
effects that we want to examine.
Possible topics include the medicalization of depression, its
privatization, the epidemic of clinical depression among student
populations, the relation between economic and psychological
depression, and more locally, the specificities of depression, and
responses to it, in Chicago. Have individuals' feelings of hope and
possibility been diminished by the "triumph" of capitalism, economic
downturns (no longer referred to as "depressions"), corporate and
political scandals, the rise of the security state and increasing
threats to civil liberties, the apparent inevitability of certain
social problems, the limited successes (failures?) of the Left and
progressives? How might focusing on depression help us to understand
phenomena like political nonparticipation, the rise of
fundamentalisms, growing consumerism, and the retreat to the private
sphere? More hopefully, we wonder: might depression have a future in
politics?
Ultimately, the conference will work to dispel the notion that
disempowerment is the only prognosis for the depressed or that the
goal ought to lie in "getting happy." Instead, we will ask how
depression might be used politically. In particular, a guiding
question will concern the historical specificity of our own moment:
in a time when certain narratives no longer inspire optimism and when
a culture-wide sense of a totalizing despair has started to seem
natural, how might we see the political horizon opening up in new
ways?
Confirmed speakers so far include Lauren Berlant, Gregg Bordowitz,
Ann Cvetkovich, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell.
We are designing this conference to bring together work across
disciplinary divides. For related art events to take place in tandem
with the conference, we also solicit video and/or sound work,
web-based media, performative lectures, spoken word, agit-prop,
radio, and ephemeral installations.
Presentations should take 30 minutes.
Please send proposals of no more than 250 words, postmarked by
October 1, 2003, to the following address:
DEPRESSION Conference
The University of Chicago
Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts
5845 South Ellis Avenue
Gates-Blake Hall, Room 101-A
Chicago, Illinois 60637
Please do not write your name on your proposal. Instead, please
include a separate cover letter with your name, mailing, and email
addresses, as well as the title of your proposal.
For queries, please contact
Debbie Gould (dgould@uchicago.edu) or Zarena Aslami
(zdaslami@uchicago.edu).
===============================================
From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
===============================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Aug 31 2003 - 05:39:02 EDT