CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
Deadline: Monday, September 21, 2015.
Social Choreography is a working group dedicated to examining how systems of discipline, desire, power, and sociality choreograph movements, patterns, and gestures in lived experience. With concerns ranging from urban design to dance, Social Choreography seeks to understand how movement is conditioned by larger cultural infrastructures and how it responds to and impacts these infrastructures in antagonistic or reflexive ways. Seminar discussions and research may engage activist-oriented artistic interventions, the structuring of public movement and the circulation of bodies, theories of theater and performance, ethnographic understandings of everyday rhythms and habits, and institutions of control and holding including incarceration, housing, education, and labor management. What are the forms that push back on these aggressions? What is the role of aesthetics as it intersects with politics and the social order? Of concern to our research workshops are recent events of police violence, gentrification, as well as migration due to political conflict and climate change. We hope to engage these matters from as broad a disciplinary base as possible.
The working group consists of presentations of participants’ research at any stage of completion and will adopt the format of the studio “crit” during meetings. Though the working group is primarily targeted at graduate students in all fields, faculty are invited and guest speakers will engage discussion periodically. At the end of the fall term, participants will cooperatively determine how to frame or present their research, whether in a multi-author publication, public programming, or the continuation of sessions. Given the focus on presentations and active conversation, the working group will be closed in the fall semester. Applicants from across departments and programs are encouraged to submit a paragraph of inquiry detailing interest in the working group as well as research interests or working projects relating to the theme of Social Choreography via email to [email protected] by Monday, September 21.
The Social Choreography Working Group is organized by Joseph Henry and Kaegan Sparks, Ph.D. Program in Art History, and Katherine Carl, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
