The graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine invite you to attend our annual conference on March 12th, 2010:
theory/practice
In a year when many of us have thought long about the social and political obligations of the academy, this conference hopes to further conversation about the relationship between varying types of work academics do: that which is cast as non-quantifiable and thus abstract (reading, "thinking," or even teaching) and that which is imagined as a more concrete sort of "doing." "Doing" might be the ways in which scholars actualize the potential of their academic work (eg, operating as an activist or in the public sphere) or might alternately refer to the demands placed upon them at every level to be "pragmatic" and practical.
Our central question is how and to what end differentiations between thinking and doing are made. What are the ways in which theory and practice are imagined and configured? What sorts of work are variously attributed to each, and how is that work valued? How is a consideration of the work performed by both theory and practice inherent in the structure of disciplinary knowledge? We are interested in examining the relationship between material conditions and artistic or intellectual work - your work or others'. This may also include considerations of the following:
-comparative disciplinary practices
-art theory and particular artistic practices
-pragmatisim as ideology
-intellectual labor
-humanities undergraduate education
-teaching/modeling activism
-scholars as public intellectuals
-scholars as activists
-the ‘real’ world
Contact us at [email protected]
Our central question is how and to what end differentiations between thinking and doing are made. What are the ways in which theory and practice are imagined and configured? What sorts of work are variously attributed to each, and how is that work valued? How is a consideration of the work performed by both theory and practice inherent in the structure of disciplinary knowledge? We are interested in examining the relationship between material conditions and artistic or intellectual work - your work or others'. This may also include considerations of the following:
-comparative disciplinary practices
-art theory and particular artistic practices
-pragmatisim as ideology
-intellectual labor
-humanities undergraduate education
-teaching/modeling activism
-scholars as public intellectuals
-scholars as activists
-the ‘real’ world
Contact us at [email protected]
