ASTR 2011 CFP - à Montréal

[Erin Hurley, Prof.]

AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THEATRE RESEARCH/ THEATRE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 2011 CONFERENCE
Montreal, Quebec Canada
November 17 – 20, 2011
Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth Hotel

Economies of Theatre
Theatre is an economy unto itself. It is a practice of representation and exchange. It deals in substitutions and sleights of hand, seeming always to offer one thing in return for another. Theatre manages its own systems of debt and collateral, trades in trust and credulity, traffics in goods, services and persons. It provokes love, pity and fear for its promiscuous commodification of the world.
Theatre is also one of those places in a wider economy at which production and consumption, work and leisure take place simultaneously and in each other’s presence. Theatre is therefore a place where the relations between production and consumption, work and leisure are variously obscured, enchanted and explored.
Some forms of theatre and performance seek to evade or resist the economic structures within which they operate, while others are entangled with the market and its vicissitudes in ways that attract both the suspicion and the fascination of both artists and scholars.
All this might amount to little were theatre not also an economy of feelings: a space and a practice constituted by the circulation of images, the transmission of affect and a multitude of peculiar investments of time and of thought.
The Program Committee invites proposals for plenary session presentations that offer new thinking or provoke fresh questions about the theatre and its many economies. We are open to all proposals that address the broad theme of the conference, addressing theatre and performance from any historical period or geographical / cultural location, including, but not exclusively, questions of:

 *   theatre and performance in terms of marketplaces, commerce, subsidy, financialization, wages, exploitation, consumption, overheads, capitalization, profit and loss, and the not-for-profit;

 *   the role of theatre and performance in economic policy and its implementation, in urban development, tourism, cultural industries, heritage;

 *   the circulation of images and identities in the theatre and beyond – by means of economies involving substitution, representation, documentation, gossip, remediation, identification and disidentification;

 *   economies of affect and emotion: the movements of desire and passion, feelings and actions of reciprocity and non-reciprocity, love requited and unrequited;

 *   economies of the gift and of waste (of energy, time, resources);

 *   theatre and performance as queerings of productivity and resistances to logics of accumulation;

 *   the performativity of economics and finance (forecasting, confidence, credit).

Participation Guidelines
Plenary Presentations: We invite proposals for individual plenary papers and/or presentations. These presentations are “plenary” in the sense that they address the entire conference and nothing runs concurrently with them. Proposals should take the form of an abstract (max. 250 words) that includes name, affiliation, mailing and email addresses. Full-length papers will not be accepted. Individual presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Those whose proposals are not selected for plenary presentations will have the opportunity to apply to a second call for participants in accepted working sessions.
Working Sessions: We invite proposals for working sessions. This category includes roundtables, seminars, research groups, reading groups, forums, workshops, as well as formats that have yet to be imagined. “Working sessions” is a general category that allows the session leader(s) to convene small groups around a proposed area of inquiry or practice, and to structure a method and format that best suits the goals of the group. No formats will be privileged over others; all proposals will be given equal consideration according to their merit. Proposals should include a rationale for the subject of the session and for its format, and must be accompanied by the “ASTR/TLA Working Sessions Proposal Form,” attached below. Proposals related to the conference theme are particularly welcome, but not necessary. Once the program committee has made its selection of working sessions, each session convener will be invited to issue a specialized call for participants for that session; this second round of calls for participants in working sessions will be posted on the ASTR and TLA websites, with a late May deadline for submission.

For more information about ASTR working sessions see:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines

For an application form for ASTR working sessions: www.astr.org/files/ASTRpropsal%20form.doc<http://www.astr.org/files/ASTRpropsal%20form.doc>

All submissions must be received by February 1, 2011 and should be sent as email attachments, in MS Word, to  astr2011 at gmail.com<mailto:astr2011 at gmail.com> This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Inquiries are welcome. Please contact Nick Ridout at  astr2011 at gmail.com<mailto:astr2011 at gmail.com> This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  with program questions
or Nancy Erickson ( nericksn at aol.com<mailto:nericksn at aol.com> This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) with questions about conference logistics.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE 2011
Nicholas Ridout (Chair), Queen Mary University of London
Colleen Reilly (TLA Representative), Slippery Rock University
Stacy Wolf (Vice President), Princeton University, ex officio
David Saltz (Committee on Conferences), University of Georgia
Scott Magelssen (Committee on Conferences), Bowling Green State University
Pannill Camp, Washington University in St Louis
Erin Hurley, McGill University
Shannon Jackson, University of California, Berkeley
Tavia Nyong’o, New York University
Jim Peck, Muhlenberg College
Beliza Torres (Graduate Student Caucus Representative)
Patricia Ybarra, Brown University