[csaa-forum] FW: Present Tense Empires, Race, Biopolitics [UCHRI - S.E.C.T.]

[Danny Butt]

This looks interesting for anyone with sponsorship from an investment bank.

****PLEASE CIRCULATE****

UCHRI Summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory
August 15-26, 2005 

PRESENT TENSE 
EMPIRES, RACE, BIO-POLITICS

Instructors: Ien Ang, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lisa Lowe, Achille Mbembe

The UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) invites applications from
scholars - faculty of all ranks and students - wishing to participate in the
second annual Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT). Applications
must be submitted online via the UCHRI's FASTAPPS system and are available
at  <http://www.uchri.org/main.php?page_id=29>
http://www.uchri.org/main.php?page_id=29

Deadline: Applications are due, along with a $17.50 application fee, by
January 31, 2005. 

Program Overview 
SECT is an intensive two-week summer program for graduate students and
faculty from the UC system and elsewhere, as well as other scholars,
professionals, and public intellectuals. The Seminar will bring together
four distinguished instructors and a group of 50-60 students to study a
pressing issue or theme in contemporary critical theory, in both its "pure"
and "applied" modes. SECT is neither exclusively an introductory survey
course nor an advanced research seminar. Rather, it is an academy or
"laboratory" where students and faculty at all levels of previous experience
can study with scholars involved in important and creative theoretical
thought. Truly innovative work is of necessity both fundamental and
advanced, hence needs to be presented in ways that are simultaneously
accessible and challenging for the widest range of scholars.

The second annual UCHRI Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory will focus
on Empires, Race, Bio-Politics. The Seminar links our present both
theoretically and politically to the pasts that have produced it. Colonial
domination and racial subjection continue to function as rule,
representation, and rationalization through bio-politics. They mobilize
bodily assertions and ascriptions, penetrations and impositions, rules and
commands in and as culture, class, sexuality and gender. At the heart of
these relations of domination and structures of social definition, of
modernity and its shadows, are not just residual but renewed relations of
power, of violence and distress, of destruction and death.

The Seminar will address these continuities and discontinuities between the
colonial and the postcolonial, mapping their respective racial registers,
their histories and politics, their materialities and traces, their
bio-political assumptions and expressions. Concerned with questions of
political and aesthetic representation, the Seminar will interrogate
prevailing assumptions about home, homeland and homogeneities, chart
landscapes of metropolitan urbanity and provincial marginality, and attend
to indigeneities and invasion as much in structures of feeling as materially
and militarily. These questions in turn prompt reconsideration of travel,
shifting trade and consumptive routes, media of movement, circulations and
connectivities, but also war and terror, and the concomitant concerns of
memory and forgetting, trauma and distrust, what remains buried and what
buried alive. 

The Seminar will focus as much on the profound challenges to contemporary
empires as on the historical conditions of their making and masking. Woven
into these theoretical threads will be a concern with the state of the
modern nation-state, with racial states of being and belonging, rule and
regulation, with the shaping and shriveling of civil society, and with the
relational politics of abundance and superfluity, life and death.

Participants will be encouraged to think experimentally and critically,
reflecting on prevailing structures of thought while dynamically engaging
intellectual inheritances and pushing for theoretical innovations.

Cost 

        .       Application fee: $17.50 (non-refundable) is due at the time
of the online application submission. Applications will not be reviewed
until the application fee is received.

        .       Registration fee:  $1,750 for the SECT series. The fee
includes tuition for the two-week Seminar and daily refreshments. It does
not include the cost of housing or meals.

        .       Scholarships:  The UCHRI will make available up to 10
scholarships for full-time registered students covering the full SECT fee.
Notice of scholarship awards will be announced by March 1, 2005. Applicants
are encouraged to seek funding from their home institutions.

Application Requirements
One-page statement covering education, relevant publications (if any),
background in critical racial studies/postcolonial theory, and reasons for
requesting course of study; and abbreviated curriculum vitae (two pages
maximum). 

For further information, contact the SECT coordinator at sect at hri.uci.edu or
(949) 824-8900.  


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