From: kbiers-AT-uchicago.edu Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 17:21:26 -0500 Subject: SPOON-ANN: CFP: Depression -- What Is It Good For? [Spoon-Announcements is a moderated list for distributing info of wide enough interest without cross-posting. To unsub, send the message "unsubscribe spoon-announcements" to majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu] 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? We are designing this conference to bring together work across disciplinary divides. Confirmed speakers so far include Lauren Berlant, Melissa Harris- Lacewell, Ann Cvetkovich and Gregg Bordowitz. Please send proposals of no more than 250 words, with a cover letter, postmarked by October 1, 2003, to the following address: Attn: DEPRESSION Conference The Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts The University of Chicago 5845 South Ellis Avenue Gates-Blake Hall, Room 101-A Chicago, Illinois 60637 For queries, contact Zarena Aslami at zdaslami-AT-uchicago.edu or Debbie Gould at dgould-AT-uchicago.edu. Finished papers should take 30 minutes. Please do not write your name on your proposal-we will review them anonymously. Instead, include your name, institutional and email addresses, and the title of your paper on a separate cover letter.
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