2008 Conference CFP

What Is Public Culture?

University of California, San Diego Visual Arts Department
Graduate Conference
Call For Papers

Please Circulate

The graduate students of the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego would like to announce the call for papers for their Graduate Conference themed “What Is Public Culture?” to convene April 5, 2008.

Public Culture as an academic strategy, department or discipline has entered scholarly vernacular without a clear or concise definition. We are not claiming such a definition exists, however we aim to examine its possible vicissitudes through the work of graduate students who are interested in the public sphere in any sense. In this conference we wish to explore the possible points of intersection between seemingly unrelated disciplines and open the conversation.

Possible points of questioning include, but are not limited to:

Public/private
Natural and built environments
Public spaces such as gardens or parks
Generic exchanges among traditional discourses of art (painting, sculpture, media, etc)
Interaction between gender and culture within public and/or private space
Collaborative practice as methodology
Art as a visual language for research, representations and productions in public space

We welcome all graduate students with related interests to submit abstracts (300-400 words) or full papers by January 15th, 2008. Participants will be notified in mid January, and final papers will be due in mid March. The authors of chosen papers will be asked to prepare presentations of approximately 20 minutes.

Please send all submissions to visarts-conference@ucsd.edu . Kindly include the name of your university or home institution, department of study and degree program (MA, PhD, etc.).

We would like to open submissions to graduate students in departments such as: Art History, Visual Arts, Cultural Studies, Area Studies, Classics, Antiquities, Film Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, Communications, Urban Studies, and others, this list is by no means exhaustive.

More information about our department, programs and conference can be found at http://visarts.ucsd.edu.