The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) announces a call for papers for our 2012 annual one-day conference:

MOVEMENT(S)

Saturday December 1st

9am-6pm

Location TBA

Inspired by such socially significant movements such as Occupy Wall Street and such spacially significant movements as the recent reclaiming by the new World Trade Center of the title of New York’s tallest building, the New York Metro Studies Association has chosen the theme of “Movement(s)” for our annual conference. The expansiveness of this topic opens up the possibility of multiple perspectives: what moves us? How do the social, political, and economic conditions at work in the U.S. empower or deter different kinds of movement? How do movements develop, disseminate, diffuse, and dissipate?

In imagining this conference, we invite participants to engage with any of the following issues (or any other this topic inspires):

• social movements
• political movements
• movements of capital or people through or from New York and beyond
• artistic and fashion movements
• the movements of bodies through immigration, urban flight, suburbification and gentrification
• transportation and commuting
• digital movement of information, images and data locally, globally, and in and out of networks
• historical movements
• critical and canonical movements in academia
• literary movements
• movements of leisure, sport or travel
• kinetic movement
• disabled and prosthetic movements
• movable type
• military and peace movements
• outsourcing and movements of labor
• social mobility and moving on up
• religious movements
• being moved and affective movement
• passing
• failed or stalled movements
• compulsive, obsessive, and repetitive movements

We welcome papers on any historical period in American Studies, as well as 21st century topics.  We particularly encourage presentations that circulate across historical and disciplinary borders, presentations that are non-traditional in form, and presentations that incorporate performance and/or visual art.  While we welcome proposals on any  element of American Studies, we will especially privilege presentations focusing on the New York area. Please note that we will accept abstracts for individual paper presentations only, not pre-constituted panels.

Please send abstracts to nymasamovements@gmail.com by June 15, 2012.