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?
Confirmed speakers so far include Lauren Berlant, Gregg Bordowitz, Ann Cvetkovich, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell.
We are designing this conference to bring together work across disciplinary divides. For related art events to take place in tandem with the conference, we also solicit video and/or sound work, web-based media, performative lectures, spoken word, agit-prop, radio, and ephemeral installations.
Presentations should take 30 minutes.
Please send proposals of no more than 250 words, postmarked by October 1, 2003, to the following address:
DEPRESSION Conference The University of Chicago Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts 5845 South Ellis Avenue Gates-Blake Hall, Room 101-A Chicago, Illinois 60637
Please do not write your name on your proposal. Instead, please include a separate cover letter with your name, mailing, and email addresses, as well as the title of your proposal.
For queries, please contact Debbie Gould (dgould at uchicago.edu) or Zarena Aslami (zdaslami at uchicago.edu).