Solving for X / call for papers 21-22
Recent scholarship across humanities and social sciences highlights the place of variables difficult to name and perhaps not finally nameable. Variables up for play nonetheless hold and channel force in social structures. Like a missing name; an algebraic unknown; an extra or missing property; a placeholder in logic; the excessive jouissance of being, marked as x in some psychoanalytic schemas; the x of nonbinary gender, and of an undetermined alternative to identity, call on theory to infer and speculate on unidentified critical concepts.
We invite 20-minute paper proposals from any members of the community and particularly from graduate students and faculty wishing to present two related papers together. Group discussion is integral. Three sessions per quarter will be booked as closely as possible into regular days and times (e.g., Tuesdays at 5). This series aims to build community across Critical Theory by emphasizing non-hierarchal exchange and mutual support in the context of a core problem. Unlike other works in progress, we hope to maintain a throughline of thought from month to month across the year.