The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum invites 10-minute lightning talks from MSU graduate students researching the history and impact of dictatorships around the world. Conceptualized in connection with The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes, this interdisciplinary event explores the ways in which dictatorships develop technologies of violence, and how those technologies have shaped the political, economic, artistic, and ecological systems in which we live. How have oppressive regimes reorganized governments, markets, modes of artistic expression and scientific inquiry, the narration of history? How has the trauma of dictatorship marked individuals and populations, both human and nonhuman? How do technologies of violence operate at both local and global scales, or across time and space? And how have artists, historians, writers, activists, scientists, educators, and journalists created technologies of dissidence in response? Graduate students working on or in relation to dictatorship from any discipline and within any historical or regional context are encouraged to submit.
Possible themes or fields of inquiry include but are not limited to:
Memory and memory studies
Trauma and trauma studies
Institutional violence
Migration
Torture
Borders and built infrastructures
Aesthetics
Environmental justice
Local and global economies
Science studies and histories of science
Participants will speak in the gallery space, allowing disciplinary expertise to illuminate fresh perspectives for engaging with the exhibition. This format is designed to showcase the variety of research perspectives represented on our campus, and to emphasize the necessity of
interdisciplinary conversation and problem solving concerning this complicated global political phenomenon. To this end, participants need not work in art history or cultural criticism to participate, nor must abstracts respond specifically to work in the exhibition, although they might. Rather, the event extends a warm welcome to a variety of fields and research methodologies.
The Broad Art Museum will support participants in the composition of these talks–a unique and tricky job market genre–by providing a gallery tour and some consultation with Writing Center staff in advance of the event. Please send 250-300 word abstracts to Michelle Word (wordmich@msu.edu) and Laura Romero (romerola@msu.edu) by October 7, 2019.
Participants will be notified by October 11, 2019.