Manufacturing Happiness: Investigating Subjectivity, Transformation, and Cultural Capital

CALL FOR PAPERS

Manufacturing Happiness: Investigating Subjectivity, Transformation,
and Cultural Capital

The Graduate Students of George Mason University invite paper proposals
for our 4th Annual Cultural Studies Conference. The Conference will
take place on Saturday, September 19, 2009 at George Mason University
in Fairfax, Virginia.

This conference considers practices, institutions, and products that
promise happiness, in a sense of inducing “the good life,” typically
expressed as self-realization or finding one’s purpose—borrowing
Agamben’s term, subjective technologies that have a specific
relationship to social and political forces. How do practices designed
or claimed for such diverse purposes as personal stress management,
recovering from colonization, parenting, global conglomeration, and
corporate development work? What kinds of transformations do they
bring, in terms of personality, power, and communitas? And what becomes
of the living cultural traditions from which these practices are
abstracted, as in the care of the psychotherapeutic practice of
“western Buddhism,” which Zizek claims is the “hegemonic ideology par
excellance of late capitalism?” From the transmission of packaged
idealisms and practices with a putative relationship to traditional
sources to the commodified transactions for services and goods, the
conference organizers seeks papers that investigate the growing cultural
industries, both global and local, devoted to manufacturing happiness.

The wide-ranging contexts for our investigation include, but are not
limited to: the social positions within the family, home, workplace,
community, or nation-state; geographical and global considerations of
institutional development and affiliation; the political economy of
corporate training models; cultural capital and legitimation; media and
mediation (print, television, DVD, Internet, radio, etc.); religious
connections and origins; the confirmation and construction of
identities (gender, physical, class, spiritual, national, sexual, and
race) in social or political realms; and the rise and intensity of
ecological subjectivities.

Examples:
• Integral Institute, Integral Naked, and Ken Wilber
• est Training
• Shambhala Training
• Eckhardt Tolle and Oprah’s Book Club
• Weight loss and Constructing Beauty
• The “Human Potential” Movement
• The Zen Alarm Clock
• The Secret
• Hollywood Kabballah Centre
• Transpersonal Psychology
• The “Self-Help” Industry
• Magazines such as What Is Enlightenment?

Please e-mail a 500-word abstract of your presentation along with a
short CV to Michael Lecker (mlecker@gmu.edu) no later than June 15,
2009.

G.E.M. Anscombe Bibliography

Bibliography of the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001)
http://www.unav.es/filosofia/jmtorralba/anscombe/

IX Symposium Platonicum

IX Symposium Platonicum in Tokyo in 2010

(1) General information
The IX Symposium Platonicum will be held at the Mita Campus of Keio
University (2-15-45 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo). Please note that the IPS
Tokyo office is located at another campus, i.e. Notomi’s Office in Hiyoshi
Campus, while the Mita Campus is in central Tokyo. The dates are 2-7
August, 2010. The registration and hotel booking will start in mid
January 2010, about which the information will be circulated late this
year.
The topic of the Symposium is the “Republic”, and the program will follow
the custom of the past symposia; the sessions are held from the afternoon
of Monday to the morning of Saturday, with one afternoon for excursion (a
Tokyo City Trip). The General Assembly will be held on one late afternoon
(probably Thursday). The TOC is inviting, as guest speakers, Mario
Vegetti (Pavia), Gerald Boter (Amsterdam), and Myles Burnyeat (Cambridge).

(2) Call for papers
The deadlines and other conditions for the submission of abstracts of
proposed papers were fixed at the mid-term meeting of the Executive
Committee.
Submissions are received between 14 September, Monday, and 16 October,
Friday. Abstracts should be between 300 and 500 words in length
(including bibliography, if any); applicants should indicate preference
between the “shorter” paper (presentation of 20 minutes) for the
“Parallel” session and the “longer” paper (of 40 minutes) for the
“Plenary/Panel” sessions. The Executive Committee will establish two
Panels on the general topics of the “Republic”, for which three papers for
each (total six) are selected out of the “longer papers”.
Judging from the previous symposia, a larger number of papers may be
submitted than we can accommodate. In that case, the evaluation by the
Executive Committee will become crucial, so we advise all applicants to
write abstracts clearly and carefully.
The privilege of submitting papers is confined to paid-up members of the
Society: each member can submit one abstract, written in any of the five
official languages. The author’s information (contact address, e-mail
address, fax, and affiliation) should be attached to the abstract (not
included in the word limit).
The abstract can be submitted through the “IPS 2010” conference website
(to start in summer; it will be indicated on the site how to submit the
file), or sent to the following e-mail address / fax / postal address of
the IPS Tokyo Office at Keio.
Website: http://phil.flet.keio.ac.jp/ips2010/
E-mail: ips2010@phil.flet.keio.ac.jp
Fax: +81-(0)45-566-1102 (addressed to Notomi at Keio University)
Postal Address: IPS Tokyo Organizing Committee,c/o Noburu Notomi, Faculty
of Letters, Keio University, 4-1-1, Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama,
223-8521, Japan

We will acknowledge the receipt by e-mail or surface mail (the latter only
for those who do not use e-mail), so if you do not receive any response
over a week, please contact the TOC (ips2010@phil.flet.keio.ac.jp /
notomi@z8.keio.jp).

All papers will be evaluated by the Executive Committee in the last two
months of 2009, and notifications will be sent out early in January 2010.
Those whose abstracts are accepted for presentation are next requested to
submit enlarged abstracts in two languages (e.g. German & English, Italian
& French) by mid April. Full papers should be sent to the TOC by June
2010, to be posted on the website in the “pdf” file for “download”.

(3) Election of new Regional Representatives, and choice of venue for the
2016 Symposium
Two members of the committee, François Renaud (representing North
America) and Álvaro Vallejo Campos (one of the two members
representing Europe) are due to retire in 2010, and must be replaced. The
other regional representatives will be re-elected automatically unless
other candidates are nominated. The election will be held at the General
Assembly in the Tokyo Symposium, and nominations, signed by at least two
members in good standing, may be sent to the TOC by the end of June 2010.
Proposals are also invited for a venue for the meeting of 2016, after the
X Symposium Platonicum in Pisa in 2013. Statements of willingness to host
such a meeting should be submitted to the TOC with the details of the
venue proposed and the expected degree of support, by the end of March
2010. The proposal(s) will be circulated well in advance, and the venue
will be decided, in accordance with the Statutes, by a vote of the members
present at the General Assembly.

First Annual Dutch Conference in Practical Philosophy, 2-3 Oct 09

The Netherlands School for Research in Practical Philosophy (Onderzoekschool Ethiek) is pleased to announce the first Annual Dutch Conference in Practical Philosophy, which will be held on 2-3 October in conference centre Zonheuvel, in Doorn, the Netherlands.

Link: http://www.ozse.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=73&Itemid=1