American Studies Assocation conference

Five UMBC faculty members will be participating in this year's ASA conference:

• Rebecca Adelman, "Saying Thank You to the Troops: On the Militarization of Gratitude" - Scheduled Time: Sat Nov 23 2013, 10:00 to 11:45am   Building/Room: Washington Hilton, Concourse Level Georgetown East (C)
• Theodore S. Gonzalves, panel chair: "Racialized Debt and the Strangeness of Dissent in Asian/American Popular Culture" - Scheduled Time: Thu Nov 21 2013, 4:00 to 5:45pm  Building/Room: Washington Hilton, Terrace Level - Columbia Hall 10 (T)
• Nicole King, "Envisioning Relocation as Justice: The Debt of War and Industrialization in South Baltimore" - Scheduled Time: Sun Nov 24 2013, 2:00 to 3:45pm   Building/Room: Washington Hilton, Terrace Level - C - Cardozo (T)
• Margaret Re, "The Traveling Exhibition Program: Postwar Consumption, Design and Desire" - Scheduled Time: Sun Nov 24 2013, 12:00 to 1:45pm   Building/Room: Washington Hilton, Concourse Level - Georgetown West (C)
• Fan Yang, "The Spectacle of National Debt in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election" - Scheduled Time: Fri Nov 22 2013, 2:00 to 3:45pm   Building/Room: Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium
  

The conference theme Beyond the Logic of Debt, Toward an Ethics of Collective Dissent called for discussions of "debt" in its many historical, contemporary, and allegorical dimensions, and invited thinking not only about the dominant logic of debt but also the alternative practices of collective dissent that disrupt and deregulate its coercive power. We could not be more pleased with the multiple ways in which ASA panels, sessions, and roundtables have engaged and elaborated on the theme. The program committee received almost 300 individual paper proposals and 377 session proposals representing an exciting range of projects that foreground practical, material, and institutional contexts such as Indigenous land theft, home foreclosure, environmental devastation, health care inequities, military violence, occupation, prison, and education, as well as rich historical and conceptual work around key words like debt, obligation, ethics, collectivity and dissent.