6th Annual “Cultural Carolina” Graduate Student Conference
Languages, Literatures and Cultures’ Graduate Student Association (LLCGSA)
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
Darla Moore School of Business, Room 118
“VIOLENCE” (February 2nd-3rd, 2024)
download the conference flier here [pdf]
download the conference schedule [pdf]
Violence surrounds us, sometimes visibly (in times of conflict and wars, directly or mediated through images), and sometimes invisibly, as part of a statistic. With the increasingly extremist rhetoric on parts of the US political spectrum, the so-called “culture wars,” violent hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people have surged in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pacific-Asians and Asian-Americans were targeted because of xenophobia and conspiracy theories. Similarly, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were met with violent responses from authorities. Additionally, mass and school shootings hit an all-time high for two years in a row between 2021 and 2022. It seems that violence has been a part of America since its inception, the forceful appropriation of land and displacement of Native Americans, which also applies to other regions of the world - the expansionist histories of the British, French, Spanish, etc. Literature, from the very beginning, has engaged with these states of violence.
This conference encourages participants to think about these topics from the greatest range of perspectives possible and across disciplines such as literature, linguistics, languages, history, music, women’s & gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, biology, psychology, philosophy, etc.
Topics that papers might consider, but are not limited to, include
- Linguistic violence
- Femicide, violence against women
- Protest Movements, violent activism or violence against activism
- Violence through “Culture Wars”
- Psychological violence
- Colonial and imperial violence
- Violence against Queer communities
- Structural violence
- Representation of violence in the media landscape
- Racial violence
- Environmental violence
- Cultural violence, appropriation, notions of property and theft
- Economic and class violence
If you would like to participate in the conference, please fill out the following Google Submission form , where you will be able to paste your 250-word abstract (as a PDF or Word document attached) by November 5, 2023. For panels, please submit a 250-word abstract for the panel and an abstract for each paper in the panel. Papers will be accepted in English only.