CFP: Intimate Labors

Interdisciplinary Conference on Intimate Labors

October 4-6, 2007

University of California, Santa Barbara

INVITED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Viviana Zelizer (Princeton) and Rose Ann DeMoro (California Nurses’ Association)
INVITED CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS: Eileen Boris (UCSB), Laura Briggs (Arizona), Amalia Cabezas (UCR), Grace Chang (UCSB), Dorothy Sue Cobble (Rutgers), Evelyn Nakano Glenn (UCB), Steven Gregory (Columbia), Maria Ibarra (SDSU), Jennifer Klein (Yale), Cameron Macdonald (Wisconsin), Premilla Nadasen (CUNY-Brooklyn), Rhacel Parreñas (UCD), Raka Ray (UCB), Ellen Reese (UCR), Becki Ross (British Columbia).

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Hull Professor of Women’s Studies Eileen Boris of UCSB and Asian American Studies Professor Rhacel Parreñas of UC Davis invite single paper proposals from graduate students and junior faculty members that advance critical and innovative ways of thinking about how intimate labor could be a useful category of analysis for understanding not just current economic transformations and strategies for social change, but also for the social meanings of money and love; constructions of race, gender, and sexuality; and relations of power and authority in the global economy. We encourage diverse methods and approaches from the humanities as well as social sciences, including but not limited to ethnography, microhistory, political economy, critical race theory, and cultural studies. Papers will be “work shopped” in breakout sessions not only to provide an opportunity for graduate students and junior faculty to present their work but also to receive extensive comments from invited commentators and the assembled audience.

Call for Papers

We hope this conference creates a venue for intellectual exchange and collaboration between junior and senior scholars to discuss care work, sex work, and domestic work around the themes of the political economy of intimate labor, globalization “from below” through intimate labor practices, work process and the culture of intimacy, and the politics of space and labor organizing. Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer, the author of /The Purchase of Intimacy/, will give the academic keynote on October 5 and we have invited Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of the innovative California Nurses’ Association, for a kick-off keynote on October 4.

Funding (transportation and 2 nights in hotel shared accommodations) is available for workshop participants connected to the UC system and partial funding may be available for other selected participants.

The conference organizers ask that all proposals be sent to Elizabeth Shermer (ellie@umail.ucsb.edu ). Submissions should include a one-page abstract, one-page curriculum vitae, and a mailing address, phone, and email address.

Proposals are due April 15^th , 2007. Decisions will be made and participants notified by May 15^th , 2007. Papers due September 1. They will be pre-circulated through the password protected conference webpage.