15th Annual Research, Art, Writing Graduate Student Conference
The RAW conference is a vibrant platform created by and for graduate student scholars and artists, fostering scholarly, creative, and transdisciplinary dialogues across the fields of arts, humanities, and emerging technologies. The annual Spring conference, organized by the Bass Association of Graduate Students, witnesses participation from graduate students across Texas and the U.S. The theme for RAW 2024 is Fugly: Aesthetics, Activism, and Politics.
15th Annual Research, Art, Writing, Graduate Student Conference
The RAW conference is a vibrant platform created by and for graduate student scholars and artists, fostering scholarly, creative, and transdisciplinary dialogues across the fields of arts, humanities, and emerging technologies. The annual Spring conference, organized by the Bass Association of Graduate Students, witnesses participation from graduate students across Texas and the U.S. The theme for RAW 2024 is Fugly: Aesthetics, Activism, and Politics.
Keynote Address
Dr. Kartik Nair
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Kartik Nair, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University, Philadelphia, will be delivering the keynote address for RAW 2024. Dr. Nair's talk will address the smoothness and textural traces of film history.
Dr. Nair's research is on popular cinema, focusing on the material life of genres. His work explores the infrastructures that produce moving images and how viewers experience those infrastructures as expressive screen forms. Nair's first book, Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror, published by the University of California Press, examines the familiar conventions of horror films for the spectral presence of filmmaking histories. Nair's work has been published in journals such as Film Quarterly, The New Inquiry, Discourse, Quarterly Journal of Film and Video, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Nair is also the core editor for Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies.
CONFERENCE TOPICS (by no means exhaustive)
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Ideologies of ugly in othering
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Ugliness and disgust in Gender, race, class, caste and sexuality
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Pathologies of ugliness (body and psyche)
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Affect and disgust (disfigurement, aging, death)
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Subversion of pejorative tropes in literature and media
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Intersections of socio-political activism and taboo
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Beauty and eugenics
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The Grotesque and scatology in literature, art, and media
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Aesthetics and politics of cuteness in art and internet (kawaii, cute cats, memes)
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Representations of trauma, war, and genocide
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Punk feminism and performance activism
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Sensuality, vulgarity, and obscenity in performance, art, and media
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Good objects/Bad objects, Good politics/Bad politics
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Avant-garde art and transgressive aesthetics
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Disgust, discipline, and state censorship
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Displacement, marginalization, activism
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Philosophies of beauty and ugliness (Kant, Nietzsche)
