Genres in the New Economy Conference Schedule:

Friday, Aug 23

8:30 – 9:00                  Breakfast

9:00 – 9:55                  Introductory remarks: Group ice-breaker – ‘My favorite office genre…’

 10:00 – 11:45              Session #1  — Adam Sargent – Working with Genres: Translation,                                                                           Transparency and the new India

                                                              Deborah Jones -The Ghost in the Tweet: Writing as                                                                       Someone Else in the New Economy (And the Old One)

                                                              Discussant: Edgar Illas

12:00 – 1:00                Lunch at CAHI House — Please RSVP if coming

1:00 – 2:45                   Workshop paper #1

                                       Caitrin Lynch – Technology, Creativity and Expertise in the New                                                            Textiles Economy

                                    Discussant: Susan Lepselter

 

3:00-4:45                     Workshop Paper #2

                                       Miyako Inoue – The Antics of the Virtual: The Otherness in the Self                                            in the Japanese Expression, Nanchatte

                                        Discussant: Ilana Gershon

 

Saturday, Aug 24 –

8:30 – 9:00 AM           Breakfast –

9:15 – 10:45                Session #3

                                       Susan Lepselter – Unruly Bodies

                                      Ellen Kladky – White Comes to the Cumberlands

                                     Discussant: Martha Lampland

11:00 – 12:30              Workshop #3

                                    Eitan Wilf – To go with the informational flow: The Genred Multi-                                             Sited Mediation of the Innovation Architect as a Communication Node

                                   Discussant: Mike Prentice

 12:30-1:30             Lunch –CAHI house – please RSVP

1:30-3:00                Workshop #4

                           Matthew Hull- Microbiome of the State: Police Procedure and Corporate                                  Customer Service in India

                        Discussant: Ron Day

3:15-4:40                     Session #4

                                      Mike Prentice – To No One’s Satisfaction: Genre Regimentation                                                  in the Korean Workplace

                                      Ben Robinson – Crisis: Event and Description

                                     Discussant: Jane Goodman

4:45 – 6:00                  Session #5

                                      Ilana Gershon –Chronotopic Dilemmas in Job Application Genre                                                   Repertoires

                                     Andrew Graan – Projects and the Project Form

                                     Discussant: Purnima Bose

 

Sunday, Aug 25 –

 

9:00 – 9:30                  Breakfast –

9:30 – 10:30                “360-Degree Feedback” from Martha Lampland

10:30 – 11:15              Next steps

 

Bios of Participants:

Andrew Graan, University of Helsinki

Dr. Graan is a Lecturer in Social & Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki, with interests in mass media, political language and performance, publics and publicity, nation branding, international intervention, and global governance in Macedonia, the Balkans, and the European Union. His current project, “Brand Nationalism: Neoliberal Statecraft and the Politics of Nation Branding in Macedonia,” examines how the coordinated efforts to regulate public communication that are found in nation branding projects constitute a wider program of economic and social governance.

Matthew Hull, University of Michigan

Associate Professor, Anthropology
 Dr. Hull is a leading scholar on the role of language, materiality, and documents in their relation to state functioning. He is specialized in Pakistan and India and is the author of Government of Paper, which won the Staley Prize.. His recent research has focused on the role of privatization of police services in India and the digitization of government functions.

Miyako Inoue, Stanford University

Associate Professor, Anthropology
 Dr. Inoue is a leading scholar on language, gender, and modernity in twentieth century Japan. She is the author of Vicarious Language and numerous articles that address how gendered positions emerge from or are articulated within specific genres and technologies, from magazines to typewriters.

 

Deborah Jones, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Post-doctoral Researcher

Dr. Jones is a junior scholar focused on the semiotics and materiality of the nation in contemporary Ukraine. Her research examines how paper documents and other material artifacts come to be potent vehicles for articulating revolutionary sentiments. She is currently developing a manuscript based on her dissertation.

 

Ellen Kladky, University of California, Irvine

 Ellen Kladky is a doctoral student who researches US government programs that educate US citizens on general support on how to be part of a family in West Virginia.  She is also doing historical research on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s role in shaping the ethnoscape of West Virginia.

 

Martha Lampland, University of California, San Diego

Professor, Sociology
Dr. Lampland is a leading scholar on socialist state planning and elite experts in twentieth-century Hungary. She is the author of numerous books including The Object of Labor and Standards and Their Stories. She will serve as a discussant.

 

Caitrin Lynch, Olin College

Professor, Anthropology
Dr. Lynch has published two books exploring gender, aging, and manufacturing: Juki Girls, Good Girls and Retirement on the Line. Her article builds on ongoing research in a 150-year old Boston textile mill, which examines changes in how employers and employees understand the boss-worker relationship as business gets tight and deindustrialization tears communities and families apart.

 

Michael Prentice, Brandeis University

 Dr. Prentice is a junior scholar who conducts research on the multi-genre’d office in South Korea. His forthcoming work addresses the ways corporations appear differently depending on what kind of genres managers and academics see them with. He is developing his book manuscript entitled Supercorporate: Hierarchy and change in the South Korean workplace.

 

Eitan Wilf, Hebrew University of Israel

Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology
 Dr. Wilf is a leading scholar of creativity, music, language and institutional expertise. He is the author of School for Cool about the paradox of institutionalizing an improvisational music form, jazz, in American music schools. His recently published book, Creativity on Demand, addresses the implementation of creativity into business innovation tactics.

 

 

Purnima Bose

Professor, English and International Studies

 Her research has been focused on exploring questions of agency within larger geopolitical frameworks, including colonialism, nationalist movements, and neo-liberalism. She has written about corporations and the relationship between activism and globalization. Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation, an anthology she co-edited with Laura E. Lyons, provides case studies of corporations that interpret their self-representations in relation to their activities in China, South Africa, India, Iraq, and the United States. A special recent issue of Biography on Corporate Personhood offers analyses of the corporate form’s different iterations in Canada, China, India, Singapore, and the United States.

 

Ron Day

Professor, School of Information

Dr. Day is one of the foremost scholars in an international network of scholars, artists and professionals in various fields who are interested in the exploration of the concept of the document as a resource for scholarly, artistic, and professional work. He has published two monographs that are now considered classics in this field: Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (MIT Press, 2014) and The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001).

 

Ilana Gershon

Professor, Anthropology
Dr. Gershon studies hiring practices in corporate America as a fruitful site for analyzing how neoliberal logics are introduced into everyday practices. She is the author of numerous articles and a recent book, Down & Out in the New Economy. She will present a paper on the strategies Americans advocate for finding jobs and negotiating workplace hierarchies.

 

Jane Goodman

Associate Professor, Anthropology

Dr. Goodman is a leading scholar of Berber (Algeria) oral performance and its connection to cultural and global politics. She is the author of Berber Culture on the World Stage and Bourdieu in Algeria. She will serve as a discussant.

 

Edgar Illas

Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese

Dr. Illas is the director of the Catalan and Hispanic Literature program, and a prominent scholar writing about the intersection of capitalism, labor and literature.  He is the author of Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City.  He will serve as a discussant.

 

Susan Lepselter

Associate Professor, Anthropology.

Dr. Lepselter researches the poetics of both popular media and everyday life in contemporary American culture, focusing on captivity narratives, themes of gender and class, and discourses of memory and trauma in American social life. She is the author of The Resonance of Unseen Things, which won the Bateson prize. She will serve as a discussant.

 

Ben Robinson

Associate Professor, Germanic Studies

Dr. Robinson is currently studying the role of economic indicators in economic crises, asking what is in practice the representational work these indices perform.  He is the author of The Skin of the System: On Germany’s Socialist Modernity (Stanford UP, 2009).

Adam Sargent

Dr. Sargent is a junior scholar whose research examines the politics of labor and urban development in India.  Focusing on the construction industry in Delhi, his work tracks how the value of labor is translated in ways that reproduce inequalities between urban residents and migrant workers.  He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Constructing Labor: Toil and Translation in Making the New India.