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EXTENDED DEADLINE — Call for Proposals: Fellowship Applicants for the USC Center for Feminist Research

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: FELLOWSHIP APPLICANTS

USC Center for Feminist Research
NEW DIRECTIONS IN FEMINIST RESEARCH
2013-2014 Seminar Theme: “Global Capitalism and Intimate Industries”
Seminar Director: Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Each year, the CFR sponsors an interdisciplinary research seminar broadly related to feminist topics, themes, or methods. The seminar’s theme in 2013-2014 is “Global Capitalism and Intimate Industries,” and will be directed by Professor Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (Sociology and Gender Studies). We are now inviting applications from USC faculty and advanced graduate students to become 2013-2014 New Directions Fellows. Faculty fellows are awarded research stipends of $2500 and graduate student fellows receive $1000 to pursue their own research related to the seminar’s theme.

The 2013-2014 seminar will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to advance the humanities and social science literature on gender, labor, and global capitalism. The seminar focuses on “intimate industries” in peripheral economies, meaning industries that commodify intimacies including affect, care, reproduction, and sex in the ‘Global South’. Examples of these industries include international marriage brokerages, migrant care work training centers, medical tourism facilities, sex tourism companies, internet pornography businesses, cultural tourism institutions, call centers, adoption centers, and surrogacy clinics.

Seminar participants will examine the distinctive elements of markets for intimate industries, and account for the construction of race, gender, sexuality and nation in intimate labor. Employing a multi-scalar approach, the seminar will interrogate the social relations constructed in intimate industries, such as relations between surrogates and mothers, care workers and wards, and migrant remitters and recipients. Seminar participants will also examine how the state regulates intimate industries, illustrating how state and transnational regulations and public anxieties that are gendered and racialized often emerge alongside the commodification of intimacy. Lastly, the seminar will explore how intimate industries reconfigure the political economy of globalization. Scholars conducting international research are encouraged to apply.

Applicants should submit a CV of no more than four pages, and a two-page description of their ongoing or proposed research on by March 27th to Rebecca Das: cfr@usc.edu. Next year’s Fellows will be announced by mid-April. New Directions in Feminist Research Seminars offer a setting where faculty and advanced graduate students pursuing related research can work intensively on their own ongoing projects in a collegial atmosphere that encourages productive experimentation and provides both intellectual and material support. During the course of the academic year, New Directions Fellows participate in a series of workshop sessions focused on the development and presentation of their own work. Fellows are expected to meet in seminar at least six times during the academic year. They are also expected to participate in related public seminar events.