The meeting will feature a keynote address from Lua Kamal Yuille, Professor of Law and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at University of Kansas, as well as a screening and remote discussion of the film What is Democracy? with filmmaker Astra Taylor.
Submissions are open for presentation proposals that engage with the aesthetic, cultural, historical, political economic, and/or rhetorical aspects of the Green New Deal movement. We are particularly interested in proposals that approach the Green New Deal from the following perspectives: · Democratizing Money · Critical Pedagogy · Cultural Production · Decolonization · Higher Education & Academic Labor · Identity & Intersectionality · Labor History · Law & Political Economy · Neoliberalism · Social Movements
Send proposals to William Saas (wsaas@lsu.edu) by February 15, 2020 for full consideration. Proposals should include a title and an abstract of no more than 500 words. Proposals for presentation of original research papers, roundtable discussions, and creative performances are welcome. Notices of decision regarding proposals will be sent out by February 15.
Website: https://moneyontheleft.org/files/Money_on_the_Left_2020_CFP-v2.pdf
Rationale
Critical work in the arts and humanities confronts the historical constructions, social practices, political institutions, and cultural discourses that authorize and animate the political economic status quo. Over the past century this work has complemented and reinforced myriad movements for the liberation and empowerment of oppressed and marginalized peoples across the world. Current scholarship in decolonization, intersectionality, social reproduction, and materiality extends these vital critical legacies, disclosing novel modes of alternative worldmaking while helping to give expression to the demands of newly globalized social movements.
In other words, the ends of contemporary critical arts and humanities scholars closely align with those of participants in the international movement for a Green New Deal. Both aim to make the world anew on grounds of equality, justice, and solidarity. Both see the necessity of doing so with close attention to the violent details of cultural, economic, and political history. Most pressingly, both recognize the need for decisive collective action to remediate current and future climate catastrophes.
Practitioners across the critical arts and humanities and the Green New Deal movement increasingly agree, too, on the means by which these goals might be achieved. They reject tired neoliberal tropes—like “fiscal responsibility,” “balanced budgets,” and “taxpayer money”—and embrace heterodox economic ideas. They demand radical democratic reorganization of the financial system and aggressive mobilization of public resources to build better infrastructures for collective care, maintenance, and provisioning. They demand environmental and social justice without economic austerity. And they know we can afford it.
For as much as they share in common, however, the critical arts and humanities and international Green New Deal movement have yet to fully account for how one extends the goals of the other. Money on the Left: The Green New Deal Across the Arts and Humanities represents a significant step toward such an accounting. Indeed, through gathering academics, artists, and activists united by their shared commitment to a capacious vision of global climate justice, the conference aims to forge new alliances and strategies for beating back neoliberal hegemony and ushering in the era of the Green New Deal.
Baton Rouge, capital city of Louisiana, is an ideal site for such a meeting for several reasons. With much of the state at about 100-feet above sea level, Louisiana’s lands, waterways, and people are uniquely vulnerable to the devastating effects of climate change. Instead of developing a robust public infrastructure to ward off further devastation and address associated social, economic, and environmental injustices, however, Louisiana’s state and municipal governments have doubled down on investments in, and subsidies for, the very industries that bear the bulk of the blame for the global climate crisis. As a result, Louisiana ranks consistently at the very top of national oil and gas production charts, and at the very bottom of every meaningful survey on quality of life, including infant mortality, life expectancy, food security, and poverty. Residents in Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor—“cancer alley”—suffer daily from exposure to the most toxic air in the United States. Meanwhile, roughly a football field’s-worth of Louisiana’s coastal land is washed away every ninety-minutes.
Similarly striking conditions, which disproportionately affect women and people of color, exist and persist in other states along the Mississippi Delta. Across the region, members of indigenous communities have been joined by vibrant social movements to demand redress for the horrific consequences of the fossil fuel industry for local lands, lives, and cultures. In sum, Louisiana is on the frontlines of both the global climate crisis and the international movement for a Green New Deal. By hosting Money on the Left: The Green New Deal Across the Arts & Humanities at LSU, MMNHD commits to honoring and extending these existing efforts.
About MMNHD
The Modern Money Network Humanities Division (MMNHD) is an organization for the cultivation and dissemination of scholarship that explores the democratic potentialities of the modern money form. Money on the Left, the official podcast of MMNHD, is hosted by Scott Ferguson (University of South Florida), William Saas (Louisiana State University), and Maxximilian Seijo (University of California Santa Barbara). The podcast is presented monthly in partnership with Monthly Review Online.For more information, visit hd.modernmoneynetwork.org/MotL/episodes, or follow MMNHD on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at @moneyontheleft.
Money on the Left: The Green New Deal Across the Arts & Humanities will be the second meeting of the Modern Money Network Humanities Division. The first MMNHD conference was held April 2017 at the University of South Florida in Tampa, and featured participation from over 50 artists, activists, and scholars from around the world. View footage of the 2017 conference at https://bit.ly/2YMxBS6.