Working Groups

The Cultural Studies Association is home to several research working groups. The aim of these working groups is to promote collaboration and advance specific projects of interest to the membership. Here, members gather to debate and discuss the latest questions, topics and theories, as well as host conference sessions, roundtables, and seminars. Each working group is entitled to organize two sessions at the annual meeting of the association. Use the navigation to the left to read more about each working group.
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If you have any questions about the CSA Working Groups, please feel free to contact Delores Phillips (phillidb@jmu.edu) and Mark Nunes (nunesm@appstate.edu), Working Groups Co-coordinators. 

If you have questions about a specific Working Group, please feel free to contact its designated chair or co-chairs.

Co-Chairs

​The Black and Race Studies Working Group centers blackness as a structural position from which to theorize the contemporary production of race. The group is dedicated to providing space for exploring black and critical race and ethnic studies not as coterminous fields, but as inhabiting an often vexed yet theoretically fruitful interrelation. Accordingly, we seek to create a forum for contemplating blackness as a problem for critical thinking, one that the feminist philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva contends “returns The Thing at the limits of modern thought.” We aim to foster work that critiques or radically dilates conventional approaches to the questions of “race” and “power,” that thinks through the racial as a limit concept and a concept of limit, and that explores new historical, theoretical, and methodological paradigms for expanding the study on race and blackness across the domains of science and art, culture and ecology, ethics and politics.

Co-Chairs

The Crip Cultures/Critical Disability Studies Working Group is prompted by the work initiated by the collection, Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry, to create a space for crip culture and disability justice strategies to intersect with new, innovative, and developing scholarship in Cultural Studies.  As Mia Mingus describes it, “We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached.”* We are interested in cross pollinated projects with artists, praxis sessions, alternative and creative modes of presentation, to workshop, think about and imagine radical and transformative cultures of access, crip futures, as well as shaping archives of crip knowledges, practices, performances, critiques, and collective strategies of resistance and of survivorship.
*As quoted in Patsavas and Danylevich’s “Introduction: Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” (Lateral, Issue 11.2 [Fall 2022]). 

​2024 CFP

Chair

The Critical University Studies Working Group takes the university itself as our object of analysis and critique. This includes an examination of the paradox of the university as an institution that is a site of power, control, and violence as well as a generative site for resistant cultural formations. As a successor to the Critical Pedagogies Working Group, this working group also takes the space of the classroom, as well as the labor and methodology of teaching, as objects of concern. Finally, we are concerned with labor at the university beyond the work of teaching, and in labor organizing in relation to the university.

Chair

The Critical Feminist and Queer Studies Working Group dedicates itself to work that builds upon, even as it critiques, the institutions and practices of Women’s and Gender Studies, focusing in particular on a historical and intersectional approach to feminism and feminist theory, transnational formations and movements, queer methodologies as well as critical feminist and queer politics, practices, and representations. We welcome work of emergent, interdisciplinary areas of inquiry in Cultural Studies including work rooted in Disability Studies and Transgender Studies. One of the aims of this Working Group is to open up a critical space for the ideas and initiatives of young scholars and junior faculty within Cultural Studies.

Co-Chairs

The Critical Pedagogies Working Group includes a focus on culture and education, cultural pedagogy, and the curriculum of cultural studies. Pedagogy, broadly conceived and critically understood in this context concerns a wide range of issues taken up in cultural studies including but not limited to mass media, popular culture, subculture, public culture, nationhood, postcolonialism, political economy, identity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability studies.

2024 CFP

Chair

The CSA Working Group on Culture and War is dedicated to scholarly and activist work on the cultural aspects of war and militarism, encompassing rhetoric and language, news and mass media, fictional texts and representations, documentary film and video, new media and other cultural forms. The Working Group welcomes interventionist and critical work on wars past and present, as well as on the everyday militarization of society, from historical, theoretical, global and interdisciplinary perspectives.

2025 CFP

Co-Chairs

The ESP Working Group welcomes creative, critical, and analytic work grounded in multiple approaches to the environment, urban space, and sense of place. We invite theoretically, methodologically, and empirically diverse work from scholars, artists, and activists investigating the spatial, cultural, and political dynamics of nature, space, and place, broadly conceived. The ESP highlights scholarly and activist projects that illuminate the functional exchange between space and power, with an eye to building productive dialogue between cultural studies and interdisciplinary fields such as Indigenous studies, urban studies, environmental studies, eco-criticism, political ecology, architecture, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. In keeping with the political genealogy of cultural studies, the ESP especially encourages submissions that bring such explorations to bear upon contemporary concerns surrounding environmental, urban, and social justice.

Chair

The Working Group of Film Studies seeks to promote a critical understanding of film, television, and related media through research and teaching grounded in contemporary cultural studies, where these multiple media are situated in their larger social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts. Thus, the working group encourages all work and projects that approach and examine film, television, and related media from a variety of disciplinary, critical, theoretical, and analytical locations and perspectives.

Co-Chairs

The CSA Working Group on Globalization and Culture is interested in providing a forum for the voices of the globalized. With the awareness that we are beginning en media res and that we are working with a binary system that currently is not capable of providing an accurate appraisal of either process nor product, this working group hopes to be able to provide support and forum for those interested in constructing a model for thinking globally, and exploring what that means, that works without reifying old distinctions.

Chair

  • Robert Carley, Interim (carley@tamu.edu)
  • If you are interested in chairing this Working Group, please reach out to Michelle (admin@culturalstudiesassociation.org)

The Literature Working Group concerns itself with the juncture of literary and cultural production, placing text in context, and exploring the ways in which literature reflects and shapes its political, cultural, and historical settings. Cultural studies has its roots in literary studies, as Jonathan Culler reminds us: “Cultural studies arose as the application of techniques of literary analysis to other cultural materials. It treats cultural artefacts as ‘texts’ to be read rather than as objects that are simply there to be counted. And, conversely, literary studies may gain when literature is studied as a particular cultural practice and works are related to other discourses.” This WG supports literary analysis of texts of all kinds, in the belief that text matters, as it shows us material and imaginative realities. We invite emerging and established scholars, activists, and authors to imagine new ways to make these connections and to intervene in these fields.

Co-Chairs

This working group seeks to provide a space to bring music and sound studies into conversation with interdisciplinary perspectives in cultural studies, broadly construed. We envision such conversations happening in a variety of ways, including academic papers, music criticism, and modes of engagement beyond the annual conference. In all cases, we prioritize the magic that can occur when disparate topics and methodologies collide within shared contexts and questions. Such methodologies include but are not limited to: critical race, feminist, queer, political economic, performance, affect, and decolonial studies, as well as musicology, popular music studies, and sound studies. What happens to music and sound when approached from such varied viewpoints? What happens to our understanding of culture when we pay attention to the sonorous or vibratory? In pursuing such comparative questions, this working group seeks to become a place where music and sound studies can continue to grow. We especially encourage submissions from graduate students, contingent, and early career scholars.

Co-Chairs

The Cultural Studies Association New Media & Digital Cultures Working Group concerns itself with matters of post-humanism, post-evolution, trans-humanism, cyborgism, and cyberculture in all its manifestations. Technology related studies of mediated environments, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, identity, information, prosthetics, pharmaceuticals, medicine, genomics, distributed consciousness, and embodiment are among the particular contexts investigated.

2025 CFP

Co-Chairs

The Performance Working Group examines the relationship between performance and cultural formations, exploring performance as an object of study, an analytic framework, a research method, and a creative practice. We focus on performance as a site of power and resistance, analyzing its aesthetic interventions in the spheres of politics, economics, and everyday life, including the performance of social identities and digitally mediated performances. Valuing dialogue across diverse perspectives, we welcome contributions that address issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, and class, as well as transnational concerns such as ecological devastation, war, migration, or the impacts of artificial intelligence. To foster deeper engagement, we are committed to the organization of small panels at the annual CSA conference that prioritize discussion and collaboration. This working group prioritizes yearly meetings at the CSA conference, where we will share and offer feedback on developing research, with the aim of advancing scholarship toward publication.

Chair

As a field of study, Cultural Studies has always been committed to the necessity of theory and theoretical work. It is not committed to theory for theory’s sake; it is rather interested in how theory and theoretical work can be deployed to better understand and transform specific historical conjunctures, contexts, and formations. This Working Group provides a forum where a multiplicity of theories and theoretical studies are explored, examined, and elaborated and where the places, uses, merits, and limits of specific theories in the field are interrogated and engaged.

Co-Chairs

The Visual Culture Working Group broadly considers the predominance of visuality: its particular forms, objects, histories, audiences and affective responses, and spaces of seeing as well as its theoretical and material interventions into structures of domination, oppression, and invisibility.  We ask not only about the ‘scopic regimes’ of seeing, but also about the development of particular visual technologies over time and how they have shaped and been shaped by spectatorial engagement. More theoretically, we welcome members that consider the contested terrain of the field of visual culture, its limitations and possibilities.