New Directions Seminars

CFR's "New Directions in Feminist Research" is organized annually around a particular theme.  The seminar offers participants an opportunity to work collectively on thematically linked projects, and also creates public events--invited speakers, panels, conferences--that engage the broader feminist community of faculty and students at USC. Stay tuned for announcements of such events in 2012-13.

2012 - 2013 New Directions in Feminist Research Seminar

Theme: Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Politics of Popular Music

Seminar Director:

Karen Tongson, Associate Professor of English & Gender Studies (Dornsife)

PROJECT: Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Politics of Popular Music

tongson @ usc.edu

Seminar Fellows:

Edwin Hill, Assistant Professor of French, Italian, Comparative Literature and American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife)

PROJECT: La Rage: Losing it in the French Peripheries. Explores anti-colonial discourses of rage in French hip-hop culture and literature, in order to offer a timely intervention into debates about the 2005 and 2007 riots in the French banlieus, or urban peripheries, and France's "ultra-peripheries"--its colonial territories in the West Indies.

edwinhil @ usc.edu

Kara Keeling, Associate Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinematic Arts, and African American Studies in American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife)

PROJECT: 'Electric Feel': Transduction, Errantry and the Refrain. Ascertains what logics inherited from particular popular musics might offer ongoing efforts to renegotiate bonds, institutions and political possibilities shaped by the violences characteristic of capitalism, white supremacy, neoliberal multiculturalism and contemporary geopolitics.

kkeeling @ cinema.usc.edu

Josh Kun, Associate Professor of Communication (Annenberg) and American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife)

PROJECT: The World Begins Here: Love and Death and Music in Tijuana. Tracks the transnational flows of culture from Tijuana's founding as a family-owned cattle ranch in the aftermath of the 19th century creation of a US-Mexico border, to its current state as a chaotic urban sprawl of well over two million people. In these histories, Kun hears what he calls the 'aural border': a bi-national territory of sonic performance and listening; of melodic convergence and dissonant clashing. 

jkun @ usc.edu

Shana Redmond, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife)

PROJECT: Timing is Everything: The Feminine Antiphonies in 'We are the World.' Revisits this anthem of global "relief"--particularly its redeployment in the wake of the 2010 earthquake disaster in Haiti--in order to expose the feminized musical tropes that organize conditions of aid and aid occupation, which developed in post-disaster sites like Ethiopia in 1985, and Haiti in 2010. 

sredmond @ college.usc.edu

Mina Yang, Assistant Professor of Music (Thornton)

PROJECT: Dancing into Visibility: Asian-American B-Boys and the Hip-Hop Trans-Nation. Situates her extensive research on b-boying in Asia and Asian America within the context of racial discourses in the United States and hip-hop history, and against the backdrop of emergent transpacific economies and cultural geographies.

minayang @ usc.edu

Micha Cardenas, Ph.D. student in Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice (SCA)

PROJECT: Femme Disturbance. Combines scholarship, poetry and performance components to explore how musicality and figures like Janelle Monae and Ke$ha (among others) help foster antirationalist theories of genderqueer solidarity, politics and action. 

mmcarden @ usc.edu