These are challenging times in American academe, writes David Cohen. But is the world's higher education leader quite ready for a major university conference celebrating ... failure? The Visual Studies Graduate Student Association at the University of California, Irvine, thinks so, having recently called for papers from a wide-range of areas of study that "investigate and critically explore, contest, engage with, the concept of 'failure'" for the university's gathering of lost scholarly souls scheduled to take place on March 4.
It's a concept whose time has come, organisers say. According to the association's website the notion of failure "has always remained closely tied to that of progress: economically, morally, culturally, and politically. In an effort to denaturalise this binary, we would like to examine what failure means through papers that deal critically with its various forms in both historical and contemporary circumstances, not only because this will help us understand how narratives of success and progress operate, but also because we wonder what potential 'failure' as a political and aesthetic tactic may offer. Might we discover a 'loser theory'?"
