camp | fire
New York City
Organization: NYU Tisch's Center for Research & Study
Call for Papers: Center for Research & Study Spring 2025 Graduate Student Conference —
camp | fire
April 4th - 5th, 2025
Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
Fire is not an object, but rather the sustained product of interactions: friction, combustion, decomposition, smoldering. From homoerectus' first encounter with fire to more recent ecocidal forest fires; fire, then, may also appear as a measure of history between the human and more than human. While camp operates as a method of performance, a home, a vehicle, and a statement. In an hierarchical understanding of human value, the camp is not considered to be a final destination, but when people slip through the cracks, a camp shows up as a method of survival. Camps may resemble the work of queer collectives, scholarly canons, political parties, artistic groups, film collectives, and ways of survivance and even, protests. Yet simultaneously, the camp is a “final solution,” used as technology of control by nation-states: internment camps, concentration camps, and refugee camps have and continue to be biopolitical instruments that convert life to bare life.
Today, as in the past, across the planet, campfires light, congregate and emanate minoritarian insurgences and political struggles. Campfires hold memory as intergenerational history. Part of rituals, ancient to contemporary, here we find storytelling, cooking, theatrical forms, songs or group-conjuring in collective grief or rage. The space of the circle unlocks modes of thinking foreclosed by Cartesian approaches to mapping: Hip-hop cyphers, cyclical narrative structures, geometric forms of visual art like the dot or the bindu. Under the embers of the camp’s fire lurk shadows of possibilities; online contagion, student encampments, calls for paradigm shifts. Camp | fire may then be conceived of as a metaphor of placemaking to erupt and disrupt modular typologies.
NYU Tisch School of the Art’s Center for Research & Study invites you to the annual graduate student conference: camp | fire, organized by the joint effort of students at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, the Department of Performance Studies, and the Department of Art & Public Policy. Together we seek to contemplate the themes of camp and fire both individually and as “campfire,” an object, a gesture, a verb, and an adjective. We not only welcome, but would like to encourage other forms of responding to camp | fire beyond boundaries of disciplines and codified methods of presentation, which may include paper presentations, performances (solo or group), film screenings, artistic lectures, curated convenings (in the form of workshops, group work or otherwise). We hope with this conference, to foster a productive cross-pollination across and within disciplines, departments, as well as between the academic institution and the wider world.
We are looking for papers/performances/projects that speak to the provocation of “camp | fire.” We welcome proposals from a very wide range of fields: performance studies, cinema studies, and media studies, where processes of gathering, circuitous routes and dialogic interplay are central to methodological concerns; comparative literature, postcolonial studies, indigenous studies and anthropology, where camps and fires as systems, symbols, and metaphors allow ways of approaching history and nations as kempt and unkempt by time and space; art history and artistry that consider facets of the material, social and environmental, questioning the anthropocene. Practice/Art-based presentations welcomed!
We are excited to receive submissions that engage in any number of topics. The following list is intended as possible examples of where meditations on camp | fire may be applied:
Migrancy and displacement
Ghost stories and hauntology
Craftwork
Chemistry
Effigies
Drag performance and kitsch
Food, cooking, roasting
Histories of rebellion and anarchy
Shadow puppetry, shadow play, dance
Storytelling, oral history, folklore
Decameron
Mapping
Survivalism
Political protest
Historical methods of homemaking and care
Nation formation and nationalism
Concepts of chaos and order
Traditional dance
Children’s theater
Outdoor festivals
Natural disasters
War tactics
Cellular performance
Pyrotechnics and explosives
Singing in the round
Fission/fusion
Sabbatical/sabbath
Ephemerality
Methods of timekeeping
Shamanism and the Occult
The conference sets out to ask such questions as:
What do we gather AROUND? What brings a collective together? What unites?
How do we tell stories and disseminate information?
What are places/spaces of gathering but also of igniting disruptions?
How should we think about the disruptive/destructive force of camp?
What is the performative force of war camps, encampments, concentration camps, and refugee camps among others?
What happens when we think of “fire” as a technology?
How can destructive forces sustain groups of people
What place does orality have in the collective
Methods of being “off the grid”
How does the analog or rudimentary continue to make an impact in our digital age
How might objects speak/enter into conversation with one another in addition to humans?
What is the relationship between fire and memory/group memory?
How may novel campfires elicit new forms of being in tune with the world?
We are interested in proposals drawing from a variety of fields and approaches, including but not limited to:
Performance studies
Cinema studies
Black studies
Indigenous studies
Crip theory, disability studies
Cultural studies
Decolonial theory
Dance and movement theory
Trans theory
Historiography
New object-oriented materialism
Eco criticism
Archival studies and methodology
Sound studies
Food studies
New media studies
American studies
Ludology and Play Studies
Psychoanalysis
Art history
Craft Making and Folk Art Traditions
Law
Speculative methods
Religious studies
Folkloristics
Hali Alspach