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San Diego
State University The College of Arts and Letters' Crisis Carnival conference originated in 1993 when a group of graduate teaching associates from the departments of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and English and Comparative Literature decided to create a forum for graduate students to participate in one of the primary forms of academic discourse: the academic conference. Run entirely by graduate students, and with the assistance of faculty advisors Cezar Ornatowski and Melody Kilcrease of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, the Crisis Carnival Conference is designed to offer graduate students practical experience in the wide range of tasks required to produce an academic conference, including fundraising, public relations, organizing event logistics, refereeing entries, and chairing paper panels, among others. Perhaps most importantly, it offers graduate students an opportunity to share and explore intellectual knowledge with their peers and faculty as professional colleagues. Typically a one to two-day event scheduled early in the Fall semester, the conference also regularly features a keynote speaker whose work relates directly to the conference theme, as well as a panel of SDSU faculty members from various disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Since 1995, each year's conference has encouraged and enjoyed college-wide participation from graduate students and faculty throughout the College of Arts and Letters, both at SDSU and several other local universities. Previous keynote speakers have included Victor Villaseņor, William Vollmann, Sherley Anne Williams, and Marisela Norte. Most recently the conference themes have dealt with the effects of deterritorialization on shaping identity, the recent re-emergence and growing popularity of interdisciplinarity in academia, and the ways in which the concepts of gender, race, and class relate to the construction of a university, its disciplines, and various objects of study. The conference organizers hope that the Crisis Carnival conference will continue to be an interdisciplinary forum which encourages graduate students to take part in the larger conversation about what it means to profess literary and cultural studies, and its changing relationship to other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Get Involved The Crisis Carnival Committee selects several new co-chairs and a new conference theme at the beginning of each Spring term--watch for logistics updates early in the semester. San Diego State College of Arts & Letters graduate students interested in applying for the position of co-chair should contact Melody Kilcrease or Cezar Ornatowski in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the beginning of Spring term. The information on this page represents that of The Crisis Carnival Conference and not that of San Diego State University. The Crisis Carnival Committee takes full responsibility for the information presented herein. Crisis Carnival Sponsors |