U Penn's CFP and Category Breakdown: A Rant

Continuing somewhat with the topic of inter- and trans-disciplinarity...

I've been following U Penn's Call for Papers site for some time now. I say "site" because it is no longer just a single page where the CFPs are dumped and clumped together arbitrarily, where we had to sift through endless calls of which only about 1 of every 20 or so caught our interest. After growing into something too unwieldy, the administrators divided it into several pages using your typical categories--Eighteenth Century, Gender Studies & Sexuality, Medieval, etc. Fantastic! It was great that I could then check out the Rhetoric section without having to waste my time stumbling upon a call for the postcoloniality of Beowulf or whatever somesuch that is irrelevant to me at the time. It was clear that the field of English studies was becoming more and more superspecialised.

Along with a growing interdisciplinary movement, however, came CFP posters who wanted to post matter that ran across more than one category and still had to post manually in each of the different ones. So, sometime during the last few months, the administrators "developed" the site's functionality. Now, if you're someone wanting to post a CFP you think deserves to be in several categories, all you need to do is check categories you deem applicable. This new system requires a certain degree of professional consideration. But what we get now are overzealous calls that, through the seductive simple click of a New Media feature, checkmark every single box and revert our practices. After following Jessica's suggestion to subscribe to RSS feeds from the site, its return to an unnecessary barrage of irrelevant CFPs became even more apparent to me.

Example #1: The 2010 National PCA Fat Studies Panel
In Cultural Studies? Definitely. In Popular Culture? Makes sense. But in African-American?! Wow, what kind of assumptions are the panelists working on here?

Example #2: Red Feather Journal: An International Journal of Children's Visual Culture
In Children's Literature? Definitely. In Film & Television? Sure. But in Classical Studies?! I'm not a classicist, but I like to think I know about what constitutes as classical studies. If I were a classicist, I may just feel the urge to post in the Children's Lit section a CFP about the virtues of worshipping the Greek pantheon of gods, or the necessary homoeroticism of Homer's Iliad, or the sublime political joy of death by drinking hemlock--because we should start our American kids early on polytheism, homosexuality, and capital punishment. How do you like that, children's lit?

Facetiousness aside, I do realise that there is a certain intellectual stimulation in academia becoming more and more interdisciplinary, which is a positive way to look at these recent developments. Let's do an arbitrary test based on the two examples above. How about: for #1 "Donna Haraway and the Posthuman Prosthetic Trope in Tyler Perry's Use of Fat Suits," or for #2 "Plato's Republic and Philosopher Kings in Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are." Sound like interesting papers. On the other hand, when we can apply any of our specialisations to any CFP at random, what is the point of using categories?

For me, it has to do with efficiency. We are, most of us who regularly visit the CFP site, busy busy little scholars/professors/graduate students. When I go to my home category of Rhetoric, I don't want to think about how rhetoric or composition apply to this CFP about popular romance narratives that has been posted there as if on a whim. If, one day, I wake up thinking: "Hmmm... I should teach Obama's rhetorical moves through a fresh perspective, and I think Nora Roberts is on to something," I will gladly set aside time to look around in appropriate categories like Twentieth Century or Popular Culture.

My concerns may seem rather trivial and exaggerated, but they have larger, ideological implications in the way we conduct this practice: The way certain CFPs feel forced upon me is the same feeling I get from Amazon or eBay dealers when they tack on irrelevant search tags to their products in order to get more customer hits. And that, the capitalist-institutional pressure, is what I guess will always determine our noble pursuit of knowledge, including our efforts with U Penn's CFP site.

Ultimately, it all comes back to the "publish or perish" anxiety that we experience. Likewise, we need more people to come to our conferences, to make a name for ourselves, to get more funding and grants, and so on. What I'm afraid all this might result in (if not already) is a category crisis because we are intellectually exhausted, have nowhere else to go, and are cannibalising one another's areas. Nonetheless, I do think the CFP site is a very practical site even so. But now I'm starting to formulate thoughts on the cultural, economic, and institutional pressures that are causing my concerns, and it is building up to be a whole paper, so I'll stop now, and save it for a rainy day.