Caucuses

CO-CHAIRS: Hannah Manshel (University of Hawai’i), Natalie El-eid (Georgetown University), and Emmaia Gelman (Independent Scholar)

The Caucus on Academic and Community Activism of the American Studies Association seeks to provide a network and resource exchange for scholars within ASA interested in issues of academic activism and social justice specific to American studies.

Realizing that some of this activity already takes place within existing ASA Caucuses and Committees, a central task of the Caucus will be to act as a liaison between many committees and caucuses. Issues to be taken up by the caucus include forms of academic activism within and without the University; work conditions and means of supporting full-time and part-time instructors in American Studies; the extent to which diversity is substantiated by the curricula, agendas, and demographics of institutions and organizations affiliated with the ASA; the relationship between race, gender and sexuality and academic work; prisons, war, imperialism, globalization and their impact on knowledge formation within American Studies. In addition, the Caucus’ mission would foreground issues and concerns relevant to annual meeting host sites.

CO-CHAIRS: Mary Zaborskis (Penn State Harrisburg) and Philip Nel (Kansas State University)

The Children and Youth Studies Caucus joins scholars who engage in interdisciplinary perspectives on the individual experiences, social conditions, and rights of children and youth in both historical and contemporary contexts. Children and Youth Studies aims to understand the complex experiences and conditions of young people in global, national, and local settings.

CHAIR: Nadejda Webb (Johns Hopkins University)

Founded in 2009, the Digital Humanities Caucus works to support the study of digital research and teaching within an American Studies framework. Both a method and object of study, DH has helped to reshape scholarship and pedagogy, and we are particularly interested in the ways in which American studies perspectives can usefully inform DH approaches.

We work to further DH in the ASA by:

• Bringing together ASA members who are working across the various areas of digital humanities, including but not limited to: born-digital work, computational methods (such as network, spatial, and textual analysis), cyberculture studies, digital editions and collections, digital tools (cyberinfrastructure) for humanities scholars, and new media.
• Addressing the issues and practices of digital pedagogy and digital research as they affect the field of American Studies.
• Developing proposals for conference sessions and related events such as DH Consultations and meet-ups for inclusion on the ASA annual meeting program.
• Awarding the Ángel David Nieves Book Award and the ASA Digital Humanities Caucus Digital Project Prize
• Creating and sharing resources among members and with the wider ASA membership through the ASA online and related venues.
• Working to foster greater mutual awareness among digital humanities scholars in American Studies and in other humanities disciplines.

Our membership includes scholars from across a wide range of institutions and experiences, including university faculty and staff, K-12 educators, graduate students, independent scholars, and activists, as well as working professionals from outside the academy. The DH Caucus strives to be an inclusive environment.

CO-CHAIRS: Jiya Pandya (Yale University) and Sarah Orsak (University of Virginia)

The Critical Disability Studies Caucus advances the work of scholars engaged in the study of disability, madness, neurodivergence, chronic illness, and debilitation.

We take a critical approach to disability studies, which requires us to dismantle the field’s historic investments in whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism, and to decenter the global north. In order to foreground scholarship by disabled scholars and students, we have by necessity also committed to ensuring the participation of disabled scholars and students within the ASA. The caucus provides a venue through which scholars of disability can share ideas, build networks to increase disability-related panels at the ASA, and facilitate the development of emerging scholars in the field.

Caucus activities include:

• Social gatherings for caucus members
• Sponsoring panels related to the critical study of disability at the annual conference
• Conducting an annual business meeting
• Awarding the annual Best Paper in Critical Disability Studies by Graduate, Contingent, Or Independent Scholar
• Professional development opportunities for scholars at all levels
• Collaboration with other ASA caucuses

CHAIR: Peter Reed, University of Mississippi

Since the mid-1990s, the Early American Matters Caucus has been addressing pre-1900 American Studies topics, broadly understood. We’re a collegial, friendly group, and we do our best both to cultivate a sense of community among pre-1900 Americanists and to bridge early topics with later ones.

The Early American Matters Caucus welcomes scholarship on the colonial, early national, antebellum, and postbellum periods as well as on such topics as race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, indigeneity, science, technology, language, slavery, geography, medicine, and the law. Our interdisciplinary membership includes colleagues who are also involved in such organizations as the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, ASECS – and its American affiliate, the Society of Early Americanists, as well as the SEA’s Junior Scholars’ Caucus.

CO-CHAIRS: Molly Appel (Nevada State University), Danica Savonick (SUNY Cortland), and Sarah Buckner (University of Missouri)

The Educators’ Alliance is invested in developing coalitions of American Studies educators across diverse educational settings as a means of amplifying innovative pedagogical work as an intellectual endeavor and generating political action for the benefit of our students and our field. An inter-state alliance of colleagues across institutional settings helps us to cultivate collective voice, solidarity, and action within our profession’s increasing vulnerability.  

We seek to make the educational aspects of ASA’s mandate more inclusive by better amplifying those who work in the “front line” spaces of our investments: community college educators, graduate student educators, and K-12 teachers – colleagues who are so often invoked in our conversations but are often made invisible in the hierarchies of academia. 

The now defunct K-16 Caucus formerly took up the role of safeguarding space for conversations between educators housed in a range of institutions. “K-16” suggests that education is understood solely through the structures of standardized, compulsory schooling; shifting our name to the “Educators’ Alliance” enables a broader understanding of where and how our pedagogical work occurs. In this way, we aim to make the Caucus a home for scholars, intellectuals, and educators of American Studies working across diverse educational settings.

CO-CHAIRS: Sage Gerson (Rhode Island School of Design), Senior Chair and Lisa Fink (Michigan State University), Junior Chair

The Environmental Justice Caucus works within the ASA to promote further work on the environment, broadly understood, within the association and the field of American Studies. We sponsor scholarly and professional development sessions each year at the ASA national meeting, work to organize numerous other panels on environmental issues at the conference, and engage in a variety of other efforts to raise the profile of environmental work within and around the ASA and American Studies as a field. We are interested in furthering work that reflects historical and cultural analyses of environmental issues and concerns and demonstrates the relevance of environmental scholarship to the central issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism at the heart of much work in American culture studies. Since 2002, the caucus has also awarded the Annette Kolodny Prize for the best environmentally-themed paper presented at the American Studies Association annual meeting.

CHAIR: Ben Chappell (University of Kansas)

The Ethnography Caucus of the ASA is a network of scholars who use fieldwork in their research practice and who engage with American Studies or any of the other interdisciplinary formations for which ASA is an important gathering point. Members of the Caucus include scholars with degrees in American studies, anthropology, sociology, and other fields, working in universities, non-profits, and other contexts.

Members of the caucus come together to:

• Build relations of mutual support and intellectual exchange based on a common concern with fieldwork and interactive research.
• Establish a collective presence in the ASA in order to raise the visibility of ethnographic scholarship.
• Promote discussion, criticism, and citation of ethnographies to develop and expand the audiences for ethnographic work, both in academic and broader publics.
• Share best practices in ethnographic research and teaching.
• Host and cultivate discussion on the nature, practice, and problems of ethnography.

Key questions the caucus grapples with include:

• What form might an ethnographic sensibility take in various contexts and with various research materials?
• What are the key ethical, political, and epistemological dilemmas in fieldwork and representation? How should they inform practice?
• How can ethnographers better navigate the institutional determinants of their research, such as funding, employment, human subjects review, publication, etc.?
• What are the material and social grounds for theoretical debates in American Studies?
• How should interdisciplinary scholars and an interested public understand relationships between ethnography as a genre within diverse media and practices such as reporting, documentary, autobiography, oral history, etc.?

The Caucus convenes each ASA annual meeting and sponsors sessions for the meeting program.

C0-CHAIRS: Kelly Alexander (University of North Carolina, Chapell Hill) and Claire Bunschoten (Boston University)

Members of this caucus come together to pursue understandings of food consumption and production within historical, social, and ethical contexts. While food studies is not a new field and has existed in the academy in different spaces, especially with links to anthropology, political ecology and history, members of this caucus are most interested in charting the development of “critical food studies.” By this we refer to scholarship that marks ways in which food is used to frame a variety of social issues, a critical mode to examine relations of power, membership and belonging, social cultures, and diasporas. The overarching goal of this caucus is to promote the study of food in all its complexities and by means of collaborative and shared ethical practices both within and beyond the academy.

Members of the caucus come together to:

• Bring together scholars researching and writing about contemporary issues in the realm of food, from its production, consumption, and distribution to its ecological impacts and social media representations
• Promote conversations on the past, present, and futures of Critical Food Studies in hopes of creating new spaces to share, collaborate, and discuss important questions and anxieties that persist
• Build relations of mutual support and intellectual exchange based on a common concern with ways in which food conveys social membership and belonging
• Establish a collective presence in the ASA to raise the visibility of critical food studies scholarship and its relevance to students and practitioners of American Studies.
• Share best practices in food studies research and teaching.

Our membership includes scholars from across a wide range of institutions and experiences, including university faculty and staff, graduate students, independent scholars, and activists, as well as working professionals from outside the academy. The Critical Food Studies Caucus strives to be an inclusive environment.

CHAIR: Benjamin Balthasar (Indiana University, South Bend)

The Marxism Caucus serves as a network of scholars, educators, and community organizers whose work engages with the multiple and varied traditions of Marxian cultural studies, literature, criticism, history, and the study of society.  

We explore American Studies’ engagement with questions of political economy and the often contradictory role of capitalism within the formation of social movements, cultural production, racial inequalities, U.S. empire, gendered performance and sexual practice, among other crucial issues the American Studies Association has placed at the center of its inquiry.   

The Marxian tradition has a long and multi-tendency history of engaging such questions through the lens of the historical development of capitalism and the material production of culture and ideology. We thus hope Marxian theory can be a productive site of engagement for scholars whose work identifies with Marxian traditions and for scholars who identify with other critical traditions and/or are approaching Marxism for the first time. The caucus encourages an open and welcoming space for members of the ASA to dialogue with Marxian theory as well as to consider what relationship Marxism has had to American Studies since the field’s inception in the 1930s.

C0-CHAIRS: Mariah Kupfner (Penn State Harrisburg) and Sarah Anne Carter (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Email: asamccaucus<at>gmail.com

Since its founding in 1994, the Material Culture Caucus has bridged the gap between university-based and museum-based scholars to promote the study of material culture in American studies programs. It sponsors various activities connected with the ASA’s annual meeting and also develops educational and scholarly resources for scholars and teachers in the field.

Caucus activities include:

• Developing and sponsoring scholarly panels at the annual conference.
• Conducting an annual business meeting. Our membership includes scholars from across a wide range of institutions and experiences, including university faculty and staff, K-12 educators, graduate students, independent scholars, and activists, as well as working professionals from outside the academy. The DH Caucus strives to be an inclusive environment.

C0-CHAIRS: Lucien Baskin (CUNY Graduate Center), Coordinator and Yalile Suriel (University of Minnesota), Coordinator

The Critical Prison Studies Caucus is a network of American Studies scholars who oppose the continued centrality of prisons and policing, and who share a commitment to challenging criminalization and punishment on local, national, and global scales. We advance a combination of critical research and practice that connects the production and sharing of knowledge on incarceration to concrete work for prison industrial complex abolition and radical democracy.

The caucus strives to:

• Promote scholarship that questions the continued reliance on punishment as a response to social problems.
• Foster dialogue between scholars and communities about imprisonment and its consequences, as well as sustainable alternatives.
• Encourage the ASA community to think critically about the impacts of the U.S. carceral, punishment, and surveillance regime on everyday life, culture, politics, and scholarship, as well as other areas.
• Create spaces where those interested in investigating imprisonment and policing from critical perspectives can collaborate and network with one another.
• Convene scholars and activists working for the abolition of policing and imprisonment to jointly create scholarship and apply research to organizing.

The Critical Prison Studies Caucus began in 2009. As a community of activist-scholars, we consider research, teaching, and activism as mutually informing and intersecting activities. To that end, we seek to align our knowledge production with grassroots social movements. As an interdisciplinary network, we bring together and encourage work across academic disciplines, recognize the value of scholarship and analysis produced by people who have been criminalized and imprisoned, and invite new perspectives and new research in this area.

C0-CHAIRS: Ianna Hawkins Owen (University of California, Berkeley), Summer Kim Lee (UCLA), and Ivan Ramos (Brown University)

The Queer/Trans (Q/T) Caucus is allied with the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association, a caucus associated with the GLQ journal. The caucus has done most of its organizing work, including the awarding of prizes, sponsoring of panels, and celebrating landmark events such as the GLQ journal’s recent 25th anniversary, in association with MLA annual meetings since 1974.

Our ASA affiliation represents the deep interdisciplinarity and intersectionality of the fields of queer and trans studies. In this way we seek to bring form to the vibrant ways that ASA encourages queer and trans studies by producing programming, a series of annual awards to recognize significant scholarship and activism, and social events that facilitate member interaction and celebrate caucus scholarship and publications.The caucus strives to:The Critical Prison Studies Caucus began in 2009. As a community of activist-scholars, we consider research, teaching, and activism as mutually informing and intersecting activities. To that end, we seek to align our knowledge production with grassroots social movements. As an interdisciplinary network, we bring together and encourage work across academic disciplines, recognize the value of scholarship and analysis produced by people who have been criminalized and imprisoned, and invite new perspectives and new research in this area.

C0-CHAIRS: Courtney Cox (University of Oregon) and Amira Rose Davis (University of Texas, Austin)

Why Sports Studies?

• Because sports have long held a prominent place in American culture.
• Because American Studies scholars often come to sports-centered projects out of larger questions about identity, politics, history, and narrative.
• Because sports, far from marginal, can profoundly impact Americans of all ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, classes, and ages.
• Because sports-interested scholars of diverse methodological backgrounds can most productively engage each other’s work under the multidisciplinary auspices of American Studies.

For these reasons and many more, we have established the Sports Studies Caucus, creating a legible place in the academy for scholars interested in critically considering the roles sports play in American culture. Possessing, as we do, a diversity in critical methodologies that is both inclusive and illuminating, the members of the Sports Studies Caucus are dedicated to a consideration of sport that relates to issues of broader relevance: enriching and deepening connections between our work and the work of our not-so-sports-inclined colleagues.

Sports resonate widely in American society at large, and that resonance attracts the intellectual energies of scholars from across the academic spectrum. Rather than remain scattered, those energies deserve a designated forum in American studies. That forum is the ASA’s Sports Studies Caucus.

C0-CHAIRS: Rebecca Kumar (Spelman College) and Carmen Merport-Quiñones (Oberlin College)

The Visual Culture Caucus works to support the critical investigation of visual materials at the ASA’s annual meetings and to provide a network for scholars working in visual studies from diverse disciplinary homes. Its members include teachers, museum curators, librarians, and others who research a variety of visual forms and media, such as painting, photography, sculpture, film, television, advertisements, cartoons, visual ethnographies, and the internet. Sports resonate widely in American society at large, and that resonance attracts the intellectual energies of scholars from across the academic spectrum. Rather than remain scattered, those energies deserve a designated forum in American studies. That forum is the ASA’s Sports Studies Caucus.