<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div dir="ltr"><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Hi Everyone,</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Please consider submitting or circulating the following CFP for the ASAP (Association for Arts of the Present) conference, held this October in Houston, Texas. Please feel free to email me personally in case of any questions. </div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Abstracts will be <span dir="ltr">due March 14, 2025</span>.</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Thanks,</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Corinna Kirsch</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><div dir="ltr">Begin forwarded message:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><div dir="ltr"><b>From:</b> Rebecca Uliasz <<span dir="ltr">ruliasz@umich.edu</span>><br><b>Date:</b> March 3, 2025 at 9:55:06 AM EST<br><b>To:</b> Corinna Kirsch <<span dir="ltr">corinna.kirsch@gmail.com</span>><br><b>Subject:</b> <b>Fwd: CPF: ASAP 16, "Toxicity as Atopia: Contaminated Environments and Mediated Life"</b><br><br></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">---------- Forwarded message ---------<br>From: <strong class="gmail_sendername" dir="auto">Rebecca Uliasz</strong> <span dir="auto"><<a href="mailto:ruliasz@umich.edu">ruliasz@umich.edu</a>></span><br>Date: Mon, Mar 3, 2025 at 9:02 AM<br>Subject: CPF: ASAP 16, "Toxicity as Atopia: Contaminated Environments and Mediated Life"<br>To: Rebecca Uliasz <<a href="mailto:ruliasz@umich.edu">ruliasz@umich.edu</a>><br></div><br><br><div dir="ltr"><div>Hello, </div><div><br></div><div>I am co-organizing a panel for <a href="https://www.artsofthepresent.org/conference/asap-16-worldmaking-worldbreaking/" target="_blank">ASAP/16 to take place in Houston, Wednesday, October 22 – Saturday, October 25, 2025</a> on Toxicity as Atopia: Contaminated Environments and Mediated Life. Please consider submitting something or forward to any and all that may be interested! <a href="https://asap16.exordo.com/panels/23/contribute/f127d763b1ee858e84a385a08b2a88ff809ffe90" target="_blank">This is the link to submit.</a></div><div><br></div><div><b>Toxicity as Atopia: Contaminated Environments and Mediated Life</b></div><div><br></div><div>co-organizers Dr. Corinna Kirsch (Pratt Institute), Dr. Rebecca Uliasz (University of Michigan)</div><div><br></div><div>A typical Houston sunset has a toxic beauty, with hazy oranges, pinks, and purples streaming toward a near-infinite, flat horizon line. Home to petrochemical and energy industries, the city and state have begun to shed associations with toxic commercial industries that have led to such attractive but repellent skies. Not only has the state become a notable purveyor of “clean” energy industries like wind and solar power, but tech firms, including Oracle, Tesla, and Hewlett-Packard, have relocated their headquarters to Texas within the last decade. Despite the apparent transition towards an image of green tech, the predicament of Houston reveals how toxicity accumulates new types of surplus. From exploitative micro-labor dealing with e-waste to the runoffs of mining rare earth elements and the inescapable ubiquity of plastic materials, an increasingly toxic world renders modern subjectivity as “the management of self-intoxication in a chemically harmful environment (Preciado 2013, 360).<br><br>Beyond the image of a “green” digital culture, this panel seeks contributions that take this year’s conference site as a provocation for theoretical and/or practical engagements with the atopic capacities of toxicity, media, and environment. It proposes, following Barthes (1978), the notion of atopia as a potentiating out-of-place. Treating toxicity as atopia refuses the designation of the “toxic” as a damaged, demarcated, and disposable thing; toxicity becomes a topology that invites an “outside” environment into the body, scrambling subjectivities and temporal narratives of progress. Questions may include: How can an atopic lens address how new forms of exhaust, lethargy, and depletion are managed through media’s intra-actions? Can such a perspective allow us to critically reframe (in)toxification as an intensive boundary-making practice where incorporation, consumption, and inhalation constitute acts of mediation through which bodies and environments both merge and emerge? How does such a polyvocal treatment of (in)toxification challenge the geopolitical, biopolitical, and technological hybridities and intimacies animating legacies of (neo)imperialism, colonialism, and militarism in the present? In sum, this panel seeks contributions that think through media’s toxicity as “processual, dynamic, and interactive” (Starosielski 2019) to explore the embeddedness of contamination—“not an escape from toxicity but rather a reckoning with its permeation” (Davis 2022, 6).<br><br>Please submit a brief, 250-word abstract and CV by <span dir="ltr">March 14, 2025</span>.<br><br>References<br><br>Davis, Heather. 2022. Plastic Matter. Duke University Press, 2022.<br><br>Starosielski, Nicole. 2019. “The Elements of Media Studies.” Media+Environment 1 (1). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780</a>.<br><br>Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York.<br><br>Barthes, Roland. 1978. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. 1st American ed. Hill and Wang.</div></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div dir="ltr"></div></div></body></html>