Call for Papers: 2025 Lauren Berlant 3CT Graduate Student Conference

The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) is now accepting paper submissions for the 2025 Lauren Berlant 3CT Graduate Student Conference.

Application Deadline: Friday, June 13, at 11:59 pm CT.
Conference dates: November 7–8, 2025

The conversion of the real economy into a maze of financial assets, separating ownership from management from operation, has accentuated the impersonal experience of capitalist domination. Capitalist profits have never before depended so heavily on the abstraction of and from productive and reproductive processes. Yet, capitalist power has rarely been so personal: we live in a time of ruling “strongmen” and their acolytes.

How can we productively theorize this simultaneous depersonalization and hyper-personalization of capitalist life? How might the asset economy impact possibilities for democratic governance? In other words, how does this configuration of economic power affect the collective exercise of political power? Does the asset economy have an affinity for reactionary politics? What are the specificities and/or similarities in the global trend of mass privatization and state capture? How does the privatization of social reproductive work affect the personal? What cultural and discursive forms are reflective of these new trends of capital accumulation and governmental power?

Eligibility

We invite contributions from graduate students from a wide range of disciplines including, but not limited to, history, anthropology, political theory, philosophy, sociology, and economics. Travel support will be available for a limited number of presenters without access to institutional funding.

We are especially interested in papers related to the following topics:

• The political economy of asset management
• Privatization and financialization
• Geographies of capital ownership
• Care labor, service work, and the digital precariat
• The law and legalities of “personhood” and “personality”
• The digital economy and cryptocurrency
• “Just in time” production and logistics
• The libertarian right and its histories
• Ties between neoliberal and conservative political formations
• Labor organizing strategy and tactics in the asset age
• Contemporary performances/theories of masculinity/femininity
• The culture and economy of “influencing”
• The administrative state (and its erosion)
• Theories of capitalist domination
• Analyses of developing inter- and intra-class political conflict

Application Process

To apply, submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and a CV via this Google form by Friday, June 13, at 11:59pm CT.

For more information, please visit The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory’s website.