Research and Creative Activity Symposium (RCAS)
RCAS 2022
The Research and Creative Activity Symposium (RCAS) Committee at Alabama State University's College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) dedicates itself to hosting a space for the exchange of ideas, research and creativity.
This year, in response to the challenges of the COVID pandemic and the threat that on-site gathering poses to us all, the RCAS Committee will support great work and innovative scholars through both on-site and online avenues of communication.
True to the CLASS ethos of creative exploration, intellectual development, and social outreach, we push forward to develop ASU's online presence with the 2022 RCAS Hybrid Conference.
The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Alabama State University has hosted an annual symposium where research and creative work come together to suggest new ideas and possibilities. Until 2020, the symposium took place on the ASU campus. This year, we will host the Symposium both online and on-site, here on the ASU campus in the John Garrick Hardy Center.
The RCAS is dedicated to hosting a forum for the rich variety of work scholars and creatives do in the liberal arts and social sciences. To that end, we look forward to this year's hybrid symposium: Pandemic.
Please consult the Call for Papers to learn more about the conference.
2022 RCAS Committee
Dr. Ivon Alcime, Chair
Dr. Lynne Schneider, Vice Chair
Mr. Michael Bean, Technical Chair
Dr. Calvin Smith, Member
RCAS Hybrid Symposium 2022 Call for Papers
Symposium Topic:
Pandemic
Alabama State University
College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences
RCA Hybrid Symposium
Deadline for Abstract Submissions: January 15, 2022
Submit your Abstract to: RCAS@alasu.edu
Submissions encouraged from Faculty, Undergraduate and Graduate Students, and Professionals. Acceptance Response: February 1, 2022
Conference Date: March 29, 2022
Alabama State University College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences RCA Hybrid Symposium As of this notice, the RCAS plans to hold both in-person/virtual and entirely virtual sessions. You may participate in this conference virtually on Zoom or in person on the ASU campus. If you choose to participate in person, your work will be simultaneously shared on Zoom with virtual conference participants.
● Please note: Your safety is paramount. Alabama State University follows strict CDC guidelines and procedures to protect everyone in the ASU community. As of Fall 2021, ASU is a mask-mandated campus. We will go on monitoring safety issues closely and keep you updated about both virtual and in-person RCAS platforms. We appreciate your participation and look forward to hosting you in the Spring 2022 Research and Creative Activity Symposium.
This conference invites consideration of large-scale causes, their effects, and human responses to these pandemic crises.
Coined in the 17th century to refer to the plague, “pan + demic” comes from the Greek for “all people.” The concept of “all people” has changed over time. Inclusion in “all people” has expanded from a parochial sense of people we know, people much like us, to an ineluctable awareness of world citizenship. Crises like the threat of nuclear war, and more recently COVID and climate change, validate this human interconnectedness, but global crises also highlight the unequal distribution of both suffering and respite. Recent global crises have dramatically exposed a pandemic loss of security: personal, gender, racial, ethnic, class and cultural identity, environmental stability, weather and food supply, civil rights and social justice, medical access and knowledge, reliable information, access to that information and to the acquired ability to judge the accuracy and validity of sources, and so much more. These real and perceived “shared” vulnerabilities are not experienced the same ways across populations.
Before COVID-19, we saw the rise of “localism” in the UK Brexit movement and the MAGA movement in the United States, for example. That isolationism ran headlong into a panoply of pandemics and denial of them. If we had circumscribed our world within local and personal concerns, recent global events have deeply challenged those ideas about what “our world” means and who we are in it.
We suggest a collection of topics to consider, but the conference is not limited to the following:
▪ Isolationism, parochialism, and globalism
▪ COVID-19
▪ Resistance and Reluctance to Accept the Phenomenon of the COVID-19 Virus ▪ Climate Change
▪ Energy Sources, research and politics, the push for renewable and non-carbon sources, resistance to that push, etc.
▪ Resistance and Reluctance to Accept the Phenomenon of the Climate Change ▪ Human Migration and Immigration, and resistance to it.
▪ Global Trade, Labor, and Law
▪ Supply Chain Issues
▪ Human Trafficking, Forced Labor and Slavery
▪ Child Labor
▪ Bullying
▪ Gangs, “Militia,”
▪ Guns, Access to Guns
▪ Mass Shootings
▪ Organized citizen violence (not military, state or nationally-based)
▪ Pandemic Criminal Justice issues
▪ Prisons, Prison Reform, Prison populations, Prison funding (for ex. Alabama’s plan to build prisons with COVID relief funding, for example)
▪ Media - production, population representation, political POV and/or bias, etc.
▪ Audio/Visual Industry - change, adaptation, issues, the “Loudness Wars”, etc.
▪ Zoom-life - academic plusses and problems, business use and abuse, social connection and alienation
▪ Cyber-currencies
▪ Pandemic Literature:
▪ For example, in English fiction, Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Book of the Duchess” and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and (perhaps in translation)
Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, encompass centuries of responses to pandemic disease. These are only a few commonly-read pieces about illness.
▪ Pandemic threats of many sorts inform world literature from the “biblical” flood forward.
▪ Pandemic impacts and influences on the Performing Arts -
o for ex. closure of theaters and performance venues due to plague and pandemic disease and unrest,
o Pandemic impacts on museums, book fairs, and other public arts programs,
o Influence and impact on content of the arts
▪ Other topics of interest to you that we have not suggested here.
Please, email a short abstract of your work to: rcas@alasu.edu
Abstract Due Date: January 15, 2022
For Individual Papers Include:
Your Name
Institutional Affiliation
Contact email
Please submit an abstract of at least 250 words to explain your work: your research, thesis, performance type and content, creative mode, etc.
For Group Presentations/Panels Include:
Names of all participants
Institutional Affiliations of all participants
Contact emails for all participants
Please submit an abstract of about 500 words to explain your panel and/or performance.
We will review your submission and respond by: February 1, 2022
Submissions encouraged from Faculty, Undergraduate and Graduate Students, and Professionals.
Contact email: RCAS@alasu.edu
Contact Persons:
Dr. Ivon Alcime, Chair of the RCAS Committee
Dr. Lynne Schneider, Vice Chair
Mr. Michael Bean, Technical Chair
Dr. Calvin Smith, Member
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