The Canadian Association for American Studies: 2025 Conference
October 24-26, 2025 (online)

What’s Going On?

In May of 1971, Marvin Gaye released What’s Going On, a concept album that documented various social injustices that made America far from great. Songs on the record explored American involvement in Vietnam, environmental degradation, racist police, urban poverty and other issues confronting the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Gaye also addressed divisions within the nation, divisions that have persisted since then and have come to be framed as the “culture wars.” In the LP’s title track, he invites others to speak with him so that they can inform each other of what they believe is going on.

This online conference takes its title from Gaye’s masterpiece, a choice precipitated in part by the election of Donald Trump in November 2024, for many of us are thinking about how to make sense of that event. The question “what’s going on?” asks for a description of the salient and defining features of a given historical moment, particularly the present, but it also gestures towards continuities from/within the past, namely divisions and struggles that have been “going on” for some time. Although Trump’s election might seem like, and might even be, an aberration or a crisis, it also represents long-standing tendencies within the nation.

We invite papers that address “what’s going on” in the United States. Papers can be from different disciplinary approaches and can focus on various aspects of American society and culture from all periods. Some themes might include (but are not limited) to the following:

Divisions within the nation, past, present, or future
Nativism and immigration (of people, ideas, culture)
Christian, white, and other nationalisms
Cultural canons as contributing or resisting the status quo
American authoritarianism and fascism
Black and/or Indigenous futurisms
The backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion
American utopias and/or dystopias
Climate change and environmental crises in film, fiction, television
Exceptionalism vs. internationalism
Critiques of the present
Conspiracy theories and other narratives
The apparent triumph of wealth/gilded ages
Everyday extremism
Free speech/the New McCarthyism

Please email 250-word proposals and brief bios by March 31, 2025 to CAASconference2025@mta.ca