This year’s American Studies Association conference coincided with Chicago’s first snowfall of the season. Its theme was “Pedagogies of Dissent,” and conversations that circulated in the conference commons suggest there was robust critical engagement with emergent subthemes of Pedagogies of Day Drinking, Dissenting from Weather, and Against 8 a.m. Panels. Read on for a neoliberal juxtaposition of dislocated circulating animations with decontextualized traces of subterranean discourse.
1. “I can’t tell who’s here for the lumber convention and who’s here for ASA.”
2. “We’re gonna do some meta-thinking through that lens about this terrain.”
3. “My roundtable discussion was neither at a roundtable nor a discussion.”
4. Person 1: “She’s colonized the outlets.”
Person 2: “Colonization isn’t a metaphor.”
5. Person 1: “If anyone asks why I’m drinking at 11 a.m., tell them it’s the jetlag.”
Person 2: “Don’t you live in this time zone?”
6. “The panel was the Queer Nadir. Not like Ralph.”
7. “My friend is presenting at the same time as Pedagogies of Oprah. Talk about a moral dilemma.”
8. Person 1: “There’s so much scaffolding.”
Person 2: “The building or your paper?”
9. “I’ll probably go to the queer panel next, because I’m having homo FOMO.”
10. “Cheers to not being dead inside!”
11. “It’s like no one has ridden an escalator before.”
12. “I don’t know how many more ASAs my liver can handle.”
13. “The panel must have gotten too optimistic, because the person in front of me started checking the academic jobs wiki.”
Many thanks to Omari Weekes, Aaron Goldsman, SaraEllen Strongman, Timothy Griffiths, and Laura Soderberg for their overhearing assistance! 
