Call for Papers

Race matters.  In the wake of the racialized responses to President Obama’s administration, Islamophobia, re-emerging orientalism, immigrant policing, and the perpetuation of poverty in our global communities of color, we call you to join us in a conversation about race, resistance and reason.

This conference seeks to create a space to rethink the boundaries of race, resistance and reason globally and at the level of lived experience.  Participants are invited to share scholarship and articulations of the tensions between:  the consequences of a racialized body, a strong political identity that is tied to race, and the tensions that are experienced at the intersections of race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, class, and ability.  Equally important, we hope that this conference will serve as a space to think about the resistances to hegemonic categorization, naming and normative ideas of reason and thought that we know are inheritances of race and racialized, gendered bodies.

Keynote Speakers: 

Dr. Joy James The author of: Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics; Transcending the Talented Tenth;  Resisting State Violence; Seeking the 'Beloved Community': A Feminist-Race Theory Reader (2012), as well as editor of a number of anthologies on incarceration and human rights.  Dr. James is curator of the Harriet Tubman Literary Circle digital repository, part of UT Austin's human rights archives <http://sites.tdl.org/htlc/>; and Presidential Professor of the Humanities at Williams College.

Dr. John R. Sosa Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology at SUNY Cortland since 1985 is a Symbolic anthropologist who has done ethnographic fieldwork in Maya communities in Yucatán, México since 1982.  Sosa is himself of Maya/Mexicano ancestry, and as a fluent speaker of both Maya and Spanish has recognized substantive differences in how cultures define people and social categories.  In fact, there is no “race” concept in Maya culture and language, which allows the idea of “race” as a cultural construct to be seen in stark contrast to Western “reality.”  Sosa has created and taught the classes “Prejudice and Discrimination” and “U.S. Ethnic Identity and Conflict” since 1986, and is Faculty Adviser of the La Familia Latina student organization.

Submissions:

Papers, artistic presentations, performances, and workshops may address, but are not limited to the following possibilities: 

• Social constructions and lived realities
• Teaching race in the classroom
• Islamophobia:   The new ground zero
• To end racism you must end homophobia: Intersections of race and orientation
• Crossing Borders:  Reclaiming identities and spaces
• Naming the self, resistant identities
• Foundations of Reason:  The Prison Industrial Complex and other institutional reinforcements of race (military, education system, health care)
• Panafrican understandings of race, resistance and reason
• Ideologies of citizenship and/or civility
• Hip Hop and reason
• Masculinity… and its Other
• Indigenous women and men contesting colonial normativity
• Asian Americans resisting model minority myths
• Performances of race, gender, sex and sexual orientation
• Articulating racism as white supremacy…
• Reason and Thought: Normativity, understanding and performance…fiction, storytelling, performance
• Subversive Mothering:  Homeless, migrant, immigrant mothers
• Third Space, bridges and borderlands
• Race Bending: resisting binary reason
• Transgenerational  impact of race
• Trans-raced and Trans-reasoned
• Activism, advocacy, and social welfare
• Diversity and multiculturalism:  anything but race…

Publication and social-media will be considered for publication in a special issue of Wagadu: A Transnational Journal of Women’s and Gender Studies (wagadu.org).

Proposal formats:

Individual papers
Digital Media and Films
Panel Proposals
Roundtables
Poster Sessions
Performance Art
Audio Recordings
Photographic Submissions