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Call for Papers

7th Annual Crossing Borders Ethnic Studies Conference

*Deadline for submission: January 15, 2009*

The Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of
Southern California is pleased to announce the call for papers for this
year's Crossing Borders Ethnic Studies Conference. *Now in its 7th year,
Crossing Borders has served as a meeting ground for graduate student
conversations across institutional and disciplinary lines in the field of
Ethnic Studies.**

7th Annual Crossing Borders Ethnic Studies Conference**
Serve the People: Ethnic Studies Between Theory and Praxis*
University of Southern California, March 6-8, 2009 *Call for Proposals*

The 7th annual * Crossing Borders* *Conference*, hosted by the Department of
American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California,
coincides with the 40-year anniversary of the killings of UCLA students John
Huggins and Bunchy Carter. On January 17th, 1969, these two student
activists and leaders of the Southern California Chapter of the Black
Panther Party were shot during an ideological dispute regarding the
direction of new Black Studies department. Their life work symbolizes a
particular direction and hope for an Ethnic Studies that engaged with the
anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-war movements gaining momentum in
communities around the world. Huggins and Carter, as participants in the
pilot UCLA High Potential program, saw the university as a critical site for
enacting their political commitments.

Huggins and Carter were a part of a larger movement rooted in local
communities that maintained an internationalist perspective. These analytics
emerged within a context of world-wide events which continue to reverberate
within Ethnic Studies: the war in Southeast Asia, the decolonization of
Africa, world-wide student protests in the late 1960s, people of color power
movements, the Non-Aligned Movement comprised of and led mostly by former
colonies, the New Left movement, sexual revolutions, the Gay Liberation
movement, and women's movements. In this context, the 1968 Third World
Liberation Front student strike at San Francisco State University led to the
formation of Ethnic Studies. As a rare intellectual tradition whose roots
are in confronting and transforming power, this history has deeply informed
our trajectory of knowledge production and the questions we continue to ask.
Yet, the founding of Ethnic Studies was also met with the inception of new
technologies of discipline, an intensified era of state monitored
anti-insurgency, and the inability of revolutionary visions to pay attention
to issues such as gender and sexuality.

Forty years later, with the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies on
university campuses, how do we make sense of our inheritance? How do we
radically envision what engaged scholarship means? How do we understand
questions of community engagement and commitment to social justice? How do
we honor our legacies without positing a binary between theory and practice,
nor uncritically glorifying old models of engaged work? With communities
increasingly being defined in complex ways, how do we mount effective
interventions? What are the ways in which Ethnic Studies scholars can reckon
with our history and the contradictions inherent in the multiple interstices
of our existences?

Keeping in mind the relationship between theory and praxis of community
scholarship, we invite proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables from
graduate students who address these questions through one or more of the
following broad topics: race, gender, and law, globalization,
transnationalism, immigration, diaspora, gender and sexuality, space and
spatiality, social movements, community organizing, electoral politics,
surveillance and practices of viewing, education, radical pedagogy, and
cultural production (music, film, art, literature, etc.).
*Submissions*

We welcome submissions for panels, individual papers, and roundtable
discussion. Panels should consist of 3-4 presenters, and 1 discussant, who
may also be a presenter. Roundtables should consist of 4-6 slated
participants who will briefly present their material and engage the audience
in dialogue, and one chair who will introduce the topic and facilitate
discussion. Individual papers will be considered, but priority will be
given to prearranged panels.

Submission guidelines: Individual submissions must include: a 1) 250-word
paper abstract and 2) a curriculum vitae. Panel presentations must include:
1) a 250-word description of the panel and 2) 250-word abstracts for each
paper, and 3) a curriculum vitae for each presenter and the discussant.
Roundtable submissions should include: 1) a 1-2 page description of the
proposed discussion and 2) curriculum vitae for each slated participant.

Please note that all proposals * must be compiled into one Microsoft Word
document* and sent to crossingborders09@gmail.com.
*Deadline for submission: January 15, 2009*

www.crossingborders09.blogspot.com