Crossing Borders Conference
Politics, Cultural Contest, and the Urgency of Space
Summary:
Crossing Borders is a decade long collaboration to bring together graduate students from USC, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, UCLA and beyond in the interest of initiating conversations across institutions and disciplines.
Description:
The Graduate Students of the department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC have revived the Crossing Borders Conference on March 29th & 30th 2013.
This is a joint endeavor to foster intellectual community amongst graduate students pursuing degrees in Ethnic Studies, American Studies, the humanities, arts and social science programs in California.
This year's conference engages the theme of "crossing" as both a spatial operation that confounds and consolidates borders and as an analytic through which to reconceptualize politics, culture, and social movements. Crossing challenges conventional understandings of imperialism, capitalism, militarism, debt accumulation, uneven geographic development, and imprisonment by illuminating the mobility of people, practices, ideas, and goods while transforming our conceptions of justice, solidarity, collaboration, and communication. Crossing also asks us to consider the methods of multi- and inter-disciplinary modes of knowledge. Exploring the concept of "border" beyond a singular understanding as geographic space, this conference encourages a multidirectional understanding of "borderland" as discursive, material, disciplinary, psychic, and imagined. The convergences of these different political-intellectual projects summon unruly archives and require flexible understandings of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Such convergences ask us to investigate the ways these categories are re-calibrated and dismantled through struggle in times of crisis. We seek papers that address the notion of crossing in any number of different struggles, sites and conflicts.
Possible Topics and Themes include (but are not limited to):
interdisciplinary methods & epistemologies
political economy
geography & memory
governance, dissent, & surveillance
transnationalism & the nation-state
queer & feminist of color analysis
spatial and social theory
representation & visuality
neoliberalism, liberalism, & socialism
settler-colonialism, decoloniality, & indigeneity
confinement & imprisonment
debt & consumption
You can RSVP for the Crossing Borders conference here.
Registration is free of charge!
Information on this conference and this CFP may also be accessed by going to: http://crossingborders2013.wordpress.com/