SJRI

Initiative for the Cooperation Across the Social Sciences and Humanities

May 20-23, 2015
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Constructing a New Critical Qualitative Inquiry”

The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) is a large conference of qualitative scholars in the social sciences. We’re inviting humanities scholars with research interests that foster social justice to submit any work that prominently features theorists who haven’t yet had mainstream influence in social science disciplines.

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Fourth Annual EcoJustice and Activism Conference

March 19-21, 2015 at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI

EcoJustice Education is an approach that analyzes the deep cultural roots of intersecting social and ecological crises, focusing especially on the globalizing cultural, economic and political forces of Western consumer culture.  EcoJustice scholars and educators also study, support, and teach about the ways that various cultures around the world actively resist these colonizing forces by protecting and revitalizing their commons—that is, the social practices and traditions, languages, and relationships with the land necessary to the healthy regeneration of their communities. By emphasizing the commons (and its enclosure or privatization), EcoJustice perspectives understand social justice to be inseparable from and even imbedded in questions regarding ecological well-being.

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Conable African Studies Symposium

Exile, Deportation, and Forced Labor in Colonial Africa

Rochester, New York

April 2-4, 2015

“the extreme solitude of his existence …saddened the ancestor’s spirit.”
Les derniers rois mages, Maryse Condé

In Maryse Condé’s 1997 novel, Les derniers rois mages, Spero, the fictional great-grandson of Béhanzin, the last king of Dahomey, reflects on his failures and feelings of inadequacy. Béhanzin was deposed from his throne by the French in 1894 and deported to Martinique. He brought with him into exile an enormous retinue, among them five of the “Leopard wives,” his daughter the princess Kpotasse, his son Ouanilo, and his honton, the prince Adandejan. Spero’s grandfather was left behind when the king was sent on to exile in Algeria, where he died in 1906. Several generations drown themselves in Caribbean rum as they wait interminably for the recognition they crave. And Spero, narrated by what literature scholar Chiji Akoma calls Condé’s “African griot aesthetic, ” experiences a double exile: an exile from his ancestral home, and the total separation from his royal family.

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SOVEREIGNTIES AND COLONIALISMS: RESISTING RACISM, EXTRACTION AND DISPOSSESSION

Call for Contributions for the Critical Ethnic Studies Gathering

April 30 to May 3, 2015, York University, Toronto

Deadline for proposals: December 15, 2014

Submit a proposal here: https://criticalethnicstudies.org

The 2015 conference of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association honours Indigenous sovereignty struggles for land, culture, food, water, education, and health—and centres Indigenous, Black, and people of colour activism and scholarship, especially work coming from feminist, trans, Two-­Spirit, queer, and disability struggles and perspectives.

This international gathering aims to critique settler colonialism and white supremacy; challenge colonial gender binaries; examine genealogies of anti‐Black racism and colonial racial formations; and think about resistance and oppression transnationally, in ways that challenge western hegemony and the travels of racist and colonial methods.

This gathering brings African, Caribbean, Equity, Diaspora, Critical Race, Native, Trans, and Disability Studies into conversation with Ethnic Studies to critique genocide, racialized sexual violence, and capitalism; and to engage with conditions of borders, land, migration, displacement, labour, prisons, war, development, occupation, ableism, racism, and apartheid.

CINSA 2015: Survivance & Reconciliation: 7 Forward / 7 Back

Date: 11-13 June 2015 at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Description:

The Canadian Indigenous/Native Studies Association (CINSA) Conference 2015 will be hosted by the First Peoples Studies Program (FPST) at Concordia University. Concordia University’s First Peoples Studies program recently received government of Quebec accreditation and began offering a minor and major in September 2013. The year, 2015 is also the 40th anniversary of the groundbreaking James Bay Agreement of 1975. Come honour and celebrate these two important events by participating in the first CINSA gathering since 2008.

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CU Expo is a Canadian-led international conference designed to:

• showcase the best practices in community-campus partnerships worldwide;
• create a space for collaboration around key issues; and
• foster ideas, connections, and frameworks with the purpose of strengthening our communities

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