Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, Annual Conference, York University
April 27-28, 2018
York University’s Social & Political Thought Graduate Program is pleased to invite papers and creative works for presentation at its 32nd annual conference, Strategies of Critique: Great Black North: Study, Resistance and Existence in Black. We organize this conference with an aim to understand and affirm Black experience in/of Canadian contexts where ideas of a Great White North too often prevail. Intending a scholarly intervention within an academic landscape shaped by neoliberal governance and racial capitalism, we know that we must look to challenge the academic industrial complex’s entanglements with white supremacy, settler-colonialism, enslavement, patriarchy and neoliberal logics of domination, as well as other regimes and instances of violence to understand its own “underground” constituted by Black Canadian experiences. Such modalities function to pacify or make invisible anti-racist and anti-colonial resistances within the academy. This year’s Strategies of Critique responds to the absence of a Black Canadian Studies stream as one such instance of invisibility and pacification, which must be interrogated and denaturalized. Thus it asks: what is at stake in the ongoing production of new forms of collectivity and struggle, the making and re-making of a Great Black North that exceeds the idea of Canadian experience? Under what constraints do anti-racist and anti-colonial resistances labour within the academy over questions of justice and collective liberation, and what are the various forms of intervention, academic or otherwise, through which people take up these political struggles?
The organizing committee welcomes individual and panel proposals critically engaged with Canadian experiences of Blackness, both in and outside the university contexts. We also welcome proposals from activists and community members.
See full CfP and further information here.
Deadline for Proposals: Feb. 15, 2018.