[There] are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.
—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

standing on the map of my political desires
I toast to a borderless future
—Guillermo Gómez-Peña, "Freefalling Toward a Borderless Future"

In a globalized world, the unanchored flows of capital, peoples, and ideas have, paradoxically, both dislocated and reinforced ideas of situated place and identity. We find ourselves "loos'd of limits and imaginary lines" (Whitman) as technologies of communication and mobility open up the world to unprecedented amounts of movement. This push toward infrastructures of circulation, connectivity, and porousness has produced a violent aporia in the form of nearly 60 million displaced people, at once uprooted and threatened by the forceful imposition of limits. Wendy Brown summarizes this contradictory logic: "What we have come to call a globalized world harbors fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription. These tensions materialize as increasingly liberalized borders, on the one hand, and the development of unprecedented funds, energies, and technologies to border fortifications, on the other." This conference seeks to use the tropes of "movements" and "migrancies" to articulate the ruptures enacted by globalization and to look for potential "lines of flight" on the horizon of a borderless world.

We also encourage papers that explore the themes of movement and migrancy beyond the realm of human sovereignty and epistemology. As sites such as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch illuminate, movement and migrancy can also implicate "vital" and "vibrant" nonhuman actants (Jane Bennett). The Anthropocene poses a challenge to "correlationism" (Quentin Meillassoux) and forces us to consider epistemology outside of subjectivity. Given matter's unruliness and accompanying motions either to reimagine or to contain it, how can we articulate migration and movement at an ontological and ecological level?

Finally, if global movements resonate in literatures and literary studies—if migrations influence literary and critical turns, shape genres, and influence periodization—what roles do literature and criticism play in a world on the move? This conference welcomes papers that develop the themes of migration and movement across diverse time periods, disciplines, and (inter)national literatures.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Transnational and diaspora studies: nationality, locality, globality, (post-)cosmopolitanism
• Questions of citizenship, community, access, centres, peripheries, and marginalization
• Movement as periodization; migration of forms and concepts; linguistic shifts
• Poetries and narratives of migration, dislocation, unsettlement, and home(lessness)
• Beyond the subject: ecological migrations; movement of waste, objects, and assemblages
• Crises of migration (i.e. the EU refugee 'crisis'); mapping scale and acceleration
• Countermodels to nation-based concepts of identity, belonging, and responsibility
• Migrant bodies and embodiment; rhythm, spatial movement, and moving spatialities

Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words and a short bio to torontogradconference@gmail.com by February 1, 2016. For further inquiries, please contact Scott Herder, Caroline Holland, Henry Ivry, and Max Karpinski at torontogradconference@gmail.com.