Call for Papers

In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith says, “Struggle can be mobilized as resistance and as transformation. It can provide the means for working things out 'on the ground', for identifying and solving problems of practice, for identifying strengths and weaknesses, for refining tactics and uncovering deeper challenges.” Struggle is central to the work of knowledge production and learning done at the university. In order to promote socially-engaged research and critical and creative work, there must be recognition of and reflection on the erasure and silencing of forms of knowing and being often excluded from our classrooms and our writing. This conference grew out of this very imperative– a deep need for decolonial work in response to the historic erasure and cultural genocide of colonized peoples in the United States and throughout the world. 

We invite you to engage with the theme of struggle and transformation broadly, working through collective or personal struggles in ways that are critical or creative, analytical or expressive. We welcome proposals from the humanities and other disciplines that explore power and resistance in complex and multifaceted ways. This especially includes work that centers marginalized peoples and their raced, classed, and gendered experiences, and those voices and experiences that are often underrepresented in the United States and the Global North. We encourage various forms of engagement with our theme, including scholarly papers, creative writing, posters and multimodal projects, and sonic/musical or visual texts. Also feel free to propose a roundtable discussion or a workshop that you would like to facilitate and would be beneficial as we come together in community.

The conference is scheduled for April 20-21, 2023. The conference program and proceedings will be published digitally by Marquette University. Also, presenters will be provided the opportunity to submit their conference papers or projects to be reviewed for possible inclusion in the conference proceedings that will be published online.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• decolonialism and decolonial epistemologies

• The legacy of colonialization

• language and questions of identity 

• capitalism and anti-capitalism

• property, land, Land Back

• gender and/or embodiment

• disability and divergence

• sexuality and agency

• race and intersectionality

• transnational or third-world feminism

• borders, refugeeism, and migration

• the environment or eco-critique 

• labor (in all of its forms)

• sovereignty

• carcerality and surveillance

• Neocolonialism and third world interventions

• Aid and the NGO sector

• postcoloniality/postcolonialism

• archives and the recording of history

• Indigenous epistemology

• media and representation of Indigenous people

• Colonialism and the academy 

• Indigenous ways of knowing 

• religion and ways of being

• religion and coloniality

• teaching and pedagogy

By February 1st, 2023, send a 250-word description of your project and a brief 150-word bio. written in third-person to: aegsconference@marquette.edu.

Academic Committee: Alex Gambacorta, Ayo Ibiyemi, Jen Stanislawski, Ibtisam M. Abujad