Conference on Race, Racialization, and Resistance: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Humanities

deadline for submissions: 
September 22, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Seattle University

Conference on Race, Racialization, and Resistance: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Humanities ● Call for Abstracts  
Seattle University, April 25 – April 27, 2025 (Friday through Sunday)
  
Full Name/Name of Organization:   
Seattle University

There will be no registration fee for this conference.

The funding for this conference is provided by the Mellon Foundation, for the “Race, Racialization and Resistance in the US” curricular project at Seattle University.
    

Deadline for Submission: September 22, 2024
Submit your conference proposal using this link

Seattle University will host a multi-disciplinary conference on “Race, Racialization, and Resistance” with a focus on the praxis of curriculum and course development, pedagogy, and scholarship that informs approaches to teaching. Historian Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada), recently observed that, “history provides the common soil for a nation’s growth and a window into its future.” Blackhawk calls for the formation and teaching of a new American history, insisting that “it is time to reimagine U.S. history outside the tropes of discovery that have bred exclusion and misunderstanding.” This conference will examine the ways that educators are attempting to build out Blackhawk’s vision for creating inclusive histories and practices in the classroom and related educational spaces.  

We invite proposals from full and part-time faculty of all ranks without regard to institutional affiliation, including graduate students and practitioners. Most of the sessions will be on undergraduate education; there may be sessions on graduate education. Proposals should focus on examining approaches to reconfiguring curricular practices and/or strategies for teaching in the college classroom that move toward building out Blackhawk’s vision of creating a new and usable past. We welcome proposals for presentations that explore creating curricula, syllabi, and classroom spaces that center histories and conversations about race and racialization. We also encourage proposals interrogating practices of resistance deployed by marginalized or minoritized groups as they worked to confront oppressive systems and create new worlds free of coercion.

Potential topics / themes:   

  1. Centering marginalized and minoritized communities in the syllabus and the classroom.
  2. Teaching racial histories and geographies as an act of resistance or activism.  
  3. Analyzing the historical roots of race, racialization, and resistance in the U.S. and beyond.
  4. Global and transnational connections to U.S. histories of race, racialization, and resistance.
  5. Exploring the overlap between race and ecology and how to bring environmental studies and issues of race, racialization, and resistance together into classroom spaces and pedagogy.
  6. How to build and sustain classroom norms, practices, cultures, and containers for critical conversations around race, racialization, and resistance.
  7. How to build and sustain liberatory syllabi and pedagogies (e.g., lectures, presentations, and assignments) that center and remain open to meeting the needs and contexts of multiply marginalized BIPOC students (e.g., BIPOC disabled students, BIPOC low-income students, BIPOC LGBTQIA+ students).
  8. Classrooms as sites of healing, reconciliation, and justice and trauma-informed pedagogy.
  9. How teachers/educators can acknowledge and stay firmly and humbly grounded in their own social locations (advantaged and marginalized identities) as they build and sustain their syllabus, pedagogies, and classroom cultures to foster understanding of race, racialization, and resistance.   
  10. The intersectional dimensions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other forms of identity in pedagogy.    
  11. Creating inclusive classroom spaces for international students, undocumented migrants, and refugees.   

  

A proposal can be for a complete or partially complete panel, complete or partially complete roundtable, individual paper, lightning talk, artistic contribution, or another format. Please be specific with details. Proposals may also include teaching demonstration of classroom lesson plans, student responses to current pedagogical practices, and scholarship interrogating these themes in the social media and online digital landscapes.   

Submission Link: https://forms.gle/KUyaUYoXLgD6Dpo17

Each proposal consists of:  

Single paper abstracts should be no more than 300 words long and include a brief CV, no more than 2 pages in length. Panel proposals should include a panel abstract no more than 500 words long, with individual paper abstracts and CVs for each contributor. CVs should include any teaching experience. We also encourage proposals for roundtable discussions, lightning talks, teaching demonstrations, or some alternative or creative ways of initiating a conversation about the conference themes. Alternative proposals may use either single or panel formats for submission.  

Each submission should include contact emails for all participants.  

All conference rooms will be equipped with a projector and a computer.
 
Please note any audiovisual or access needs for both presentation and conference participation.   

There is a limited number of grants available for airfare for non-tenure track or early-career scholars as well as graduate students. Please indicate whether you are interested in applying for this funding.

Proposals should be filled out and submitted using the link above by September 22, 2024 at 10pm.   

Send any questions you may have to mellonconference@seattleu.edu