Starting Date: 02-22-2007
Ending Date: 02-24-2007
Austin, Texas 78710
United StatesThe College of Liberal Arts, The Center for African and African American Studies, The Office of Diversity and Community Engagement, and The Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies are pleased to announce the fourth annual conference on Activist Scholarship in the Americas.
Abriendo Brecha draws together scholars, activists, artists and others whose research and creative intellectual work is developed and carried out in alignment with communities, organizations, movements or networks working for social justice. This year’s conference theme is “Public Education, Marginalized Publics, and the Politics of Insurgency.” We want to explore how research, and intellectual and artistic production can engage with issues of public education, broadly defined.
Call for Papers
We encourage the submission of proposals for individual paper presentations, fully-coordinated panels, and workshops. Proposals should include the specific topic of the presentation and a statement indicating how the proposal relates to the conference theme and to activist scholarship. The proposals should be 300 words or less. The deadline for submission is 17 December 2006.
SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL
Conference Theme: Public Education, Marginalized Publics, and the Politics of Insurgency
Our theme this year directs attention toward three inter-connected topics:
First is the universities where many of us were trained, and many of us work. To what extent are these institutions, their training programs and their teaching approaches oriented toward a comprehensive, egalitarian and liberating idea of the social good? We are interested in exploring spaces that have been opened in universities to carry out activist scholarship toward such ends, and the results of these efforts. We also encourage analysis of barriers to such efforts, be they ideological, bureaucratic, or logistical.
Second, within our broad focus on public education, we are especially concerned with struggles for empowerment among historically oppressed or marginalized members of their respective societies, throughout the Americas. How have inequalities along the lines of race, gender, class and sexuality affected access to quality education, and what strategies have these communities employed in struggle to remedy these disparities?
Third, we wish to highlight efforts for the revitalization of public education, at all levels of established educational institutions, and equally important, through radically alternative or anti-systemic means. What are the most promising paths for reform and revitalization, along the lines of social justice and community empowerment, and how are these new educational spaces constituted? What role can activist, feminist, and decolonizing methodologies and scholarship play in these processes?
For all three of these interconnected themes, we make a special call to turn the lens inward toward our own University, in order to generate ideas and energy toward institutional change at home. At the same time, we look outward for examples and models that may aid us in providing new directions and facilitating change. The conference theme is meant to provoke and inspire submissions, and to guide our selection of invited and keynote speakers. It is not intended to delimit or exclude. We will consider any proposed papers and sessions related to activist scholarship, broadly defined.
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Geographical Scope: State Conference |
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