Mixed Race Studies

Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey 2012 Annual Convention: Call for Papers

Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey
2012-01-31

Building on the success of the inaugural 2011 conference, the second annual convention of the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey (BGCSNJ) will be held at Barnard College in New York City on August 10-11, 2012.  This year’s convention will focus on the theme of “What Is the Black German Experience?” The conference will feature a keynote address by Yara Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria, screenings of the films “Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story” and “Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984-1992,” and readings by Black German poet-performers Olumide Popoola and Philipp Khabo Köpsell.

The BGCSNJ Review Committee invites proposals for papers that engage the multiplicity and diversity of the experiences of Blacks of German heritage and on Blackness in Germany. We welcome submissions for twenty-minute presentations on three academic panels and two sessions devoted to life writing, oral history and memoir. To participate please send a one-page abstract and a CV or short biographical statement to: bgcsinc@gmail.com. Deadline for proposals: March 15, 2012

For more information, click here.

Call for Papers: Association for Feminist Anthropology Sessions

American Anthropological Association
2012-02-07

Posted by Josyln O.

The Association for Feminist Anthropology welcomes sessions to be considered for inclusion in AFA’s programming for the 111^th AAA Annual Meeting, to be held November 14-18, 2012 in San Francisco. The AAA meeting theme this year is “Borders,” so AFA particularly welcomes panels that take up “borders” from a feminist anthropological perspective. Various approaches to the theme include papers and sessions that might explore:

• Borders/collaborations/intersections between feminist anthropology and other scholarly spaces from within and beyond anthropology: critical race studies, queer studies, and/or women’s studies; linguistics and genetics; political science, geography, environmental, and/or policy studies; migration and immigration studies and/or economics and archaeology and/or ethnography; biology/history/cultural studies; masculinity and/or gender studies; educational psychologies and social work; etc., etc., etc.
• Existing or potential conversations/alliances/engagements between scholarly anthropology and everyday activism
• Geographical, political, and ecological borders and the people who move across and re-define them: histories/archaeologies/economies of trade, trafficking, and/or transnationalism; refugees, resettlements, and asylum seekers; multiple and multiplying citizenships; migration, immigration, and diasporas; etc.
• “Borders” and “borderlands” in terms of identities: liminal; queer; mestizaje; mixed-race; transgender
• The “in between” scholar working across/between/among disciplines; conducting research and participating within communities; “insider anthropology”; Lorde’s concept and Harrison’s theorizing of the “outsider within”

We are especially interested in sessions that take advantage of the meeting site of San Francisco by involving local activists, practitioners, and policy makers, whether they are anthropologists or not. If you have questions about the details of registration for non-anthropologists, please let us know…

For more information, click here.

Critical Ethnic Studies: An Anthology (Call for Papers)

Rather than attempting to pose and answer the question, “What is critical ethnic studies?,” this anthology seeks to catalyze a more wide-ranging set of critical problems for emergent scholarly work and new forms of knowledge. Building on longstanding critiques of race, imperialism, and capital in ethnic studies and related fields, some broadly framed key conceptual questions for this anthology include: Is it necessary to rethink and reframe some of the central—even taken-for-granted—analytical and theoretical rubrics of ethnic studies, such as “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “citizenship,” and “class?” How do long histories of multiple, incommensurable racial genocides (e.g., land conquest, racial slave trade, militarized extermination) constitute the historical present? How do we apprehend and theorize the persistent systems and structures of gendered racial violence, on the one hand, while attending to the resilience of political agency and transformation, on the other? How can we rethink the question of (racist/state) violence in rigorous and creative ways, neither reifying nor pathologizing it, but asking instead how a violence of condition produces a condition of violence? What do notions of the “subaltern,” “collective,” “popular,” and “multitude” mean in a white supremacist and settler colonial formation such as the U.S.? What is the relationship between critical ethnic studies and related emergent fields, such as critical prison studies, queer ethnic studies, and settler colonial studies? How can we create the conditions and framework for the ongoing appreciation of marginalized yet dynamic modes of critique, contestation, and inquiry within (and across) various fields, such as: critiques of sovereignty and recognition within Native and Indigenous studies; anti-Blackness as an analytical rubric within Black studies; debates about the politics and theorization of Asian settler colonialism within Asian American studies; and critiques of First World privilege and mobility within (U.S.) queer of color studies?

We invite essay submissions on a wide range of topics that may include but are not limited to the following:

• Race, colonialism, and capitalism
• Warfare and militarism
• Theories of violence
• Settler colonialism and white supremacy
• Critical genocide studies
• Cultural studies, the politics of aesthetic and cultural practice
• Critical feminist epistemologies
• Queer ethnic studies
• Decolonization and empire
• Social movements, activism, insurrection, and revolution
• Immigration and labor
• Multiculturalism and colorblindness
• Critical race studies
• Critical legal studies
• Liberationist epistemologies
• Critical ethnic studies, undisciplinarity, and relationship to other fields
• Professionalization, praxis, and the academic industrial complex
• Relationship between racism and environmental justice movements
• Sovereignty, the nation, and the nation-state
• Ethnic studies in relation to past and current eras of the privatization, corporatization, and defunding of the university
• Tension between institutionalization and movement-building in ethnic studies
• New frameworks for the comparative analysis of differential racial histories, e.g., immigrant and indigenous histories
• The erotic and sexual outlaw
• Academics of color and the erasure of class privilege

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2012
Word Limit: 4,000 – 6,000 words including notes
Format: Word document with citations in Chicago Style
Email Submission to: cesanthology@gmail.com

Escaping to Destinations South: The Underground Railroad, Cultural Identity, and Freedom Along the Southern Borderlands

National Park Service
Network to Freedom
2012-06-20 through 2012-06-24
St. Augustine, Florida

The Network to Freedom has joined with local partners to present an annual UGRR [Underground Railroad] conference beginning in 2007. These conferences bring together a mix of grass roots researchers, community advocates, site stewards, government officials, and scholars to explore the history of the Underground Railroad. Rotated to different parts of the country, the conferences highlight the unique history of various regions along with new research.

The 2012 Conference theme is the resistance to slavery through escape and flight to and from the South, including through international flight, from the 16th century to the end of the Civil War. Traditional views of the Underground Railroad focus on Northern destinations of freedom seekers, with symbols such as the North Star, Canada, and the Ohio River (the River Jordan) constructed as the primary beacons of freedom. This conception reduces the complexity of the Underground Railroad by ignoring the many freedom seekers that sought to obtain their freedom in southern destinations.

Likewise, borders and the movement across them by southern freedom seekers are also very crucial to our understanding of the complexities of the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers often sought out political and geographical borderlands, as crossing these locations usually represented the divide between slavery and freedom. To this end, the conference will explore how southern freedom seekers seized opportunities to escape slavery into Spanish Florida and the Seminole Nation, to the Caribbean Islands, and into the western borderlands of Indian Territory, Texas, and Mexico.

Escape from enslavement was not just about physical freedom, but also about the search for cultural autonomy. The conference will explore the transformation and creation of new cultural identities among southern freedom seekers that occurred as a result of their journeys to freedom, such as the dispersal of Gullah Geechee culture and the formation of Black Seminole cultural identity.

The 2012 Conference will include participation by independent and academic scholars at all levels, educators, community activists, public historians and preservationists, and multi-media and performance artists. The conference seeks to create a cultural, historical, and interpretive exchange between domestic and international descendent communities of southern freedom seekers.

Gullah Geechee and Black Seminole descendants are particularly welcome at the conference.

For more information, click here.  Call for papers information (Deadline 2012-01-15) is here.

I am a third-year doctoral student in counseling psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University and I am currently working on a study exploring the experiences of biracial and multiracial women. I am looking for women who are 18 years old or older and of mixed racial heritage to participate in a one hour confidential interview. Please contact me if you interested in participating in my study.

For more information, contact Susan Mao at susanemao@gmail.com.

Invitation to Participate in Groundbreaking Study of Racial Identity

If you are a person at least 18 years old, who is commonly identified as black, African American, biracial, mixed, or multiracial, but do not yourself subscribe to racial identity as part of your sense of self, please consider reviewing the information at www.racetranscenders.com to see if you might be interested in participating in an important study of this identity disposition.

Call for Robson Square Art Installation: Hapapalooza Festival

Hapa-Palooza Festival seeks outdoor art installation proposal to show-case work by individual artist and/or groups of mixed cultural descent whose artistic work explores mixed roots/cultural heritage/hybridity/identity.

Submission Deadline: 2011-07-15
Contact: Ella Cooper – ella@ecoartslab.com

Hapa-Palooza: A Vancouver Celebration of Mixed-Roots Arts and Ideas is a new cultural festival that commemorates Vancouver’s 125th anniversary and celebrates the city’s identity as a place of hybridity, synergy and acceptance.

In an unprecedented gathering of artists, Hapa-palooza will bring together in one festival Vancouver’s many talents of mixed-heritage and hybrid cultural identities. A vibrant fusion of music, dance, literary, artistic and film performances, Hapa-palooza places prominence on celebrating and stimulating awareness of mixed-roots identity, especially amongst youth.

This inaugural event will take place between Sept 7-10, 2011 with our Mainstage event taking place on September 10, 2011 from noon to 6pm in Robson Square.

Submission Details: We are seeking an artist or artists whose existing work deals with hybridity, identity, contemporary traditions and/or cultural heritage. Depending on the submissions received, this final installation will either showcase a variety of works or feature one or two artists in Robson Square. Compensation includes funds to mount the installation, volunteer support during the event plus an artist honorarium. Emerging artists are welcome.

For more information, click here.

Seeking Participants for a Multiracial Documentary

We are in production on a documentary that looks into the subject of multiracial individuals. The director is an award winning filmmaker who has written on the multiracial issue in the Los Angeles Times. He is multiracial himself. This documentary will not repeat the multiracial clichés of the past and will instead explore impending social and cultural crisis facing multiracials as they continue to grow in numbers.

Right now we are interested in multiracial subjects—child to adult—who have experienced one or more of the following:

• Lives publicly as one race and privately as multiracial
• Encounters with the public school’s “two races or more” category
• Pre-school applications with racial categories
• Faced family or social pressures to identify with one race at the expense of other races
• Ongoing conflicts over multiracial identity within self or with others
• And any unusual multiracial conflicts that we may not yet be aware of

If any of the above applies to you, please write a paragraph describing your situation and what makes it relevant to the ongoing multiracial dialogue.

Please include the following: name, city, and an e-mail address where we can reach you. If you have a photo that you can attach, that would be appreciated.

If you have any further questions, please contact Rick at katrinanetwork@hotmail.com.

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you!

Critical Mixed Race Conference 2012: Call for Papers

Critical Mixed Race Conference 2012
“What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”
2012-11-01 throuth 2012-11-04
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Click here for this announcement in PDF format.

Conference Description: What is Critical Mixed Race Studies? will be hosted at DePaul University in Chicago, November 1-4, 2012. The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have fostered different approaches to the field, the 2012 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”

Proposals:We invite panels, roundtables, and papers that address the conference theme, although participants are also welcome to submit proposals that speak to their own specialized research, pedagogical, or community-based interests. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the proposal, not its connection to the conference theme. Proposals might consider the ways different disciplines approach or provide methodologies for critical analyses of mixed race issues. Proposals might also consider the following areas as related to Critical Mixed Race Studies:

To submit a proposal or for more information, please visit: http://las.depaul.edu/cmrs

Deadline for all proposals: December 15th, 2011.
Selections will be finalized by March 1, 2012.

All queries should be directed to cmrs@depaul.edu.

Request to interview members of multiracial organizations for Sociology Honors Research Study

My name is Steve Alcantar, a Sociology honors student attending the University of California, Irvine who is currently conducting a research study from January until April of this year [2011] on government classification of multiracial individuals. The purpose of this study is to observe how modern-day racial and ethnic categories used by the government are implemented on documentation, as well as the effects this may have on American society’s views on the concept of race. Another objective is to compare past and present day sentiments on a multiracial identifier and the idea of being multiracial in general.

One aspect of my research involves interviewing individuals belonging to groups that were represented in events during the 1990s that ultimately led to the Office of Management and Budget’s 1997 decision to allow census respondents to “mark one or more” races in the race question. This includes interviewing members of multiracial organizations, and interviewing experts with comprehensive knowledge and experience studying the concept of race and race relations.

The in-person interview (around the Southern California area, I could also meet in Northern California March 19th-23rd [2011])  on average takes about 30 minutes to complete, and responses are kept confidential in that no one will be able to trace back to any statement a respondent makes during the interview.

If you are interested, please contact me at alcantas@uci.edu or (510) 965-2030.

Thank You

For more information, read the Study Information Sheet.