Call for Papers

– an interdisciplinary symposium –

April 2017, University of Toronto, Toronto ON

Abstract Submission Deadline: December 9, 2016

The Work of Settler Colonialism Symposium was launched in April 2016 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. This event brought together conversations between the emerging field of settler colonial studies and scholars engaging in the continual crises of neoliberal capitalism with new approaches to labour, capitalism, and resistance against the contemporary issues of late capitalism. This convergence of fields brought to light the interrelations of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and neoliberal capitalism as they operate through and within each other. The symposium offered scholars across interdisciplinary fields the opportunity to generate unique lines of inquiry and envision new alliances for resistance and movement building.

This Call For Papers proposes a second symposium that builds on these important discussions and asks, where do we go from here? The Work of Settler Colonialism II – Emergent Solidarities asks writers, activists, and scholars to expand on the collaborations, contradictions, and possibilities that arise when we organize within and against settler colonialism. This is especially pertinent when situated alongside processes of the exploitation of migrant labour, racial slavery and its afterlife, imprisonment, the expansion of extractive industries, and the corresponding struggles that have emerged out of these conditions.

The future of the settler state will be brought about through the work of reproducing social, economic, and political life in its many spaces and forms. Therefore, a central question of this symposium is: how might we interrupt this labour, and instead work towards anti-colonial and decolonial futures?

From ongoing land-based resistance movements against the expansion of pipelines, to movements calling for the abolition of police and prisons, and mobilizations against the increasingly precarious and temporary nature of work and citizenship, this conference is interested in activist, art-based, and scholarly engagements that are firmly rooted in anti-colonial resistance.

We welcome contributors from within as well as beyond the academy, including activist and community-rooted perspectives, to join us in April 2017 in Toronto. We invite contributions (papers, panels, performances) to this symposium that address themes including, but not limited to:

The labor of expansion; enslavement; extractive industries; land ruination and preservation; land parceling and dispossession; the commons; sovereignty; unions and unionization; anarchism, socialism, and Marxism; migrant workers; solidarities and divergences; anti-racism and prison abolition; intersectionality in anti-colonial movements; gendered labor and gendered violence; reproductive labor, education, and child abduction; laboring within recognition; academic labor; and transdisciplinary interventions.

Our primary concern is to hear from those interested in thinking through emergent solidarities across Indigenous, settler, and arrivant positions as we collectively work against ongoing settler colonialism. We look to incite discussions around questions such as:

• What is the work of settler colonialism?
• What is the work of resisting settler colonialism?
• What can be generated by comparing settler colonial contexts (Canada, US, Australia, Israel etc.)?
• Is the future of labour a settler future?
• Where are the points of convergence and divergence in potential anti-colonial coalitions?
• How can interlocking oppressions (such as race, gender, sexuality, and class) be conceptualized within settler colonialism?
• Where is solidarity work already happening?
• What is the status of movements across the world committed to decolonization?

Please submit an abstract, no longer than 500 words, single-spaced, including your name and institutional affiliation, by December 9th, 2016, to workofsettlercolonialism2017@gmail.com

Papers will be due February 15th, 2017.