The 50th Annual Conference of the Canadian Sociological Association will be held from Monday, June 1 through to Friday, June 5, 2015 as part of the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences Congress, this year taking place at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ontario.

The Call for Abstracts is now open. Full details here: http://www.csa-scs.ca/files/webapps/csapress/annual-conferences/call-for-abstracts/

CCUSB followers might be particularly interested in the session detailed below, which is organised by Jan Clarke and Rémy Tremblay in affiliation with CCUSB.

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Editor in Chief: Prof. France Houle, Université de Montréal, Canada

Email: ijmbs.editor@gmail.com

The International Journal of Migration and Border Studies (IJMBS) is pleased to announce a call for papers for its third issue in 2015.

IJMBS aims to bring together a diverse range of scholars and practitioners to advance knowledge and improve practice and methodologies in a broad range of issued related to migration and borders studies. Broadly speaking, it seeks to provide different perspectives to its readership ranging from exclusion to integration of permanent, temporary and irregular migrants as well as asylum seekers. Articles covering a large spectrum of topics addressing the development of international, transnational and national immigration policies viewed in a broad sense are welcome. What could be the best practices regarding inclusion? Which measures have exclusionary effects? Some examples of themes this journal intends to cover are listed below.

Subject Coverage

Broad themes on which articles are sought include but are not limited to:

• Innovations in institutional, procedural and social arrangements to deal with border security and immigration policy

• Personal information databases and exchanges

• Measures to restrict access to asylum

• The coherence and coordination between various actors dealing with issues such as health, education, social welfare, employment and law enforcement in the migration context

• Causes and consequences (economic, social, political, environmental, etc.) of migration and their legal and policy implications

• Local, regional and international mechanisms and logics that transform political and media discourses, norms, policies and practices related to migration and border studies

• Development of new priorities for immigration programmes

• The role of gender, age, social status, ability, race and other factors in curtailing border and immigration policies

• Indigenous rights and claims and border and migration studies

IJMBS is a peer-reviewed journal which offers a forum for disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research concerning conceptual, theoretical, empirical and methodological dimensions related to key concepts that underpin them: borders, immigration and integration policies, humanitarianism, sovereignty, states, citizenship, etc. Such critical analysis contributes to a better understanding of current challenges from different disciplinary perspectives including law, sociology, anthropology, social policy and social welfare, criminology, political economy, political science and public politics.

The journal invites submissions from both emerging and established scholars, including graduate students, post-graduates, professors and practitioners from around the globe, with the objective of ensuring that a plurality of experiences and perspectives is represented.

Notes for Prospective Authors
Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper has been completely re-written and if appropriate written permissions have been obtained from any copyright holders of the original paper).
All papers are refereed through a peer review process.

All papers must be submitted online. Please read our information on preparing and submitting articles.

Important Date
Submission deadline: 31st January, 2015

Ninth Biennial MESEA Conference

May 29th – June 1st 2014
Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken Germany

“Crossing Boundaries in a Post-Ethnic Era – Interdisciplinary Approaches and Negotiations”

Moving into the second decade of the twenty-first century, interdisciplinary border studies are still in need of new theoretical approaches that not only move beyond the “borderless” discourses of the post-Cold War era, but that also respond to the urgent need that was articulated in the late 1990s for a conceptualization of borders/boundaries as the sum of social, cultural, political, and economic processes. Following the 9/11 attack in the U.S., the reality of increased border securitization as part of the “war on terror” has undermined the neo-liberal rhetoric of the “borderless world.” At the same time, partly as a reaction to globalization and partly as a response to emerging regionalism and ethno‐regionalist movements, a number of states have set in motion a process of re‐scaling in which they have devolved part of their power in governance to supra‐state and sub‐state regions (Paasi 2009). As a result of the above, the complex roles of borders and boundaries have become more relevant than ever, necessitating a reconceptualization that sees them as processes, discourses, practices, even symbols, through which power functions.

“Crossing boundaries” is to be understood literally as well as metaphorically; possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Ethnic/National/State boundaries
• Redrawing boundaries, modifying ethnic categories—expansion or limit?
• Ethnic conflict versus decentralization—redesigning political arrangements, mapping out new borders
• Boundaries in literary criticism: world literature; comparative literature; national literature
• Boundaries (physical and discursive) and the material reality of cultural production
• Crossing language borders – multilingualism
• Social or class boundaries
• Migration processes and global/national/regional mobility; eg. tourism, work migration, human trafficking
• Religious boundaries– from religion to fundamentalism
• Contemporary and historical globalization processes from the epoch of “discoveries” (16th/17th century), to the imperial expansion of the West (19th century), and the global “virtual village” of the 21^st century
• Technology and borders; virtual biopolitics
• Post–ethnic border performances
• Negotiating North-South divisions (Europe/Americas) and economic disparities
• Theories and realities of post-ethnicity
• Deterritorialization and/or reterritorialization

Proposals should be submitted between August 15 and November 15, 2013.

Submitters will receive notification of acceptance by January 1, 2014.

Preference will be given to complete panel proposals with an inter/transdisciplinary and/or transnational focus. Panels may not include more than 2 participants from the same institution. Presenters must be members of MESEA or MELUS in 2014.

As in previous years, MESEA will award two Young Scholars Excellence Awards.

Fore more information, see: http://www.mesea.org

Program Director:

Jopi Nyman, PhD DSocSc
Professor of English
School of Humanities
University of Eastern Finland
P. O. Box 111
FI-80101 Joensuu
FINLAND
Tel. +358-2944-52143
Email: jopi.nyman@uef.fi

Third Biennial Conference of the International Association of Inter-American Studies

The Americas have a long history of colonialism; even the concepts ‘America’ and ‘Americanity’ date back to European expansion, invasion and conquest. As the success of the term ‘postcolonialism’ suggests, the colonial legacy is a relic of the past that is continuously rearticulated and reactivated until today.

In the Americas, colonialism informs nearly all aspects of life. From European invasion onward it established a durable matrix of power based on gender relations, racism and ethnic classifications that defined white and criollo male superiority over the indigenous and ‘Afro American’ as well as over Asian, Jewish, Arabic, Muslim and Hindu populations, peoples and nations, in spite of the ambiguity of ethnic and racial frontiers. Moreover, in recent times, the thrust to decolonize has become a major aspiration that implies the rescue and re-evaluation of native and subordinated cultures.

In this sense the battles for recognition and self-determination of disenfranchised groups in the Americas demonstrate the overwhelming burden of colonialism and its connection to gender, ethnicity, racism, and class hierarchies. The state reacted with special procedures of ethnic administration such as exclusion through reservations, haciendas, and slums, or politics of forced inclusion in terms of forced homogenization and assimilation. Recently emerged new politics of recognition have led to a redefinition of nation-states as pluricultural or even plurinational.

Colonialism has deeply informed cultural production and popular culture in the Americas. Jazz, blues, rock music and hip-hop have given voice to the experience of ethnic and racial exclusion and Latin America’s boom literature is informed by ‘magic’ indigenous-colonial cosmovisions. Ethnic and racial struggles against quota systems and/or auto-ethnographic media productions are integral parts of the fight against the negative aspects of the colonial legacy. Thus, colonialism is not only a historical burden for American societies but also represents an uneven syncretism that must be deconstructed. The linguistic aspects of colonialism resonate in a high degree of exterminated and endangered autochthonous languages but also in the creation of creôle languages and techniques of code-switching.

Colonialism contains important material aspects as concerns the appropriation, reappropriation and redistribution of land, commodities as well as work force and citizenshipregimes. From early colonial land-taking to internal colonialism and imperial politics to the recent forms of neo-extractivism the colonization of space and nature has been an integral part of colonial and postcolonial projects.

The conference will adopt a broad concept of colonialism, which refers not to a single historical period but to a relational mode that creates asymmetric power relations and modes of exploitation. This cross-disciplinary forum of academic exchange invites contributions from all academic disciplines concerned with colonialism in the Americas. It will examine colonization, colonialism, nation building, decolonization, and continuing facets of coloniality as they relate to societies, politics, economy, cultures, and media. The participation of doctoral students is strongly encouraged. Scholars are invited to propose presentations and/or panels on a wide variety of topics including:

• Racism and politics of exclusion
• Multiculturalism, politics of recognition and cultural classification
• Identity politics and social movements
• Literature, film, visual arts and music in contact zones
• Colonial heritage and the politics of memory
• The “Colonial complex” of the young American republics
• Colonial power and resistance
• Colonialism, slavery, and their aftermaths
• Educational reform and the teaching of American histories and cultures
• Economic colonization and neo-extractivism
• The colonization of nature
• Imperialism and neo-imperialism
• The Coloniality and decolonization of media and mediascapes
• Creolization and hybridization in language and culture
• Decolonization, plurinationality and transnationalism
• Decolonization and knowledge production, the geopolitics of knowledge
• Transformations of coloniality
• Coloniality and religion
• Coloniality and gender relations

Please send proposals for individual papers or for panels with a chairperson and 3 to 5 presentations to iaslima2014@uni-graz.at. Please include your name, the title of presentation and/or panel, an abstract (200-400 words per presentation) and email addresses. Presentations can be held in English or in Spanish. The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2013.

Host: Gonzalo Portocarrero (Pontíficia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Perú)

Organizing Committee: María Herrera-Sobek (UC Santa Barbara, USA), Olaf Kaltmeier (Bielefeld University. Germany), Heidrun Moertl (University of Graz, Austria)

De/Colonization in the Americas: Continuity and Change (Lima/Peru, 2014) » Inter-American Studies.

Canadian Comparative Literature Association: Congress 2014

Comparative Literature is often seen as a quixotic discipline, since it attempts to cover not only the totality of literary production around the world but also the relations between literature and such diverse fields as music, sculpture, painting, theatre, and film, to say nothing of history, sociology, anthropology, folklore, and genetics. Given its profusion of interests, one cannot help but wonder what are the field’s limits, or boundaries. From May 25 to May 27, 2014, as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Canada hosted by Brock University—in the beautiful Niagara region—the Canadian Comparative Literature Association (CCLA) invites scholars to explore the boundaries of Comparative Literature. What is the relation between national literatures and world literature? How are new media shaping Comparative Literature? What is the role of translation in comparative literary studies? How can historically excluded literatures and literary histories be incorporated into Comparative Literature? How are new geographies of literary production refashioning Comparative Literature? What is the role of interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, or transdisciplinarity in Comparative Literature?

Comparative papers on other topics are also welcome and will be collected into general sessions. Proposals for pre-arranged panels, roundtables or other formats too may be submitted. Joint sessions with other organizations are encouraged but should be arranged as soon as possible.

Please submit 250-300 word abstracts for 20-minute presentations to Program Chair Albert Braz (albert.braz@ualberta.ca) by January 15, 2014.

CFP: CCLA Congress 2014 – ACLC Congrès 2014  | CCLA | ACLC.

Call For Papers

Conference website

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most seminal events in modern American poetry, the Vancouver Poetry Conference 1963. Following the publication of Donald Allen’s prescient The New American Poetry in 1960, Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley gathered together a number of the New American poets (including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg) in Vancouver for three weeks of poetry readings, public lectures, workshops and roundtable discussions on contemporary experimental poetics. This occasion helped to consolidate some of the primary theoretical arguments informing American experimental poetry of the period and facilitated an unprecedented level of cross-fertilisation and dialogic exchange between current and successive generations of experimental poets.

To coincide with UEA’s own fiftieth anniversary, the School of American Studies will be hosting a one day conference to reassesses the continuing legacies of the Vancouver Poetry Conference and its participants. We welcome proposals on topics related, but not limited, to:

•  The poetry/poetics of the contributors to the conference; Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Philip Whalen, Margaret Avison, etc.
• A cross-border (Am-Can) avant-garde: for example, the influence of the conference in establishing a relationship between experimental poets associated with Robin Blaser in British Columbia and those associated with Robert Duncan in San Francisco.
• The transgression of borders in experimental American poetry (formal, stylistic, thematic, etc and/or political, philosophical, sexual, religious, etc)
• The importance of the border (spatial, conceptual, literal, ethical, textual, etc) in experimental American poetry
• Instances of direct inter-generational influence and/or dialogue between the contributors and successive experimental poets/poetry collectives

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to davidmccarthy.uea@gmail.com by 31^st August 2013. The conference poster can be found Here.

University of Manchester’s School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Graduate School Inaugural Conference for Academic Year 2013-2014

Writing Beyond Borders

The University of Manchester, 20^th September 2013

Opening Keynote Speaker: Dr Jean-Marc Dreyfus (Religion and Theology, Manchester)

Closing Keynote Speaker: Dr Claire Chambers (English Literature, York)

This conference aims to examine the ways in which reading, writing and researching literature intersects with conceptions of borders and border crossing. The conference arises from and seeks to expand debates in postcolonial studies and criticism surrounding boundaries (whether cultural, linguistic, historical, personal, economic, etc). As such, we welcome contributions from literary studies and complementary fields. Through this interdisciplinary approach, we aim to understand the varying methods used to answer questions such as:

• Does a border inherently imply a binary, and on what terms?
• It is possible to remove a border without removing one ‘side’, or to have two sides without a border?
• Can individuals choose (how) to position themselves in relation to borders, or is a side inherently imposed? Can we inhabit borders?
• Is a postcolonial world moving towards a borderless world, and if so, what would this look like or mean?
• Are borderlines inevitable in a capitalist society?
• How do human borderlines manifest themselves in the formal space of a text or book? How does this impact on our work as researchers?
• What does it mean to write in a language other than your ‘mother tongue’? Does the concept of ‘mother tongue’ itself create or reinforce socio-historic borders?
• Do changing borders demand changing methods?
• Is there a possibility of border-transcending or borderless literature, or are such borderlines as language, gender, religion and nationality essential to literature?
• What are the implications of a future borderless space?

We invite responses to these and related questions in the form of a maximum 300-word abstract for a 15-minute paper. Please email abstracts to writingbeyondborders@gmail.com by 5^th July, 2013.

Please also include a title for the proposed presentation and details of your PhD topic, discipline and University.

Call for Proposals, Food Across Borders

CALL FOR PAPERS

Food Across Borders:

Production, Consumption, and Boundary Crossing in North America

Recent criticism of our global food system has obscured a longer, and still healthy, tradition of food cultivation and circulation among nations.  Our own national diets are a product of long-existing agricultural empires across the North American continent.  This is especially true in relationship to Mexico: corn, chocolate and peppers are just three of the many indigenous foods that became central to the diets of other nations, including cuisines of the United States.  North of the border, Canada has played a significant role in the cultivation of grain for both nations and is a consumer of many U.S. products.  In terms of U.S. agriculture, without Mexican workers, our national food production system would not function.  These conditions reveal a transnational project, north and south, which have existed for more than a century.  Food Across Borders seeks to examine this world in which boundaries create exclusions and dialogs, coercions and collaborations.  In our examination we hope to uncover both the ways that boundaries represent true divides in terms of rights and power, and also create and reify false categories of “inside” and “outside” that often do not fit the realities of our current food system.

The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies is joining with Comparative Border Studies at Arizona State University for the 2014-2015 symposia on Food Across Borders.  On behalf of the conference organizers/editors, Matt Garcia, E. Melanie DuPuis, and Don Mitchell, we invite proposals for scholarly papers dealing with food and boundary crossings in North America.  We welcome a range of interpretations, from the movement of people and goods across land and bodies of water to the passage of food over and through our bodily boundaries.  We welcome proposals that explore these issues historically and/or in the contemporary moment.  Possible subjects for exploration include:

• The dependency of the North American food system, from farm to food preparation, on the migration of guest and immigrant labor, and the effects of that dependency on source countries, cities, and villages.
• The ways in which climate change will result in the adaptive migration of agricultural ecosystems and social systems across northern and southern borders, and what that might mean for local, regional, and larger food cultures and practices.
• The public health implications for one nation when it embraces the food consumption and production practices of another.
• The ways in which media represent and reify the boundaries of territory and identity in food discourses.
• The challenges of cross-border food justice organizing in light of the “liberalization” of agricultural trade and the changing geography of agricultural production.

The Food Across Borders symposia will occur in two stages and in two places.  The first will be held on October 3-4, 2014 in Phoenix, Arizona, where there will be a workshop for participants and an opportunity to give initial public presentations of their work.  The second scholars’ workshop and public symposium will be held in Dallas, Texas at SMU in spring 2015.  Each Clements Center symposium follows a similar model and each has resulted in a book or a soon-to-be published book (http://smu.edu/swcenter/Symposia.htm).

We welcome submissions from scholars of any rank—from graduate students to full professors.  Please send a CV and description of an original proposal to Matt Garcia (Matthew.J.Garcia@asu.edu) by September 15, 2013.  The proposal, of up to five pages, should describe the research and explain how it serves the goal of the symposia.  Eight to ten papers will be chosen for the symposia and resulting volume.  For more information see either, http://borders.asu.edu or http://smu.edu/swcenter.