Events

Love, Violence, and Feminine Resistance: Dis-/placement, Reckoning, and Reconciliation

Afecto, violencia y resistencia femenina: Desplazamiento, reconocimiento y reconciliación

May 12, 2023

This interdisciplinary conference approaches the phenomena of forced displacement and mass migration by focusing on works of dis-/placed female artists and exploring the ways that these artists have articulated and imagined myriad forms of identity, resistance, belonging, and home. This conference invites paper proposals, video essays (finished and works-in-progress) to reflect on how the material and symbolic dilemmas of dis-/placement, definitions/categorizations of “female”, and conceptualizations of inside and outside—from the boundaries of nation states, to the familial, to those of race, class, gender, and sexuality—are negotiated across aesthetic categories and transnational geographies. 

Internationally acclaimed author, actor, and playwright Carmen Aguirre, whose work explores themes such as exile, loss, alienation, racism, and isolation, as well as hypocritical puritanism and sexual paranoia on university campuses, to visit UCSB January 11-12, 2023 for an in-person event. 

The Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective, in collaboration with the Global Latinidades Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, (UCSB); Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, (KHM); New York University (NYU); and Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca, Mexico will convene an autonomous summer learning space, or ateneo, to be held virtually (via Zoom) and in person in Oaxaca. This unique convergence brings together researchers, public intellectuals, and grassroots activists for reflection and action engaging critical issues associated with what the Zapatistas theorize as the 4th World War, understood as a longstanding counterinsurgency, ongoing war against subsistence practices and knowledges, and imposed forgetting and oblivion. Specifically, we want to collectively share experiences and insights pursuant to effective theories and practices that challenge elements of the 4th World War that include, for example, counterinsurgency, militarized policing and border enforcement, the international carceral state and other forms of informalized gendered violence while also engaging the co-construction of autonomous, convivial alternatives to the endemic violences of late racial patriarchal capitalism.

The UCSB AfroLatinidades Institute is a multifaceted component of the Global Latinidades Center that participates in the recovery and analysis of the African roots of Latinx history, culture, and identity. The Global Latinidades Center has assembled a team of researchers, educators, students, and community people in pursuit of a broad-based vision to further globalize the field of Latinx Studies, which necessarily involves a recentering of African lineages as part of this initiative. The AfroLatinidades Institute is thus central to the Global Latinidades Center.

This two-day conference was organized by formerly incarcerated graduate and undergraduate students at UC Santa Barbara whose areas of studies range from literature to sociology and school psychology, and all intersect with the field of critical prison studies. The purpose of this conference was to bring formerly incarcerated scholars and abolitionist intellectuals from around the country to gain an understanding of the different strategies that scholar activists employ for conducting solidarity work in different geo-political contexts. Our presenters included UW Tacoma Psychology Professor Christopher Beasley, NYU PhD candidate of history Michelle Jones, Santa Barbara Youth Counselor Ishmael Huerta, community organizer and Homies Unidos Program Director Alex Sanchez, Cabrillo College Sociology Professor Sadie Reynolds, and UC Berkeley PhD candidate of Education Davíd Maldonado. Our keynote speaker was Williams College Africana Studies Professor Joy James who spoke on the politics of abolition and prison work in the academy and how we navigate the matrix of reformist discourse while maintaining a revolutionary praxis. See the schedule of activities for more information. See video of co-organizer Clint Terrell, UC Berkeley graduate and Doctoral Candidate in English at UCSB, discuss the rationale for the conference.

The symposium is shaped by ongoing academic and public discussions on the issue of futurity, as exemplified by queer futurity, Afrofuturism, and Hillary Clinton’s resurfacing of the 1970s feminist phrase, “the future is female,” in her presidential campaign. The symposium seeks to foster an open discussion on even the possibility of a future for (critical) masculinities, especially given the toxicity of masculinity that the #metoo movement has exposed.