Canadian Association of Cultural Studies / Association Canadienne des Études Culturelles
Conference 2020:
May 15-16, 2020
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC, Canada
Conference keywords: debt; extractivism; migrants; surveillance; carceral cultures; cultures of resistance; resurgence; solidarity; neo-liberal state governance; surplus populations; environmentalism
Around the world, climate crisis, violence and intensive capitalist accumulation, have led to widespread precarity. Migrant populations on the move are shunted between unwilling states, detained at border crossing points, and parked in refugee camps. People and states are burdened by insurmountable debt, while the interests of finance capital are protected. With increased migration and income insecurity, safe and secure housing options have become less accessible. Global climate change has created conditions of increasing food and fresh water scarcity, and made species extintinction commonplace. Market deregulation, in combination with the continued manifestation of colonial dispossession and the global market of property speculation, have hollowed out the state, creating what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2015) has termed “organized state abandonment” and Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) “economies of abandonment.” Apparently caused by the retreat of the state, abandonment is actually a strategy of racial capitalist state formation to exploit vulnerable communities. Though experienced materially and affectively at an individual level, this state of affairs is more fruitfully conceptualized as an ascendant logic in the governance of populations and environments. The concept of organized abandonment signals the process of governing populations through callous yet purposeful neglect, framing many humans and other lifeforms as surplus to the contemporary political economic order.
Acts of resistance to prevailing practices of abandonment of the very conditions necessary for supportable life are ubiquitous, galvanizing contemporary political imaginaries with demands for another world. In order to address the current configuration and strategize forms of resistance, the CACS 2020 conference invites presentations on the interdisciplinary theme of organized abandonment. The conference is hosted at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby Campus on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Papers, panels and workshops are invited on (but not restricted to) the following topics:
*migrant caravans and the politics of moblity
*racial capitalism
*incarcerated worker strikes
*land and water protectors *extinction rebellions
*petrocultures, extractivism and climate change
*militarized policing
*surveillance capitalism
*property relations and dispossession
*colonial and neocolonial relations
*housing markets, underhousing and homelessness
*privatization of education
*hollowing out of public media
*food and clean water insecurity
*overdose crises
*nationalist and misogynist exit strategies
*insurgent knowledge and activisms
*alternative forms of social and political arrangement
The CACS organizing committee strongly encourages pre-constituted panels/workshops and alternative approaches to academic presentation styles. Proposals for presentations/papers, panels, roundtables and workshops are due by December 15, 2019. Please send proposals of 350 words for individual papers; 500 words for workshops and roundtables; or 500 word description plus 350 word abstracts for each individual paper for panels (max 4). Include 50 word contributor bios for each applicant. Send all materials to cacs@sfu.ca. For updates, please follow us on social media.
Davina Bhandar & Zoë Druick, conference co-chairs
email: cacs@sfu.ca
