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Call for Papers

Theme: Reconfiguring Solidarities around Caste and Race
Type: 4th International Conference on the Unfinished Legacy of B.R.
Ambedkar
Institution: University of Massachusetts
Location: Amherst, MA (USA)
Date: 4.–6.5.2018
Deadline: 20.2.2018

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The current historical moment is marked by a deep contradiction – the
incredible success of wealth generating and power concentrating
processes that depend on the unimaginable immiserating and
marginalization of large swathes of humanity. Consequently,
assertions of wealth, power, and oppressions, are met with incessant
demands for equity, justice, and end to all forms of oppression the
world over. If the arc of our moral universe is to “bend towards
justice,” then it demands a constant relearning and reimagination of
our connections, divergences, and convergence. Here, comparative
possibilities of ‘caste’ in India and ‘race’ in the USA have
generated much by way of historical imaginations, political
solidarities, comparative strategies, and critical scholarship that
have furthered our notions of justice, persistent inequities, and
possibilities of liberation.

This comparative framework of race and caste has also pointed to the
complexity of navigating between the two. Recognizing the history of
efforts in establishing this comparative framework in both theory and
praxis – starting with the publication of Gulamgiri in 1870 by Jotiba
Phule, the emergence of the “Caste School of race relations” in the
1930s/40s, the formation of the Dalit Panthers in the 1970s, and the
many struggles around the Durban World Conference Against Racism,
Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2001 –
this conference seeks to initiate a new conversation that both
simultaneously acknowledges the incommensurabilities and yet the new
possibilities of active solidarities.

Here two broad organizing categories – experience and capitalism –
aid us towards new conversations. We will need to start with the
category of comparative experiences and build towards the divergences
and convergences that mark the structural / macro-scale of the
social, political, economic and the cultural. Experience as a
category offers itself as a crucial cauldron from which to think and
build rich conversations through differences. While experiential
domains bring out the individual’s (or personal) complex worlds of
suffering, quest for dignity, and defiance, they also point to the
broader contexts of the social (or public) and the structural (or
systemic). Thus, the individual’s experience of suffering indignities
frequently ruptures the veneer of ‘civil(ized)’ society in the form
of public spectacles of hate, injustice, brutality. Attending to the
mutual constitution of both experiential and structural could produce
historically and geographically grounded forms of appreciation and
solidarity.

For this conference, we have chosen the following themes to focus on:

THEME 1:
Suicides and depression among Dalits and African American youth

This is a particularly intense and intimate form of experience of
caste/race that appears to be on the rise in higher education
contexts in the US and South Asia. We are interested in
cross-disciplinary research that helps us make connections between
mental health issues and broader structures of oppression and
marginalization.

THEME 2:
Lynchings, public humiliations, ‘atrocities,’ police brutality against
Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and African Americans

This is another experience that has now gained public attention due
to becoming spectacularized via social media in both the USA and
South Asia. Such acts have become quotidian and have produced
collective gasps of the social conscience in both contexts.

THEME 3:
Racial / Casteized Capitalism

Experiences of caste and race occur within accelerated form of
rapacious and universalist capitalism. These are shaped fundamentally
by particular forms of ‘racism’ in the US and ‘casteism’ in India,
which require gendered relations and patriarchic forms of control. To
help us move toward bringing together such experiences (intimate and
public), we need to unpack the category of capitalism so that we are
able to see how universalist objectives of accumulation and social
reproduction are realized only through particular practices and
processes operating through caste, race and gender.

We invite papers on any of the above three themes. The aim of the
conference is to build a space for participants to have a generative
conversation. It will therefore be oriented towards more sustained
discussions rather than mere presentation of papers. We encourage
advanced graduate students and junior faculty, especially from South
Asia to participate.

Deadline for Submission

Abstracts of no more than 200 words must be submitted by February
20th 2018. To submit an abstract please email us at:
casteraceconf2...@gmail.com




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