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EVENT Apr 12
ABSTRACT Feb 14
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Solidarity and Spaces

Vancouver
Organization: University of British Columbia
Categories: Postcolonial, Graduate Conference, Hispanic & Latino, Interdisciplinary, Popular Culture, Literary Theory, World Literatures, Aesthetics, Anthropology/Sociology, Classical Studies, Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Film, TV, & Media, Food Studies, History, Philosophy, African & African Diasporas, Asian & Asian Diasporas, Australian Literature, Canadian Literature, Caribbean & Caribbean Diasporas, Indian Subcontinent, Eastern European, Mediterranean, Middle East, Native American, Scandinavian, Pacific Literature, Miscellaneous
Event Date: 2025-04-12 Abstract Due: 2025-02-14

Endnotes is the annual graduate conference of the Department of English Language & Literatures at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver, which is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam First Nation. The English Graduate Caucus invites proposal submissions for presentations, panels, and creative or multidisciplinary works on the theme of Solidarity and Spaces.


In “Restoration and Reciprocity: The Contributions of Traditional Ecological Knowledge” (2011), Robin Wall Kimmerer builds on the Indigenous stewardship principle that “what we do to the land we do to ourselves,” pointing to the necessity of rethinking conventional reparative practices to instead center the inseparability of land and culture. In this vein, she points to the practice of what she terms “reciprocal restoration,” that is “the mutually reinforcing restoration of land and culture such that repair of ecosystem services contributes to cultural revitalization, and renewal of culture promotes restoration of ecological integrity." Kimmerer’s writing encourages us to consider how an “expanded vision of restoration encompasses not only repair of ecosystem structure and function but cultural services as well.”

Building on the connections between resistance and restoration, we trace broader questions of collective action and writing “in the wake” of histories of colonial, settler-colonial, and genocidal violence. Venturing into Christina Sharpe’s discussion around the violent after-lives of the Transatlantic slave trade as an ever-continuous present on Black bodies, she proposes an informed method of writing/living, one which writes in cognizance of such histories of violence and offers possibilities of resistance, terming it “wake work.” Similarly, given the turbulent and violent present we live in, we reiterate Saidiya Hartman’s question: “Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts. Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance?” (1997).

As such, Solidarity and Spaces asks for submissions engaging with the question of bearing witness and what an “ethics of testimony” in the context of “unspeakability, invisibility, and inaudibility” (Chute 2010) may look like. What does it mean to “recogniz[e]... one another’s presence” as an academic community (Hooks 1994)? How are objects, sites, and people made to “perform” meaning for us? How does the state work against and censor collective and communal resistance? What does it mean to hold this conference in a country which has yet to give land back? How may we use our positionalities in academic spaces as tools of transgression? Amidst geopolitical crises, distances, and polarities, what threads uphold places of belonging or disrupt the status quo?

We encourage submissions that explore topics including but not limited to:
? Extraction and settler states
? Decolonizing resistance movements
? Situating academia as space
? Resistive mapping
? Civic space and statecraft
? Shared worlds and technologies of othering
? Affective ecologies and the role of environment
? Cyberspace, virtual lifeways, and gathering-places
? Zones of exclusion, inclusion, and contact
? History of place and resistive hauntings
? Temporary/liminal/third spaces, events, and environments

? Transnationalism, situated epistemologies, and the global theatre
? Travel and colonial cosmopolitanism
? Imagined spaces: Science fiction, fantasy, utopia, dystopia, and resistive futurity
? Creating counter-archives, museums, and memorial sites of resistance
? Performing protests and monuments against violent histories
? Relationships between land, the human, and the more-than-human
? Zoning, redlining, gentrification, and place-based violence

Solidarity and Spaces will be held on a tentative date in April 2025 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In addition to traditional academic presentations, we welcome creative submissions, including literary work, visual art, performances, and multimedia presentations related to the conference theme. Individual presentations should be 15–20 minutes each. We welcome submissions from scholars, artists, activists, and researchers from across disciplines and career phases, though we are particularly interested in graduate-level work.


For submissions, please email your abstracts (200-350 words) and a brief bio (150 max) to
endnotesconference@gmail.com by February 7th. Please include a provisional title if possible.


We look forward to receiving your submissions. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out to endnotesconference@gmail.com.

Endnotes 2025 Committee
Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia

endnotesconference@gmail.com

Charlotte Von De Bur