Liberatory Practices for Worlds in Crisis

In 2024, we are surrounded by crisis in nearly every sector of our world(s): environmental, political, social, cultural, and interpersonal. Crisis is not a new nor a unique phenomenon: Indigenous societies have faced decimation, war has torn through family and political associations, and environmental devastation cycles again and again. 

And yet, we have found new ways of living, resisting, and surviving. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2019), Brazilian philosopher and Indigenous movement leader Aílton Krenak urges us to consider the past and present, writing that “When people speak of imagining a new possible world, it's in the sense of rearranging relations and spaces, introducing new understandings of what we recognize as nature as if we were not nature ourselves.” 

This conference invites graduate student scholars, activists, and practitioners to examine what it means and has meant to survive in a world in crisis. What do we mean by crisis? How do historical experiences of crisis inform our understanding of present crises? What is the meaning and purpose of “liberatory practices” in the historical and contemporary world? How do Indigenous, feminist, queer, trans, disability or other lenses offer alternative understandings of crisis? What world is possible after a crisis? By exploring these and more questions, we hope to consider how new methods of study and care practices in our scholarship might allow us to imagine different worlds, develop resilience in a crisis-laden world, become “undisciplined” academically, and/or form more caring and collaborative communities. 

Submissions may cover theoretical analyses, empirical studies, performative practices, reflections on community actions, and others. We especially encourage scholars who may be marginalized in their lived experience and/or in their academic field to participate.

Potential topics may include but are not limited to:

• Liberatory practices and emancipation;

• Methods of resistance;

• Institutions and power;

• Systems of oppression; 

• Understanding and defining crisis;

• Cosmologies and pluriversal politics;

• Relationship between scholarship and practice;

• Speculative futures;

• Alternative methods of study;

• Care practices.