Call for papers - Anti-imperial feminist architectures of resistance

Building on the continued provocations launched by Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group, this year’s annual workshop engages with the present urgencies of International Relations by tracing the long dureé of imperialism, its hauntings and afterlives, but also its weaknesses and the possibilities for its collapse. Extractive economic orders and global racial hierarchies continue to mutate, solidify and affect in different ways as imperialism spreads, moves and retracts. At the same time, the capacity for revolution is ever present, growing from local and grounded collectives fighting for social change and political transformation. 

This year’s CPD workshop is situated in the current struggle, efforts and successes of movements and activists to confront imperialism in all its forms, demonstrating the translocal circulation of global solidarities. We write in a moment of strengthening global demilitarisation and anti-imperial momentum emerging from the long-standing struggles of the Palestinian movement. We meet to confront the British and transnational iterations of right-wing fascism and authoritarianism and learn from the sustained efforts of student movements in Bangladesh and beyond.

This year’s annual workshop rigorously centres queer, feminist, anti-colonial and anti-imperial approaches to explore how gender/sex, sexuality, class, race, nation among other modalities of control constitute – and possibly rupture – imperialism, colonialism, coloniality, fascism, right-wing authoritarianism and extractive capitalism. We invite reflections that think with marginal (and marginalised) knowledges and geographies to map how colonialism, imperialism and coloniality rely on logics of differential gender, sexual, racial and class relations; how ideas of gender, sexuality and queerness become amenable to and are co-opted by violent projects; the role of women and other marginalised subjects in anticolonial liberation struggles and in plotting imaginaries of the anticolonial, more broadly. We are particularly interested in the translocal movement of anti-imperial knowledge and practices emerging from community action which confronts colonial fragmentations.

Following this revolutionary ethos, the workshop examines – and facilitates – building anti-imperial, anticolonial feminist and queer architectures of resistance. The workshop will reflect on the styles and formations of resistance at the local and community level that confront imperialism’s global reach. It asks what kind of institutions, networks, families, community centres, relationships with the earth and land, queer relationships and transgender bonds strengthen community ties and contribute to revolutionary knowledge production? The workshop will invite participants to reflect on how academic knowledge can feed into the questions of social justice at the centre of our scholarly investigations. Through diverse methods of delivery and pedagogical practices, this workshop hopes to provide avenues for translocal intellectual and political community building.

In the spirit of collective thinking, discussion and learning, we invite reflections, openings, meditations and questions that respond to the following:

• How do colonial, fascist and authoritarian projects deploy and magnify gender, race, sexual hierarchies?
• How do colonial and fascist projects weaponise gender and sexuality?
• What is the role of marginalised gender and sexual subjects in liberation struggles?
• How is sexuality and gender employed to target anti-colonial movements? 
• What tools do anti-imperial feminist, queer/trans and anti-racist thinking offer us to make sense of the present global moment?
• How does this current moment push us to rethink feminism as a project of collective and anti-imperial liberation? 
• What are the imaginaries of the anticolonial and the anti-imperial? 
• What translocal architectures of resistance allow anti-imperial and feminist projects to endure? 
• What can we learn from, and how do we create anti-imperial feminist repertoires and architectures of resistance and revolution?
• How do anti-imperial queer feminisms thread the local and the international? 

The day-long workshop will be followed by a public roundtable featuring post/anti/decolonial academics and organisers thinking with the workshop themes.

To participate:

This one-day, in-person workshop will take place from 10am to 4pm on 5 December 2024 (and the public roundtable starts at 6pm – a link to register will be circulated closer to the day) at the University of Westminster, with lunch provided. If you’d like to join us, please send us an email with a few thoughts about how your work/interests respond to these themes, as well as a few lines about who you are. If you do not have funding available for your travel/accommodation, particularly as an ECR scholar, please also note this in your email. 

CPD-BISA workshops are not organised around “paper presentations”, but rather each session is introduced by two to three, five-minute opening interventions. If you are interested in attending, please also indicate whether you would like to provide one of these five-minute reflections and, if so, on what topic(s) (again, just a few lines will suffice). 

We will try to accommodate as many of those interested as possible, prioritising our ‘early career’ and student participants.

Please indicate your interest in attending no later than 1 November 2024 to: cpd.group@bisa.ac.uk

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