The University of California, Berkeley's Center for Race & Gender is thrilled to announce that they are now accepting proposals for the Race, Space, Nature Symposium planned for April 27, 2011. This conference aims to open up dialogue among graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty, and independent scholars who critically engage with analytics of race/racialization and 'the environment', broadly conceived. Proposals are due January 15, 2011.
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*Call For Papers**
Race, Space and Nature: A One-day Symposium at the University of California, Berkeley April 27, 2011
This conference aims to open up dialogue among graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, faculty, and independent scholars who critically engage with analytics of race/racialization and 'the environment', broadly conceived. We are interested in understanding how scholars understand the experiences, practices, creativities, political
economies and subjectivities of racialized groups in relationship to the spaces that they move through and create: the environment, nature and cities. In what ways do racialized experiences and identities come to structure narratives, practices, and politics in relationship to built and "natural" environments? If racialization occurs in and through places, how are these processes sedimented or resisted by people? How do racial
constructs connect to spatial/environmental ones and vice versa - and why does it matter?
Interdisciplinary scholars have developed a large body of literature that considers the role of race/racialization in the context of spatial inequality, marginalization and oppression. Increasingly, scholars have interrogated the roles of agency and innovation in environmental practice among various racial groups, including the forms through which racial analytics help to shape those interactions. This one-day conference will critically engage these questions in order to ask: How do issues of race and racialization intersect with spatial/environmental/territorializing practices, discourses, and politics in the contemporary moment? We seek papers from a variety of theoretical, disciplinary, and methodological perspectives. This includes but is not limited to topics such as:
· racialized access to resources;
· the role of race in global environmental discourses and politics;
· activist practice;
· social movements;
· international development;
· intersectional engagements with race, gender, sexuality and class;
· political ecolog(ies) of race, space, and urban environmental
practice;
· the rise and fall of cities;
· environmental and climate justice;
· critical food studies.
The symposium will include a working lunch where we will match scholars with others in their fields. The event is open to the public, free, and includes lunch with registration, as funds allow. We will conclude with a keynote from UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Carolyn Finney (ESPM).
To participate, please submit a 250 word abstract *by January 15* to conference organizers Rachel Brahinsky, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, and Jade Sasser at race.conference.berkeley@gmail.com. Please include, in the body of the email: your name, affiliation, contact information, and abstract.
We will respond to submissions in early February. Once accepted, final papers must be submitted two weeks before the symposium.
