"Imagined Borders, Epistemic Freedoms" CMRC/SIMAGINE Conference CFP Deadline Extended

*CFP Deadline Extended to July 1, 2019!*

Announcing a CMRC Conference in Collaboration with SIMAGINE:
Imagined Borders, Epistemic Freedoms: The Challenge of Social Imaginaries
in Media, Art, Religion and Decoloniality
The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture University of Colorado Boulder
January 8-11, 2020

Confirmed Featured Speakers: Ann Laura Stoler, Catherine Walsh, & Glenn
Coulthard

The question of borders and the practice of bordering persist in a world
destined for encounters and confrontations. This persistence today bears
resemblance to long-standing legacies of coloniality, modernity, and
globalization, but it also foregrounds new narratives, aesthetics, and
politics of exclusion and dehumanization. Talk of walls, fortresses,
boundaries, and deportation has never been a political or philosophical
anomaly, but rather a reflection of a particularistic social imaginary, a
linear compulsion of epistemic assumptions that sees the world through the
logic of hierarchy, classification, difference, and ontological supremacy.
This foreclosure is a widely shared and accepted social imaginary, as
demonstrated in current scholarship in the critical humanities and social
and political sciences: a foreclosure that has also defined institutions
and disciplines of knowledge production which continue to marginalize other
knowledge systems and intellectual traditions and refuse to acknowledge
their viability and legitimacy in the academy. Disciplinary walls and
intellectually demarcated canons within the Western and Westernized
university in the Global North and South have generally produced narrow
curricula and models of learning that reproduce selective systems of
thought, discourses and practices.

The tenacity of this normalized worldview requires urgent new imaginaries:
a decolonial perspective not only to call out the ontological instability
of Western theory, but also to establish a sense of epistemic hospitality
capable of liberating and re-centering other ways of knowing and dwelling
in the world. This contestation of physical and cognitive borders has found
its most ardent proponents in recent movements such as #RhodesMustFall,
Standing Rock, Idle No More, Undocumented and Unafraid,
#Whyismycurriculumsowhite, Arab Uprisings, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo,
among others. At the heart of this decolonial injunction is a desire by
absented voices to reclaim the right to self-narrate, to signify, and to
render visible local histories, other temporalities, subjectivities,
cosmologies, and struggles silenced by Western and Westernized accounts of
the world.

The fields of art, religion and the media have not yet come under
historical scrutiny about their own epistemic and existential imaginaries
and whether they reify or disrupt dominant structures and legacies of
knowledge production? Drawing from a variety of intellectual traditions and
established academic disciplines, these fields risk carrying the same blind
spots, the same foreclosures, the same ontological foundations, and the
same centered claims to universality.

What can a decolonial critique then do to avoid a zero-sum epistemology?
And how can we develop new decolonial imaginaries as an invitation to undo
the Eurocentrism of our paradigms, challenge the verticality of our
pedagogical designs, and achieve an ethics of interpretation, an epistemic
justice whereby theories from the South or from ‘the margins’ in the North
are not treated merely as local or subjective? The decolonial attitude
challenges us to avoid embracing singular universalities, and rethink
altogether the hierarchies of global-local and of universal-particular that
underlie this world’s inequality.

This will be the ninth in a series of successful international conferences
held by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in Boulder. The
previous meetings have brought together an interdisciplinary community of
scholars for focused conversations on emerging issues in media and
religion. Each has proven to be an important landmark in the development of
theory and method in its respective area and has resulted in important
collaborations, publications, and resources for further research and
dialogue.

The 2020 conference is organized in conjunction with SIMAGINE, an
international and interdisciplinary research consortium bringing together
partners from the USA, the UK, Europe and South Africa; it is hosted by the
University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and dedicated
to the study of social imaginaries between secularity and religion in a
globalizing world. SIMAGINE has organized conferences on ‘Religion,
Community, Borders’ leading to a special issue of the open access Journal
for Religion and Transformation in December 2019. In 2018 the consortium
published the volume Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World.

The conference will feature keynote lectures and keynote conversations, as
well as thematic panels and artistic performances. We invite papers and
panels from across disciplines, intellectual traditions, and geographic
locations that engage with these questions and beyond. Possible topics
could include but are not limited to:

• Borders, Bordering, Border Zones between the Imaginary and the Real
• Modernity, Secularity, Religious Legacies and Universality
• Social Imaginaries and (the Critique of) Anthropocentrism
• Coloniality and Decolonial Epistemologies
• What Counts as Critical Theory and Decolonial Critique?
• What Counts as Religion in the Decolonial Imaginary?
• Big Data, Algorithmic Culture, and (De)Coloniality
• Decolonial Intersectionalities
• Decolonial Feminisms
• Decolonizing Race, Ethnicity, and Identity
• Decolonial Pedagogy, Methodology, and Praxis.
• Media, Religion, and Theoretical Provincialism
• Media, Arts, and Decolonial Theory
• Media, Religion, the Other, and the Subaltern
• Religion, Theology, and Social Imaginaries
• Social Imaginaries and (the Critique) of Neoliberalist Globalization
• Geopolitics of Knowledge Production
• Language, Publishing, and Boundaries of Learning
• Imagination and Worldview Education: Interreligious Dialogue
• Queering the Archives

Abstracts of 300-350 words should be submitted to [email protected] by July
1, 2019.
Please include your email address and university affiliation in your
submission.

For questions, email Nabil Echchaibi, Associate Director:
[email protected].
or Stewart M. Hoover, Director: [email protected].

For more information, visit cmrc.colorado.edu

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