Call for papers: Democracy, Disposability, and Repair
A Mason Center for Humanities Research Symposium with Nancy Fraser, Henry A and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science, The New School for Social Research
April 11-2, 2024 – Mason Fairfax Campus
We invite Mason faculty and advanced doctoral students from across the university to submit paper proposals for our third annual symposium. This year’s symposium will feature a keynote address by Professor Nancy Fraser on Thursday, late afternoon, and will continue Friday with a single day of consecutive panels attended by all. In this way, we hope to generate a productive and ongoing conversation among participants, attendees, and the keynote speaker.
This year’s theme, “Democracy, Disposability, and Repair,” calls for literary, cultural, historical, philosophical, artistic, linguistic, anthropological, religious, and archival engagements with disposability and repair.
Forms of disposability have been characteristic (or even constitutive) of modes of social and political life, past, present, and in envisioned futures: the dispossession, relocation, and annihilation of local populations; the forced transportation of enslaved and bonded persons; the migration of refugees escaping war, violence, oppression, famine, and environmental and climate crises; the rule of a necropolitics in various spaces beyond the rule of law (whether within, between, or beyond the boundaries of states); the tyranny of oppressive majorities in majoritarian democracies; the violation of the voiceless and of those whose voices have been suppressed or silenced in public and private spheres; the effort to erase cultures or communities, to plunder and destroy ecosystems--these and other forms of rendering people and places "disposable" haunt and hound the world we live in.
To what extent are historical and contemporary political systems dependent on forms of disposability, precarity, and extraction?
In what ways are democratic modes of governance bound up with the disposability of human and non-human life?
Could democracy offer possibilities for resistance, reparation, and repair?
How might these issues be illuminated by approaches drawn from the critical humanities including feminist, queer, indigenous, transnational, decolonial, post-humanist, dis/ability, and antiracist theories and methodologies?
Please submit a brief paper proposal/abstract (no more than 500 words), along with a brief CV, as a single PDF file, clearly labeled with your last name leading (ex. Smith CHR Symposium Proposal), by noon ET on Monday, December 4, 2023 to chr@gmu.edu.
We will reach out in January 2024 with news and preliminary details for the symposium.