We're delighted to share a call for papers for our annual research symposium:
Call for papers: Space, Territory, and Mobility (PDF here)
George Mason University Center for Humanities Research Annual Symposium
April 23-24, 2026 – Fairfax Campus
Keynote Speaker: Setha Low (Distinguished Professor, Psychology; Anthropology; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Women's and Gender Studies, CUNY Graduate Center)
We invite George Mason faculty and advanced doctoral students from across the university to submit paper proposals for our fifth annual symposium. This year’s symposium will feature a keynote address by Professor Setha Low on Thursday, late afternoon, and will continue Friday with a single day of consecutive panels that we hope all will attend. In this way, we hope to generate a productive and ongoing conversation among participants, attendees, and our keynote speaker.
We invite humanistic engagements with our 2025-26 annual theme, “Space, Territory, and Mobility.” We accept individual proposals and full panel proposals (though panels must include a proposal for each panelist).
Considerations of space, territory, and mobility—in their material, institutional, and sociocultural dimensions and in their discursive, representational, and conceptual dimensions—have long been central to humanistic inquiry.
Concepts of space and place are embedded in cultural narratives and discourses that shape our understanding of who belongs and who is considered an outsider, our ideas of possession and dispossession, our conception of social and cultural heartlands and frontiers.
The demarcation of territories, be it through physical borders, urban zoning, digital fences, or cultural boundaries, reflects and shapes political power, social inequality, and access to resources.
And the dynamics of mobility—whether through migration, war, or conflict; the transformation of neighborhoods and communities; or the movement of capital, information, culture and goods across regions and in a globalized world—reveal both networks of connection and forms of exclusion and displacement.
Topics addressed in papers or panels might include:
- Issues of belonging and identity, of insiders and outsiders, tied to localities, regions, nations;
- Engagements with conflicts and peacekeeping in colonial/post-colonial spaces;
- Reflections on forms of unity, solidarity, and protest that emerge under people sharing particular spaces or places;
- Ideas about how civic space and/or architecture influence behaviors and societies;
- Studies of the movement of culture and/or people, within a territory or across borders;
- Analysis of division of space and/or separation of people;
- Practices of sharing spaces, deterritorialization, and freedom of movement;
--or other topics related to our theme!
Please submit a brief paper proposal/abstract (no more than 500 words), along with a brief CV, as a SINGLE PDF file, labeled with your last name leading (ex. Smith CHR Symposium), by noon on Friday, January 16, 2026 to chr@gmu.edu.
We will reach out in late January 2026 with news and preliminary details for the symposium.
December 04, 2025