CFR Co-Sponsored: SPTH Graduate Student Conference ‘Strategies of Critique: Great Black North’

Co-Sponsored by the Centre for Feminist Research:
York University’s Social and Political Thought Graduate Program is pleased to announce its 32ndannual conference:
Strategies of Critique: Great Black North: Study, Resistance and Existence in Black fromOctober 11th- October 13th2018 in Senate Chamber, N940 Ross Building.
We organize this conference with an aim to understand and affirm Black experience in/of Canadian contexts where ideas of a Great White North too often prevail. Intending a scholarly intervention within an academic landscape shaped by neoliberal governance and racial capitalism, we know that we must look to challenge the academic industrial complex’s entanglements with white supremacy, settler-colonialism, enslavement, patriarchy and neoliberal logics of domination, as well as other regimes and instances of violence to understand its own “underground” constituted by Black Canadian experiences. Such modalities function to pacify or make invisible anti-racist and anti-colonial resistances within the academy. This year’s Strategies of Critique responds to the absence of a Black Canadian Studies stream as one such instance of invisiblity and pacification, which must be interrogated and denaturalized. Thus, it asks: what is at stake in the ongoing production of new forms of collectivity and struggle, the making and re-making of a Great Black North that exceeds the idea of Canadian experience? Under what constraints do anti-racist and anti-colonial resistances labour within the academy over questions of justice and collective liberation, and what are the forms of intervention, academic or otherwise, through which people take up these political struggles?
Please check our websitehttps://strategiesofcritique.wordpress.comfor more details regarding our programming.