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¿BORDERS? II Post­Oppression Imaginaries and Decolonized Futures Let’s Re­map the World! Thursday, October 20 ­ Sunday, October 23, 2016 Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, Kalamazoo College Apply to attend and participate, priority deadline: July 1, 2016 Queries to: ​
lbrock@kzoo.edu The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership will hold its second ​
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Conference. Building off the critical 2014 Global conference, the 2016 gathering aims to confront and provoke the notion that the current nadir ­ of austerity, violence and ascent of the global 1% ­ is normal and the best we humans can do. We intend to bring together those whose work envisions an imaginative, robust, plentiful, and just future. We invite conversations across disciplines and from varied social locations among academics, organic intellectuals, frontline organizers, climate change and peace activist and more. This will be a CONFERENCE – [UN]CONFERENCE featuring modules that will include panel discussions, breakout sessions, films and performances designed to prompt collective visioning how we might de­colonize, theorize, map and conjure a future we can all thrive in. Modules will focus on the following interventions: *In 1993, Mark Dery coined an aesthetic, ​
Afrofuturism​
. Today it is an exquisite and expansive narration of post­oppression desire, rooted in a “B[l]ack to the Future” sankofa archive of Africa and the African Diaspora. Largely set in fantasy, film, technology and speculative fiction, how does this mo(ve)ment reveal truths and create spaces for renderings of quantum thinking on freedom more broadly? *In 1969, Vine Deloria penned his manifesto, ​
Custer Died For Your Sins,​
and in 1973 he declared ​
God is Red​
. Today, upending colonial knowledge and a reframing of action research is central to Indigenous, Feminists and Critical Ethnic Studies. Is the call for anti­racist universities, and the struggle against high stake testing and the privatization of schools also a desire for epistemic liberation? What might de­colonialized educational structures and paradigms look like? *In 1988, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Dr. James Hansen warned of the consequences of global warming. Today, virtually all climatologists are convinced that “global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.” From the Pope’s encyclical to calls for a renewable energy [r]evolution, what ideologies and technologies can liberate us from extraction economies and life­killing pollution practices? We invite those envisioning a sustainable future to come and share their work. *In 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia, 29 nations of color came together to discuss a “third” way beyond the cold war stasis. Since 1990 and the fall of the USSR, neo­liberalism has outpaced other economic models. Today, the privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of corporate interest and tax cuts to global 1% is leading to the greatest concentration of wealth in history and deepest inequality and poverty in centuries. We invite those who are theorizing “next systems” and deploying new economic possibilities and strategies to share their movements and innovations with us.