ASWAD Seville Deadline Extended to March 17, 2017!
Call for Papers
Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora
9th Biennial Conference
Hosted by Pablo de Olavide University
Seville, Spain
African/Diasporic Futures: Re-Envisioning Power, Interventions, Imaginations and Belonging
November 7-11, 2017 Seville, Spain
In 2015 the United Nations launched the Decade for the People of African Descent to acknowledge descendants of the African Diaspora as a distinct group whose human dignities and rights have been violated throughout the globe. The Decade for the People of African Descent is a sustained global commitment to recognize, protect, and bring about inclusive social justice to members of the African Diaspora. Contemporarily, Europe is an epicenter of such urgent grappling with systematic and long-term social inequities. Politics and policies of racialized exclusion, particularly through its engagement with Africans and people of African descent, re-center Europe's non-neutral racial projects in their nation building.
The protection and promotion of human rights has gained greater significance and urgency with the crisis of African migration, and other forced and semi-forced migrations from Western Asia and Eastern Europe. As these individuals and groups have sought refuge and equitable and humane social participation within European societies, they have challenged conceptualizations of the state and citizenship formation, and continue to force new articulations and notions of "home" and belonging. These current migratory flows are newer iterations of a long relationship between Europe and Africa, and between Europe and the African Diaspora that spans centuries.
ASWAD invites panel and individual paper proposal submissions for its 9th biennial conference to be held in Seville, Spain, November 7 to 11, 2017 on the campus of Pablo de Olavide University to discuss, examine, and reflect on the critical nature of the interactions and transformations that African descendants experience in their diaspora, particularly within a European context. As an interdisciplinary organization, ASWAD invites presentations that illuminate the lives of Africans and African descendants from scholars of any discipline, including social sciences, physical sciences, life sciences and performing arts. We aim to collaborate with activist and intellectual communities around sustained dialogue involving diaspora, race and citizenship, and historical and contemporary patterns of racial formation.
In addition to academics, ASWAD welcomes artists, activists, journalists, and independent scholars with specific interests in the African Diaspora. We are especially keen to create a platform for Black European Groups and NGOs.
We encourage proposals that align with the conference theme. Suggested panel themes include, but are not limited to the following:
a. The African Diaspora, Modern States and (Re)Conceptions of Citizenship
b. Humanitarianism and Human Rights in the Global African Diaspora
c. Black Lives Matter Across the Globe
d. The African Diaspora, Economics and Immigration to/in Europe
e. Religion, Power, and Praxis in the African Diaspora
f. African Diaspora and the Arts and Activism in Europe
g. Spain and the African Diaspora
h. Writing and Translating the African Diaspora and Black Identities in Europe
i. The United Nation's Decade for People of African Descent
j. Music and the Performing Arts in Africa and the African Diaspora
k. Pedagogy, Higher Education and Activism
l. Black LGBTQIA Social Constructs
m. Labor and Organizing in Local and International Contexts
n. Activism and New Technologies and Media
o. African Diasporic Futures: Challenges and Opportunities
p. Future Makings: Collective re-imaginations through migration
q. Reimagining social spaces and collective identities
The city of Seville is a UNESCO world heritage site and former medieval capital of Euro-African kingdoms, both Muslim and Christian, and later head of Spain's early modern world empire. The city is a nexus of African Diaspora history, with a living heritage of connecting Europe, America and Africa. Pablo de Olavide University, ASWAD's 2017 conference host, has a demonstrated commitment to international cooperation and social justice.
