RINGS 2020 Decolonising Feminisms Conference CFP
RINGS Conference and Annual Meeting 2020: Decolonising Feminisms
2-4 December 2020, Durban, South Africa
For this conference we invite contributions engaging with the project of decolonising feminist scholarship and activism, not merely in symbolic and metaphorical ways, but with a commitment to material, structural change in the world. Such contributions could explore any of the following topics (but need not be limited to them):
- Shifts away from the multiple imperial contexts and colonial models of knowledge extraction in our feminist scholarship
- The forces through which Indigenous women and Native feminist theories have been invisibilised within whitestream women’s studies
- Challenging white dominated research and pedagogical models
- Unmasking and dismantling epistemic privilege attached to geopolitical positioning
- The “denaturalisation of the national” (Lukose 2018: 44) as a site of feminist theory and practice
- Exposing the persistent structures of settler colonisation and its effects on Indigenous peoples and others
- Developing and incorporating multilingualism into our research as a way of undermining the hegemony of English as colonial imposition
- Forging feminist alliances in which issues of race and land are not erased for the sake of solidarity
- The complicity of feminist scholarship in the maintenance and invisibilisation of colonial structures and the dispossession of Indigenous people
Formats other than presentations, particularly more interactive formats (such as panels, roundtables or more experimental modalities) are welcome.
The keynote lecture will be presented by Dr Danai Mupotsa who is a lecturer in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). Her research is oriented towards reading everyday intimacies, with a commitment to feminist, queer, antiracist political and pedagogical praxis. In 2018, she published her first collection of poetry titled Feeling and Ugly (Impepho Press).
This call is directed to RINGS members, but non-members can also submit abstracts. However, member organisations are encouraged to invite others towards extending membership, with particular emphasis on strengthening the participation of those from countries in the Global South. RINGS, the International Research Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies (ringsgender.org) is a global association of centres of advanced gender studies. The participating centres span Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas. Five RINGS assembly meetings and conferences have been held since the inauguration of RINGS in October 2014 at Örebro University: Prague (2015), Cape Town (2016), Reykjavik (2017), Lisbon (2018) and Tallinn (2019). The sixth RINGS annual meeting and conference will be hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.