CALL FOR PAPERS:University of Minnesota International African Studies Conference “Fault Lines: Rethinking Temporal and Disciplinary Traditions in African Studies” University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Campus April 21-23, 2016

Call For Papers

The inaugural University of Minnesota International African Studies Conference, “Fault Lines” will bring together graduate students, junior and senior scholars concerned with how existing systems of knowledge production have shaped the contours and limits of the varying disciplines that cohere around African Studies. This international conference aims to encourage dialogues and debates about various “fault lines” in African Studies – thought simultaneously as the tenacity/obstinacy of disciplinary reason and Western conceptualizations/assumptions, and as enabling the possibility for critique/critical engagement along the breaks, slippages, overlaps, and variations.

We invite submissions from a variety of disciplinary and methodological traditions that are able to broadly address the conception of disciplinary, methodological and theoretical “fault lines”, to enable debates about diverse African geographical and temporal contexts. In particular we seek to explore fault lines associated with questions of gender, geographies, race, methodologies, and theoretical interventions.

Possible topics include:

• · Critical approaches to social history in the aftermath of colonialism and apartheid
• · Ethnography and other colonial methodological inheritances
• · Oral history and the African “voice”
• · Gender, LGBTI Ontologies, and the ‘Queering’ of Disciplinary Knowledges
• · Race/Ethnicity
• · Geography/nation-state/region
• · Time and Temporality

Submission Information and Guidelines

The deadline for submissions is October 15th, 2015. We particularly encourage collaborative submissions that take the form of panels, workshops, and/or round tables. Individual paper abstracts should be no more than 200 words and include a 1-page CV. Panel submissions should include a minimum of three papers (each with a 200-word abstract and 1-page CV), a proposed chairperson (if possible), and a 200-word panel abstract.

Send panel and/or individual abstracts to iasc.umn@gmail.com. You will be notified of your abstract/panel acceptance by Wednesday, November 25th, 2015.

For more info or how to apply go to these websites http://africa.umn.edu/ and https://iascumn.wordpress.com/