5th Annual Cultural Studies in Education Conference

April 22-23, 2016

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

“Education Under Fire: Countering Violence with Peaceful

Resistance, Radical Love, and Social Imagination”

Hosted by:

The Cultural Studies in Education Graduate Student Council

The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Cultural Studies in Education Program

The theme “Education Under Fire: Countering Violence with Peaceful

Resistance, Radical Love, and Social Imagination” calls attention to the increasingly

violent climates emerging within shared cultural spaces and places of learning. School

shootings, concealed carry regulations, the silencing of subaltern knowledges, and

instances of gendered and racialized violence compromise the very existence of critical

educational spaces. These hostile circumstances threaten possibilities of imagining and

working towards peace, dialogue, solidarity, and healing. Yet, even in a time when

violence is ubiquitous, we must remember that our capacity for hope and change is

boundless. We come together at this year’s Cultural Studies in Education conference to

deeply consider the ways that individuals and communities continue to approach such

uncertain and hostile terrains in search of a renewed peace and understanding.

Poet Adrienne Rich asks, “What would it mean to put love into action in the face

of lovelessness, abandonment, or violation? Where do we find, in or around us, love–

the imagination that can subvert despair or the futile firing of a gun? What teaches us to

convert lethal anger into steady, serious attention to our own lives and those of others?”

Today, Rich’s concerns prompt us to ask similar questions: What does it mean to fight

for education and justice when children of color are being attacked in their classrooms

by police, when a young Muslim student is arrested for displaying ingenuity, or when

Indigenous histories are erased from textbooks? How can we engage in critical dialogue

when we are threatened with legislation that allows firearms to be brought into our

classrooms? How might we put love into action amidst hate-filled political discourse that

is built upon discriminatory notions of equal rights and citizenship? In what ways can we

simultaneously exercise our social imaginations to cultivate community and compassion

while neoliberal understandings of success hinge upon competition and polarizing

notions of individuality? And, how, amidst global concerns of terror and instances of

tragedy, are we to work towards relations founded upon peace rather than fear?

As critical scholars and educators we strive to honor those who are persistent in

pursuits of reconciliation, peace, and justice through scholarship, activism, and the arts.

The conference aims to support all participants in all capacities, whether emotional,

spiritual, and/or academic. We welcome proposals from diverse fields that provide

insights into your work as an educator, researcher, activist, student, or community

leader that engage with such modes of inquiry.

This conference also strives to provide a space to present research and/or share

experiences focusing on violence and how we speak back to it through critical pursuits

of hope, healing, and peaceful reconciliation. We encourage the examination of the

social, cultural, political, economic, historical, literary, linguistic, and psychological

influences at work in these contemporary negotiations of peace and violence,

particularly as it relates to broadly conceived practices of teaching and learning. The

committee will consider proposals that engage with this year’s theme, along with related

topics, including, but not limited to, the following:

! Gun violence, specifically Campus Carry

! Legislation and Policy

! Historical and cultural erasures and avoidances (in curriculum, discourse, popular

culture, symbolic, etc.)

! Mass incarceration and deportation

! School-to-prison pipeline

! Trans* Identities, Narratives, Experiences, and Activism

! Artistic/Literary engagements

! Restorative Justice and/or Reconciliation

! Transformative Pedagogy

! International Peace work

! (Micro)-Aggressions

! Student Activism

! Economic Justice

! Critical Media Studies

! Environmental Justice

! Trauma Studies

! Transnational Violence and Solidarity

! Linguistic Studies

Guidelines for Proposal Submission

Proposals must be submitted via Google form at http://tinyurl.com/utcseconf2016 by

11:59 P.M. CST on January 15, 2016. Please include a 250-word abstract describing

your presentation, presentation format, equipment, and/or accommodations needed for

the presentation. Presenters may submit more than one proposal. For group proposals,

please submit 1 form.

We welcome presentations in any of the following formats:

! A course paper you intend to expand as a conference paper or to submit for

publication to as a journal article

! A paper being presented at an upcoming conference (use this space to practice)

! A draft of a chapter from your dissertation

! An idea you seek to develop and/or incorporate to your research

! A workshop in which participants explore topics related to theme of the

conference

! A multimedia presentation

! Artistic, creative, or performative responses to the questions and topics listed

above

! A roundtable where you discuss one or more of the proposed topics

! A poetry reading or performance

This list is partial and we are open to many formats that add to the broader discussions

in connection to the conference theme. Panels will be approximately 90 minutes and

include 3-4 presenters and a Q&A session. Please plan to limit individual presentations

to 15 minutes, although some flexibility may be allowable for alternative presentation

formats. If you have any questions, please send them to utaustincse@gmail.com.

Acceptances and other pertinent conference information will be sent via e-mail in early

February.