IMAGINED BORDERS, EPISTEMIC FREEDOMS: the Challenge of Social Imaginaries in Media, Art, Religion and Decoloniality

IMAGINED BORDERS, EPISTEMIC FREEDOMS: The Challenge of Social Imaginaries in Media, Art, Religion and Decoloniality JAN. 7-11, 2020 | UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER WILLIAMS VILLAGE CENTER Featured Speakers: ANN LAURA LEANNE BETASAMO- CATHERINE GLEN STOLER SAKE SIMPSON WALSH COULTHARD “Colonial Diffractions In “The Decolonial Everyday: Workshop:“On the Decolonial “Once Were Maoists: Third Illiberal Times” Reflections on Indigenous Hows: Interrogating and World Currents in Fourth Education & Land-Centered Praxis” Making (Our) Praxis” World Anti-Colonialism” Jan. 8 | 9:00 -10:30 Jan. 9 | 10:45 -12:!5 Jan. 10 | 9:00 -10:30 Jan. 11 | 2:00 -3:30 AGENDA AT A GLANCE: TUESDAY, JANUARY 7 7:30pm: Opening Reception, CASE, 4th Floor Chancellor’s Hall WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8 9:00am -10:30am: Opening Plenary with Ann Stoler 10:30am -10:45am: Coffee Break 10:45am - 12:15pm: Session 1 12:15pm - 1:45pm: Lunch 2:00pm - 3:30pm: Session 2 3:30pm - 4:00pm: Break 4:00pm - 5:30pm: Session 3 7:30pm Creative Connections: The Imagined Borders, Epistemic Freedoms Encounters Reception THURSDAY, JANUARY 9 9:00am - 10:30am: Session 4 10:30am -10:45am: Coffee Break 10:45am - 12:15pm: Plenary Panel with Glen Coulthard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Lindsey Schneider and Clint Carroll 12:15pm - 1:45pm: Lunch 2:00pm - 3:30pm: Session 5 FRIDAY, JANUARY 10 9:00am - 10:30am: Lecture with Catherine Walsh 10:30am -10:45am: Coffee Break 10:45am - 12:30pm: Workshop 1st Movement 12:30pm - 1:30pm: Lunch 1:30pm - 4:00pm: Workshop 2nd and 3rd Movements SATURDAY, JANUARY 11 9:00am - 10:30am: Session 6 10:30am -10:45am: Coffee Break 10:45am - 12:15pm: Session 7 12:15pm - 1:45pm: Lunch 2:00pm - 3:30pm: Closing Plenary with Glen Coulthard *Unless otherwise noted, all events will take place in the University of Colorado Boulder Williams Village Center Dining and Community Commons (3300 Baseline Road, Boulder, CO 80303). Specific rooms are listed in the detailed schedule; please note that on location, the Multipurpose Room is identified as VCMPR and the Breakout Rooms are identified as VCBR. world through the logic of hierar- chy, classification, difference, and ontological supremacy. Instead, we WELCOME clamor for urgent new imaginaries: a decolonial perspective not only to On behalf of the Center for Media, call out the ontological instability of Religion and Culture and the Western theory, but also to establish SIMAGINE Research Consortium, a sense of epistemic freedom capable we would like to extend a warm of liberating and re-existing other welcome to all of you to Boulder ways of knowing and dwelling in the and to this special conference on world. This contestation of physical Decoloniality and Social Imaginar- and cognitive borders has found its ies. We have received a great number most ardent proponents in recent of remarkable submissions from a movements such as #RhodesMust- variety of disciplines, theoretical Fall, Standing Rock, Idle No More, approaches, and locations. It is Undocumented and Unafraid, heartening to share with you the #Whyismycurriculumsowhite, Arab excitement and thrill of organizing Uprisings, Black Lives Matter, A an event on such a momentous topic Rapist in Your Path, and #MeToo, at this critical time. among others. At the heart of this In the next few days, you will hear decolonial injunction is a desire by from distinguished plenarists and absented voices to reclaim the right panelists who are leading scholars to self-narrate, to signify, and to and practitioners in their fields. render visible local histories, other Your enthusiastic response to our temporalities, subjectivities, cosmol- call has made it possible to put ogies, and struggles silenced by together a truly interdisciplinary imperial accounts of the world. program that features participations This conference raises fundamental from media studies, history, ethnic questions: what can a decolonial studies, sociology, religious studies, critique do to avoid a zero-sum literature, anthropology, film studies, epistemology? How can we develop philosophy, political science, border new decolonial imaginaries to undo studies, archeology, indigenous the Eurocentrism of our paradigms, studies, and activist art. In a true challenge the verticality of our spirit of decolonial pluriversality, pedagogical designs, and achieve an we are confident this encounter will ethics of interpretation, an epistem- generate an intellectually inspiring ic justice whereby theories from and epistemically hospitable event the South or from ‘the margins’ in for all of us. the North are not treated merely As the title Imagined Borders, as local or subjective? The decolo- Epistemic Freedoms suggests, this nial attitude challenges us to avoid conference explicitly challenges the embracing singular universalities, imperial assumptions of borders and rethink altogether the hierar- and the practice of bordering in a chies of global-local and of univer- world destined for encounters. Talk sal-particular that underlie this of walls, fortresses, boundaries, and world’s inequality. deportation has never been a polit- This will be the ninth in a series ical or philosophical anomaly, but of successful international confer- rather a reflection of a particularistic ences held by the Center for Media, social imaginary, a linear compul- Religion, and Culture in Boulder. sion of epistemic orders that sees the The previous meetings have brought The College of Media, Commu- together an interdisciplinary nication and Information, the community of scholars for focused Department of Religious Studies, conversations on emerging issues in the Department of Ethnic Studies, media and religion. Each has proven The Center for Native American to be an important landmark in and Indigenous Studies, The Benson the development of theory and Center for the Study of Western method in its respective area and Civilization, The Center for the has resulted in important collabo- Humanities and the Arts, The rations, publications, and resources Program for Writing and Rhetoric, for further research and dialogue. the Department of Anthropology, The American Indian Law Clinic, The 2020 conference is organized The Center of the American West, in conjunction with SIMAGINE, and the Department of Women and an international and interdisciplin- Gender Studies. ary research consortium bringing together partners from the USA, Our deep gratitude goes to our the UK, Europe and South Africa. organizing committee who has SIMAGINE is hosted by the worked tirelessly for months to University of Humanistic Studies secure a smooth proceeding of this in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and conference. We would like to thank dedicated to the study of social especially Rachel van der Merwe, imaginaries between secularity and Valerie Albicker, Claire Waugh, religion in a globalizing world. The Samira Rajabi, and the fellows at consortium has organized confer- the Center for Media, Religion and ences on ‘Religion, Community, Culture. Borders’ leading to a special issue of the open access Journal for Religion Sawubona, I see you and Transformation in December (Zulu greeting), 2019. In 2018 the consortium Nabil Echchaibi, Stewart published the volume Social Imagi- Hoover, & Deborah Whitehead naries in a Globalizing World. Center for Media, Religion and This event would not have been Culture possible without the generous support of many partners at the University of Colorado Boulder: the Department of Media Studies, We clamor for urgent new imaginaries: a decolonial perspective not only to call out the ontological instability of Western theory, but also to establish a sense of epistemic freedom capable of liberating and re-existing other ways of knowing and dwelling in the world. KEYNOTE AND PLENARY SPEAKERS ANN LAURA STOLER is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. Stoler is the director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. She has worked for some thirty years on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and ethnography of the archives. She has been a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études, the École Normale Supérieure and Paris 8, Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory, Birzeit University in Ramallah, the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, Irvine’s School of Arts and Literature, and the Bard Prison Initiative. Recent interviews with her are available at Savage Minds, Le Monde, and Public Culture, as well as Pacifica Radio and here. Her books include Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002, 2010), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009) and the edited volumes Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (with Frederick Cooper, 1997), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013), and Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016). LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recog- nized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. Working for over a decade an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellec- tual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and has twenty years experience with Indigenous land

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