Call for Abstracts: https://www.needs2020.com/abou
Panels: https://www.needs2020.com/abou
Conference Theme: https://www.needs2020.com/abou
Abstracts are due Nov 17, 2019
Call for abstracts for the Panel De-colonizing Disasters: Affect, Race, and Queer Theory
A disaster is not only a sudden, de-stabilizing event but an affective complex that hinges on the already in place structures of violence and diminishment such as colonial occupation, conflict, poverty, heteronormativity, whiteness, and other forms of structural harms. The panel seeks to understand “natural” disasters as interruptions of joy; as forms of dysphoria that reorganize relationships and the expectations, one has from life and each other. The panel attempts to inspire new vocabularies on disaster aftermaths and redirects attention away from institutional and external therapeutic processes in favor of broader imaginaries on the seepage of disaster into everyday worldmaking. In this way, the panel seeks to expand the parameters of the field of disaster studies to embrace de-colonial, subaltern, and critical approaches for the study of disaster, its aftermaths, and survivors. Papers are invited from diverse theoretical and methodological standpoints from any context which address some of the following themes (but not limited to) in fresh and provocative ways:
Feeling, living, and embodying disaster
Narrative and first-person accounts of disaster
Troubling the binaries of disaster/everyday life
The convergence of disaster with other forms of diminishment
Disaster and decoloniality
Disaster and heteronormativity
Disaster and whiteness/race
Disaster and dysphoria
Queering disaster
Affective methodologies for the study of disaster
Organiser
Omer Aijazi, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada