Attached and pasted below is Call for Papers for FEAST 2017. Please feel free to distribute to other relevant listserves. Let us know if you have questions.

FEAST

The Association for Feminist Ethics and

Social Theory

 

invites submissions for the Fall 2017 conference.

Decolonizing and Indigenizing Feminist Philosophy 

October 5-8, 2017

Sheraton Sand Key Resort, Clearwater Beach, Florida

 

Submission deadline: February 28, 2017

FEAST encourages submissions related to this year’s theme.  However, papers on all topics within the areas of feminist ethics and social theory are welcome.  

We will also consider papers outside of traditional philosophical frameworks.

Keynote speakers:

Dr. Kim Anderson will speak about, “Affirmations of an Indigenous Feminist: Motherhood, Masculinities, Re-Queering, More.”  

Kim Anderson is an Associate Professor teaching Indigenous Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario. As an Indigenous (Metis) scholar, Anderson has spent her career working to improve the health and well-being of Indigenous families in Canada. Much of her research is community partnered and has involved gender and Indigeneity, urban Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous masculinities, and the convergence of Indigenous knowledge and water infrastructure engineering. Her single-authored books include A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood (2nd Edition, 2016) and Life Stages and Native Women: Memory, Teachings and Story Medicine (2011). Recent co-edited books include Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration (with Robert Alexander Innes, University of Manitoba Press, 2015), Mothers of the Nations: Indigenous Mothering as Global Resistance, Reclaiming and Recovery (with Dawn Lavell-Harvard, 2014) and Kētsānawak eskwewak, Our Sisters: Walking with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirited Peoples (with Maria Campbell and Christi Belcourt, forthcoming).

Dr. Bonita Lawrence, talk title TBA

Associate Professor in Department of Equity Studies, York University. Bonita Lawrence (Mi’kmaw) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Equity Studies, where she teaches Indigenous Studies. She is a founding member of the undergraduate program in Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity (now Multicultural and Indigenous Studies in the Department of Equity Studies. Her research and publications have focused primarily on urban, non-status and Metis identities, federally unrecognized Aboriginal communities, and Indigenous justice. She is the author of Fractured Homeland: Federal Recognition and Algonquin Identity in Ontario (UBC Press, 2012) and "Real" Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native People and Indigenous Nationhood (University of Nebraska Press and UBC Press, 2004).

Featured FEAST Speaker:

Dr. Margaret Walker will speak about “Crosscurrents in Reparations for Indigenous Peoples”

Margaret Urban Walker holds the Donald J. Schuenke Chair in Philosophy at Marquette University, where she has taught since 2011. A long-time FEAST member, she is author of Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2007); Moral Contexts (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (Cambridge University Press, 2006); What is Reparative Justice? (Marquette University Press, 2010). Margaret Walker’s current work focuses on post-conflict and transitional justice, moral repair, and reparations. In the past decade, she has published many articles on reparations and reparative truth-telling in the aftermath of conflict, repression, and historical injustice, and has been an invited contributor to research projects with the International Center for Transitional Justice. She is working on a book on reparations.

Invited Sessions

• Invited Panel: Decolonizing Feminism: Theories and Praxis

• Invited Panel: Teaching Indigenous Philosophy

Description of this year’s theme:

Feminist philosophy has had a legacy of expressing concern for diverse claims of minority groups, including indigenous people, while at the same time being ignorant of philosophy’s role in perpetuating colonial domination within philosophical scholarship or activist pursuits.  This year’s conference theme aims to cultivate and encourage more feminist theorizing related to indigenous philosophies and decolonizing methodologies.  How might feminist work be transformed through indigenous thought and encounters with indigenous concerns?  How are concepts of identity, gender roles, reparations, nations/national sovereignty, property, marriage, community, nature/culture, environment, and sustainability challenged or enriched by indigenous ideas and philosophies?  We also invite indigenous and decolonial engagements with human rights discourses.

While feminist theorizing has been useful in bringing to light indigenous concerns, how might feminist philosophy become more of a discipline that is transformed through an engagement with indigenous philosophy and theorizing? How might projects of decolonization shift through an indigenous feminist philosophy?  Decolonization (and colonization) projects take place in a variety of contexts/areas: geographical, psychological, epistemological, ethical, social and political, educational and pedagogical.  How can feminists working in the areas of ethics and social theory engage in projects of decolonization in these areas?  How can feminist philosophers contribute productively to both practical and theoretical projects of decolonization?  

This year’s FEAST conference invites submissions that take up feminist philosophy in relation to indigenous thought and decolonizing methods.  We welcome papers that take both theoretical and practical approaches to these issues and related issues in feminist ethics, epistemology, political and social theory more broadly construed. FEAST encourages submissions related to this year’s theme.  However, papers on all topics within the areas of feminist ethics and social theory are welcome.  We will also consider papers outside of traditional philosophical frameworks.

Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to:

• Challenges to sovereignty understood as a nation-building concept

• Reconceiving empowerment within indigenous communities

• Gender and sexual differences within indigenous communities, including the idea of gender complementarity versus gender equality

• Intersectionality within indigenous communities: race, gender, sexuality, class, post-colonial

• Indigenous “trans/queer” identities: two-spirit, fa’afafine, mahoo, etc.

• Indigenous feminist critiques of feminist philosophy

• Moving beyond critique towards the elaboration of decolonial cosmovisions, concepts, and practices

• Cultural appropriation and the problems of feminists “going native”

• Ecofeminism and indigenous philosophy/ecofeminist indigenous philosophy

• Women and gender in indigenous cosmological thought

• What is indigenous, indigeneity, or native?

• Reparations

• Indigenous conceptions of education and feminist pedagogy

• Indigenous intellectual sovereignty and/or intellectual exploitation (such as bio-piracy)

• Human rights and indigenous peoples and philosophies

• Decolonial methods/methodologies stemming from indigenous and or non-western ways of being, knowing, and theorizing

Call for abstracts: Difficult Conversations

A signature event of FEAST conferences is a lunch-time “Difficult Conversation” that focuses on an important, challenging, and under-theorized topic related to feminist ethics or social theory.

In keeping with this year’s theme of Indigenizing Feminist Philosophy, this year our topic for the difficult conversation panel is Cultural Appropriation in Feminist Scholarship. This conversation hopes to provide an environment conducive to dialogue for and among native and non-native, women of color and white academics concerning the harms produced by practices of cultural appropriation in feminist scholarship. We hope that we can openly discuss the concerns of exclusion among native feminist scholars in philosophy and culturally appropriate practices in utilizing indigenous thought in feminist philosophy.

We are soliciting abstracts (see below) that address, in both North American and transnational contexts; the ethics of responsible scholarship, concrete experiences of the difficulties and limits of cultural appropriation of indigenous thought from both native and non-native perspectives; cross-cultural pursuits in scholarship; strategies for being a culturally competent scholar when addressing indigenous thought; well-intentioned but misplaced pedagogical and scholarly strategies; strategies in decolonizing feminist philosophy; and effective activism that does not undermine indigenous concerns.

Submission Guidelines

Please send your submission, in one document (a Word file, please, so that abstracts can be posted), to [log in to unmask] by February 28, 2017.   In the body of the email message, please include: your paper or panel title, name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, surface mail address, and phone number. All submissions will be anonymously reviewed.

 

Individual Papers 

Please submit a completed paper of no more than 3000 words, along with an abstract of 100-250 words, for blind review.  Your document must include: paper title, abstract of 100-250 words, and your paper, with no identifying information. The word count (max. 3000) should appear on the top of the first page of your paper.

Panels

Please clearly mark your submission as a panel submission both in the body of the e-mail and on the submission itself.   Your submission should include the panel title and all three abstracts and papers in one document, along with word counts (no more than 3000 for each paper). 

Difficult Conversations and other non-paper submissions (e.g., workshops, discussions, etc.)

Please submit an abstract with a detailed description (500-750 words).

Please clearly indicate the type of submission (Difficult Conversation, workshop, roundtable discussion, etc.) both in the body of your e-mail and on the submission itself.  

For more information on FEAST or to see programs from previous conferences, go to:  http://www.afeast.org

Questions on this conference or the submission process may be directed to the Program Chairs, Celia Bardwell-Jones ([log in to unmask]) and/or Margaret McLaren ([log in to unmask]).