SGS Transgressing Fortified Global Borders Conference

While the dominant discourse of globalization emphasizes a borderless and more integrated world, communities and collectivities on the ground continue to organize against a different lived reality. Historically, scholars and activists alike, through various collectivites, spaces, and ideologies, have transgressed and disrupted mainstream globalizing networks and narratives that reinforce borders in the service of capitalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and the state.  Global transgressions, which we define as disobedience to the foundations of globalization thinking that rely on borders and institutions, manifest in both theory and praxis. Through this, these transgressive actors and forces explore and challenge spatial colonialities that raise and/or uphold such borders.

This conference allows for the imagining of freedoms as a place, not confined or restricted by borders, but instead shaped by all the people, philosophies, and movements that defy them.

Thus, the 2019 Society for Global Scholars conference is a call for scholars, activists, social movements, and students to regroup, rethink, and respond to the current discourse surrounding borders and explore spatial colonialities, while highlighting and discovering Global South voices and subjectivities.

The conference will feature keynote presentations by renowned activist-scholars Dr. Stephen Dillon and Dr. Vilna Bashi-Treitler, as well as opening remarks by Dr. Bishnupriya Ghosh and closing remarks by Dean Charles Hale. There will also be a book sale by PM Press, Verso Books, and Haymarket Books along with a workshop on scholar-activistism by Dr. Emiko Saldivar, an art exhibit and conversation regarding art-ivism.