This event has been postponed due to recent campus closure and cancellations from COVID-19.
Dispossession in Motion
Migration | Displacement | Knowledge
A Workshop
Call for Submissions
3-4 April 2020
University of California, Berkeley
Wurster Hall, Room 491
Scholars of urban political economy, postcolonial and ethnic studies have investigated dispossession as non-possession, extraction, usurpation, deprivation, and denial of land, labor, and resources. They have exposed the violence of capital accumulation, and colonial and imperial expansion. Other lines of inquiry have shown how dispossession can be liberatory of the normative constructions of race, gender, and sexuality that have been ingrained through modes of social regulation.
Dispossession in Motion builds on this scholarship while focusing on movement to investigate new conceptual, affective, and political spaces of dispossession, non-possession, and repossession. We propose to interrogate practices and poetics emerging at the intersection between dispossession and movement and configuring spaces (buildings, structures, vehicles, human bodies, objects, artifacts) across scales (nations, regions, cities, neighborhoods), textures (materials, surfaces, visual appearance), states (motion, stability, stillness), affective projections (hope, atmospheres, emotions), and timeframes (biological, generational, historical).
We welcome contributions across disciplines around the following tracks:
Movement 1: Spatial Journeys of Migration
In this track, we explore spaces along journeys of migration. We seek contributions that study the in-between spaces that migrants, refugees, evicted people, and asylum seekers encounter, inhabit, and use temporarily (camps, camping sites, tents, caravans, caravansaries, houses, prisons, detention centers). How can we narrate, map, and chart these spatial journeys? How are they transformative of the internal immaterial realm (subjectivity, spirituality, selfhood, desires) of those who move? How do these journeys expand our understanding of migration outside the limited temporal and spatial scale calculated on the basis of humanitarian emergency and temporary architecture? We welcome contributions that use innovative mapping to chart the multiple scales of dislocation and relocation of people across and within borders and cities—ranging from critical cartography, itineraries, oral histories, traveling narratives, photographs, drawings, and cinematic documentation.
Movement 2: Affective Spaces of Displacement and Reconstruction
In this track, we examine spaces that people leave or are forced to leave behind (beginnings, starting points), inhabit anew (new beginnings, end spaces), or reclaim, rebuild, or return to (returning points). We invite contributions that focus on the materiality of movement at the scale of the domestic interiors, buildings, and urban spaces. How are these spaces put into motion through the memories that move with those who remember, repair, reoccupy, and rebuild? How can we trace the tangible and intangible geographies of affect and belonging related to practices of displacement and emplacement? How do spaces, materials, and objects act as a reminder of the people who left? How do they, conversely, help people to construct new spaces of belonging elsewhere? We welcome accounts about how people inhabit, use, occupy, restore spaces through memories and practices of memorialization, mourning, reconstruction, repossession, and reinscription.
Movement 3: Circuits and Ecologies of Knowledge
In this track, we explore the spaces through which ideas disseminate and circulate across national boundaries through governmental and non-governmental organizations, financial networks, and cultural and educational institutions. We are interested in how techniques of governing and systems of representation move through global networks and are challenged by practices of dissent, including everyday practices, spatial activism, and social movements. How do traveling ideas categorize ecological disasters and toxic risks that produce multiple forms of dispossession? How do they allocate the vulnerability and disposability of certain populations? What is the impact of these mobile ideas on various forms of ecologies? We especially welcome contributions that examine the exteriority and interiority of circulating knowledge such as masterplans, architectural projects, regulation of norms of refugee camps and humanitarian aid, activist frameworks, statistical numbers, financial and logistical data, computational and visual representations.
Dispossession in Motion aims to bridge research by faculty and students at UC Berkeley with that of emerging scholars and scholarly debates on dispossession and movement worldwide. We especially expect it to act as a platform for new collaborations within CED and trigger cross-fertilization of ideas between students on different academic tracks, activists, practitioners, artists, and creative practitioners.
A total of 12 participants will be selected for the two-day workshop. Selected authors will receive detailed feedback by guest critics upon which to develop their papers. Selected papers will be part of a book or can be proposed as journal articles. Guests critics include Abidin Kusno (Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Canada); Ines Weizman (Professor of Architecture Theory, Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar, Germany); and Callie Maidhof (Visiting Professor of Global Studies, Colby College, USA).
Guidelines for Submissions
1) Submit your expression of interest via the Google Form by February 12, 2020 (11:59 pm PT) including:
- What you plan to submit to the workshop and percentage of work completed (max 200 words)
- If you cannot participate in the workshop as an author, we welcome your submission of interest as a respondent to one of the selected papers
2) Selected participants will be notified by February 19, 2020 (11:59 pm PT)
3) Submit your full project by March 16, 2020 (11:59 pm PT)
We welcome different types of contribution:
- Early-stage research: reflections on the fieldwork, revised prospectus, visual accounts or photo essays (1,500-3000 words, up to 5 pages)
- Partial completion: early draft of a dissertation chapter or journal article (6,000-8,000 words, up to 30 pages)
- Near completion: chapter or journal submission (8,000-12,000 words, up to 45 pages)
- Class paper: paper from a previous class that fits in the workshop’s theme (5,000 words, up to 20 pages)
- Creative Project: up to 20 images +2-page statement describing the project
All types of submissions should include:
- What you plan to submit to the workshop and percentage of work completed (max 200 words)
- A 300-word abstract of the thesis/dissertation/project
- Bibliographic references
- Formatted manuscripts should be Word files, Times New Roman, 12pt, double-spaced. Participants are encouraged to include maps and images. You can also upload a PowerPoint presentation (max 10 MB). Digital images should be at least 200 dpi and mounted onto an 8.5” x 11” pdf file, to be uploaded in the google form (the file cannot exceed 10MB).
Click here to submit your proposal via the Google Form by February 12, 2020 (11:59 pm PT)
Dispossession in Motion is funded by the Arcus Chair of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. Please direct inquiries to dispossessionmotion@gmail.com