04/12-04/13: Mobilizations and Migrations Conference

Poster by Morgan Buck

MOBILIZATIONS AND MIGRATIONS CONFERENCE

The Center for Place Culture and Politics presents its 2019 annual conference, Mobilizations and Migrations

Friday April 12: Elebash Recital Hall, Graduate Center, CUNY (365 Fifth Avenue).

Saturday April 13: The People’s Forum (320 West 37th St).

Click here for PDF of conference program.

About this conference

The Spring 2019 Center for Place, Culture and Politics Conference will bring together activist scholars/scholarly activists from across the disciplines and beyond in order to figure new dimensions of mobilization as and from migrations. The focus on movement and movements offers the possibility of constructive dialogue on specific spatial constellations in the present that does not lose sight of their historical constituents and political differences yet is willing to meet the challenge of their articulation.

SCHEDULE:

DAY 1 FRIDAY, April 12, 2019   

Elebash Recital Hall and Lobby

The Graduate Center, CUNY,

365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th and 35th Streets),

NY, NY 10016

9:45am Welcome
David Harvey (CPCP)

10–12:30pm Panel 1. Migrations
A. Naomi Paik (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign),

Javiela Evangelista (New York City College of Technology, CUNY),

Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University and Uppsala University).

Chaired by Maria Luisa Mendonça (CPCP).

12:30-2:30pm Lunch break

2:30–5pm Panel 2. Mediations
DeeDee Halleck (Filmmaker, Activist, Producer, Founder of Paper Tiger),

Angela Naimou (Clemson University),

Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper (IRADAC and CPCP).

Chaired by Peter Hitchcock (CPCP).

5–6pm Coffee break

6–8:30pm Panel 3. Opening Keynote and Screening of O Regresso do Cabral by Sana N’Hada
Sana N’Hada (Filmmaker, Guinée-Bissau)

in conversation with Sónia Vaz Borges (CPCP).

Chaired by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (CPCP).

Saturday April 13
The People’s Forum
320 West 37th Street

9:45am Welcome

10:00–12:30pm Panel 4. Mobilizations
Laura Y. Liu (The New School),

Ana Naomi de Sousa (Filmmaker, London),

Christina Heatherton (Barnard College),

Sónia Vaz Borges (CPCP).

Chaired by Mary Taylor (CPCP).

12:30–2:30pm Lunch Break

2:30–4pm Panel 5. Closing Keynote.
Vijay Prashad (Tricontinental) in conversation with all of us.

Chaired by Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper (IRADAC and CPCP). 

SPEAKERS

Ana Naomi de Sousa is an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker, writer and journalist, who works on spatial politics, identity, resistance and post/counter-colonial histories. She was the filmmaker on Forensic Architecture’s Saydnaya project with Amnesty International (2016); the series co-director of Rebel Architecture on Al Jazeera English; and the director of several documentaries including Angola – Birth of a Movement (2012); and The Architecture of Violence (2014) 

Vijay Prashad is a Marxist intellectual who is director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, chief editor of LeftWord Books, chief correspondent for Globetrotter and a columnist for Frontline. He is the author of thirty books, including The Darker Nations (2007), The Poorer Nations (2013) and Red Star Over the Third World (2017).

Javiela Evangelista is an Assistant Professor with the African American Studies Department at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, where she developed the new interdisciplinary course The Heritage of Imperialism. Her research focuses on race, nation and human rights in the Caribbean and African Diaspora. She is working on her book ‘book project on citizenship as a human right’, supported by a Faculty Fellowship with the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center and by PSC-CUNY awards for archival research.

Christina Heatherton is a scholar and historian of anti-racist social movements. She is completing her first book, The Color Line and the Class Struggle: The Mexican Revolution, Internationalism, and the American Century (University of California Press, forthcoming). With Jordan T. Camp she recently edited Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso Books, 2016). Her work appears in places such as American Quarterly: Interface; Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion and Change, edited by Leela Fernandes (New York University Press, 2018); Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (Verso Books, 2017); and The Rising Tides of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific, edited by Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington Press, 2014). With Jordan T. Camp she previously co-edited Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond (Freedom Now Books, 2012). She is the editor of Downtown Blues: A Skid Row Reader (Freedom Now Books, 2011). She is currently an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Barnard College where she co-directs several public facing initiatives including: New Directions in American Studies, the Oral History and Activism Project, and the Racial Capitalism Working Group, a project of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD), Columbia University.

Laura Y. Liu is Associate Professor of Global Studies & Geography at The New School. Her research focuses on community organizing, labor, migration, urban development, and design. As part of the collaborative Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster (https://www.multiplemobilities.org [multiplemobilities.org]), she has researched the US-Mexico border and other border spaces, and has collectively written a photo essay on border images in Anthropology Now (2017). She has written against the novelty of precarity in Women’s Studies Quarterly (2017). With the poet Jennifer Firestone, Liu co-produced the art book LITtle by LITtle (2014). She has written on the connection between geography and industry in the art exhibit Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave (2011); the influence of digital technologies on urban space in Situated Technologies Pamphlet 7: From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (2010, with Trebor Scholz); and the impact of September 11 on Chinatown (Indefensible Space, 2007, Ed. Michael Sorkin). Her other articles have appeared in Urban Geography; Gender, Place, and Culture; and Social and Cultural Geography. She is writing a book, Sweatshop City, which looks at the continuing relevance of the sweatshop in New York City and other post-Fordist, globalized contexts. 

Angela Naimou is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University and co-editor of the international human rights journal Humanity. She is the author of Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (Fordham University Press 2015), which won the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize and received honorable mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Award from the Modern Language Association. Her current book project considers how literature reconceptualizes contemporary migration and international border regimes. She is also at work on an edited volume that tracks the concept of diaspora in literary criticism and theory. In addition to co-editing Humanity, she serves on the motherboard of ASAP and is an associate editor of the journal Contemporary Literature.

DeeDee Halleck is a media activist and co-founder of Paper Tiger Television and the Deep Dish Satellite Network, the first grass roots community television network. She is Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of California at San Diego. Her first film, Children Make Movies (1961), was about a film-making project at the Lillian Wald Settlement in Lower Manhattan. Her film, Mural on Our Street was nominated for Academy Award in 1965. She has led media workshops with elementary school children, reform school youth and migrant farmers.

A Naomi Paik is an assistant professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her book, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (UNC Press, 2016; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), reads testimonial narratives of subjects rendered rightless by the U.S. state through their imprisonment in camps. She has published articles in Social TextRadical History ReviewCultural Dynamics, Race & Class, e-misferica, Humanity, and the collection Guantánamo and American Empire. She is currently writing Walls, Bans, Raids, Sanctuary (under contract with University of California Press), a short book on the criminalization of migrants in the U.S. and radical sanctuary movements. As a board member of the Radical History Review, she is co-editing three special issues of the journal—on “Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), and “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020). She is also developing a new project on military outsourcing. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.

Shahram Khosravi is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University and the author of the books: Young and Defiant in Tehran, University of Pennsylvania Press (2008); The Illegal Traveler: an auto-ethnography of borders, Palgrave (2010); Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran, University of Pennsylvania Press (2017), and After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives, Palgrave (2017, edited volume). He has been an active writer in the Swedish press and has also written fiction.

Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper is a Postdoctoral Fellow with in the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and The Caribbean. Her doctoral work centered on a coalition of social movement organizations calling for an end to the ongoing “non-governmental” occupation of Haiti. She is interested in the construction of neocolonial nationalist ideologies and collective identities in relation to race and class, gender and sexuality, education and language, and religion. Prosper is currently working on her manuscript tentatively titled Development Contested: Social Movements, NGOs, and the Evangelical State.

Sónia Vaz Borges is a militant interdisciplinary historian, social and political organizer. She has B.A. in Modern and Contemporary History, Politics and International Affairs from ISCTE -University Institute of Lisbon, and an M.A. in African History from the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Lisbon. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is also the editor of the booklets Cadernos Consciência e Resistência Negra (2007-2011) and author of the books Na Pó di Spéra. Percursos nos Bairros da Estrada Militar, Santa Filomena e Encosta Nascente (2014), and Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness. The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963-1978 (2019). Along with filmmaker Filipa César, Sónia Vaz Borges co-authored the short film Navigating the Pilot School (2016). Sónia Vaz Borges is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP) at the Graduate Center City University of New York and is working on her new research project focused on Errant Archives.

Organized by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Cosponsored by The Center for the Humanities, the Advanced Research Collaborative, the Committee on Globalization and Social Change, The American Studies Certificate Program, and the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, and Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY; and The People’s Forum.

Further info at: https://www.facebook.com/events/639732719800594/

The conference is free and open to the public.

***Related event***

04/09: SPECIAL SCREENING of XIME with FILMMAKER SANA NA N’HADA