Powered by Indico
v3.2
Building on the continued provocations launched by Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial (CPD) Working Group, this year’s annual workshop engages with the present urgencies of International Relations by tracing the longue dureé of imperialism, its hauntings and afterlives, but also its weaknesses and the possibilities for its collapse. Extractive economic orders and global racial hierarchies continue to mutate, solidify and affect in different ways as imperialism spreads, moves and retracts. At the same time, the capacity for revolution is ever present, growing from local and grounded collectives fighting for social change and political transformation.
This year’s CPD workshop is situated in the current struggle, efforts and successes of movements and activists to confront imperialism in all its forms, demonstrating the translocal circulation of global solidarities. We write in a moment of strengthening global demilitarisation and anti-imperial momentum emerging from the long-standing struggles of the Palestinian movement. We meet to confront the British and transnational iterations of right-wing fascism and authoritarianism and learn from the sustained efforts of student movements in Bangladesh and beyond.
This year’s annual workshop rigorously centres queer, feminist, anti-colonial and anti-imperial approaches to explore how gender/sex, sexuality, class, race, nation among other modalities of control constitute – and possibly rupture – imperialism, colonialism, coloniality, fascism, right-wing authoritarianism and extractive capitalism. We invite reflections that think with marginal (and marginalised) knowledges and geographies to map how colonialism, imperialism and coloniality rely on logics of differential gender, sexual, racial and class relations; how ideas of gender, sexuality and queerness become amenable to and are co-opted by violent projects; the role of women and other marginalised subjects in anticolonial liberation struggles and in plotting imaginaries of the anticolonial, more broadly. We are particularly interested in the translocal movement of anti-imperial knowledge and practices emerging from community action which confronts colonial fragmentations.
Following this revolutionary ethos, the workshop examines – and facilitates – building anti-imperial, anticolonial feminist and queer architectures of resistance. The workshop will reflect on the styles and formations of resistance at the local and community level that confront imperialism’s global reach. It asks what kind of institutions, networks, families, community centres, relationships with the earth and land, queer relationships and transgender bonds strengthen community ties and contribute to revolutionary knowledge production? The workshop will invite participants to reflect on how academic knowledge can feed into the questions of social justice at the centre of our scholarly investigations. Through diverse methods of delivery and pedagogical practices, this workshop hopes to provide avenues for translocal intellectual and political community building.
In the spirit of collective thinking, discussion and learning, we invite reflections, openings, meditations and questions that respond to the following:
The provisional programme is as follows:
Thursday 5 December 2024
9:30 - 10:00: Introductions
10:00 - 11:30: Session 1
11:30 - 12:00: Coffee Break
12:00 - 13:30 - Session 2
13:30 - 15:00: Lunch
15:00 - 16:30: Workshop run by Makan
16:30 - 17:00: Concluding remarks
The workshop will be followed by a public roundtable and reception with Dr Afaf Jabiri and Dr Dilar Dirik. Workshop attendees should register separately for the public roundtable here.
Please do not register for this event if you have not been sent this link privately.