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Camps, Carceral Imaginaries, and (In)Justices
The history of the Americas shows that camps have been used again and again to confine members of numerous groups. The latter include detainees, inmates, prisoners, internally displaced people, asylum seekers, refugees, migrants, children, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, activists, and victims of political persecution, among others. In popular discourse, camps are often associated with short-term humanitarian operations related to the provision of shelter, food, and access to legal assistance. While some have functioned this way, scholars from numerous fields —literary studies, American studies, Caribbean studies, cultural studies, and critical prison studies—signal concern about the far-reaching cycles of punishment and abuse that tend to characterize them as well as their use as models by governments in other parts of the world. These and related insights prompt us to problematize camps, how they have functioned, and assumptions that they are humane, necessary, or effective.
This project seeks to cultivate interdisciplinary and intersectional exchanges that creatively navigate the space between “free society” and knowledge about encampment and a broad typology of camps and camp-like institutions. These include “assembly centers,” barracoons, slave depots, detention and internment camps, prisoner-of-war camps, labor camps, “black sites,” offshore detention centers, concentration and re-education camps, and prisons, among others. Comparative work is welcome. It is the aim to formulate critical interventions that assist in better understanding and responding to realities of carcerality at the same time that they embrace the possibilities for future change.
Website: www.campsconference-graz.com
Climate Change as System Change: Inter-American Perspectives
This project is inspired by Amitav Gosh’s (2009) claim of the “crisis of the imagination” (9) when it comes to the inability of literature, history and politics to grasp the dimensions and violence of climate change and environmental degradation. This status quo is explained by the fact that the (post)industrial world is held back by its current systems and their attendant behavioral patterns which predominately rely on fossil fuels and profligate consumption. Certainly, the industrial world cannot easily escape the “petro-imaginary” (Banita 151), which defines a system that is dependent on fossil fuels. Since modernity has been invested in fossil fuels for over 200 years, our dependence on petro-matter influences, indeed severely constricts our collective imagination. Consequently, the very act of imagining a low-carbon future, as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has explained, is not easily carried out since “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use” (208). The human influence on the planet has exponentially increased in the 20th century particularly in terms of space and time. Due to these changes in the recent past, it is significant to conceptualize “human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once” (Chakrabarty 1). Yet, the Anthropocene and its attendant phenomena—where climate change is the most prevailing—are, according to philosopher Timothy Morton “hyperobjects”. These are phenomena that are not understandable as a whole by the general public. With climate change, we see and understand, for instance, the increased melting of glaciers and abnormal weather occurrences. However, grasping climate change in its entirety is inherently difficult. For author Amitav Gosh, the Anthropocene represents a significant moment for narratives and storytelling because the Anthropocene questions “what is now regarded as serious fiction” (9). The complexity of individual phenomena and their interrelatedness, which defines the Anthropocene, demand new narratives, approaches and theoretical considerations. Inter-American perspectives can offer a new venue to discuss these pressing issues and to provide intersectional and inter-regional considerations. Drawing on non-Western and conventional theoretical and methodological understandings, Inter-American studies with its hemispheric perspectives opens up the possibilities to view climate change in all its complexities and relationalities. Thus, this project works on the following topics (1) Intersectionality and Ecofeminism in the Americas, (2) Climate change and Indigenous cultures, (3) Inter-American climate fiction and popular culture, (4) Environmental Humanities, and (5) Inter-American Critical Theories and Approaches.