AAACS 2015

Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging in the world. Recognition refers to the visible status of a human being participating in a collection of communities. How can we work with, within, and in parallel to crowds of recognition, to protest dispossession through performative, transnational projects? How can we use commitment to alterglobal action in supporting complicated conversations that are recognized and that recognize? How can we nurture maker-communities of conviviality, designing, and committed aesthetics? How might this theme be interrogated by our task forces, on internationalization, practice and policy, and ethics? Subthemes regarding politics of dispossession/recognition include: What problematics and potentials are related to exportation of Anglophone understandings of recognition politics based UnitedStatesian civil rights movements? What problematics and potentials are presented by the study of alterity, indigenous traditions, and cosmopolitan sensibilities in the next moment? What problematics and potentials are inherent in Birmingham school Marxian understandings including, among others, the discourse on public pedagogies? How is transnational recognition “conjugated” in AAACS’ task forces on internationalization, ethics, and policy and practice? What public critiques are necessary given the unquestioned neoliberal globalizing strategies of “individual students,” “standards,” “accountability,” “mass testing,” and other assessments that enact epistemicides? What is the status of multicultural foundations based on nationalist concerns in an epoch that has clearly shifted to neoliberal globalization and capital movements that outpace nations and national politics? We open the program to everyone’s curriculum studies conversations, and, while we always welcome any ongoing scholarship in our field to join us, in Chicago, we particularly encourage presenters to question how their work engages with work that weakens dispossession and strengthens recognition.