[Commlist] CFP: 2020 CMRC Conference on Imagined Borders, Epistemic Freedoms

Announcing a CMRC Conference in Collaboration with SIMAGINE

Imagined Borders, Epistemic Freedoms: The Challenge of Social 
Imaginaries in Media, Art, Religion and Decoloniality

Hosted by The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture
University of Colorado Boulder
January 8-11, 2020

  The question of borders and the practice of bordering persist in a 
world destined for encounters and confrontations. This persistence today 
bears resemblance to long-standing legacies of coloniality, modernity, 
and globalization, but it also foregrounds new narratives, aesthetics, 
and politics of exclusion and dehumanization. Talk of walls, fortresses, 
boundaries, and deportation has never been a political or philosophical 
anomaly, but rather a reflection of a particularistic social imaginary, 
a linear compulsion of epistemic assumptions that sees the world through 
the logic of hierarchy, classification, difference, and ontological 
supremacy. This foreclosure is a widely shared and accepted social 
imaginary, as demonstrated in current scholarship in the critical 
humanities and social and political sciences: a foreclosure that has 
also defined institutions and disciplines of knowledge production which 
continue to marginalize other knowledge systems and intellectual 
traditions and refuse to acknowledge their viability and legitimacy in 
the academy. Disciplinary walls and intellectually demarcated canons 
within the Western and Westernized university in the Global North and 
South have generally produced narrow curricula and models of learning 
that reproduce selective systems of thought, discourses and practices.

The tenacity of this normalized worldview requires urgent new 
imaginaries: a decolonial perspective not only to call out the 
ontological instability of Western theory, but also to establish a sense 
of epistemic hospitality capable of liberating and re-centering other 
ways of knowing and dwelling in the world. This contestation of physical 
and cognitive borders has found its most ardent proponents in recent 
movements such as #RhodesMustFall, Standing Rock, Idle No More, 
Undocumented and Unafraid, #Whyismycurriculumsowhite, Arab Uprisings, 
Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo, among others. At the heart of this 
decolonial injunction is a desire by absented voices to reclaim the 
right to self-narrate, to signify, and to render visible local 
histories, other temporalities, subjectivities, cosmologies, and 
struggles silenced by Western and Westernized accounts of the world.

The fields of art, religion and the media have not yet come under 
historical scrutiny about their own epistemic and existential 
imaginaries and whether they reify or disrupt dominant structures and 
legacies of knowledge production? Drawing from a variety of intellectual 
traditions and established academic disciplines, these fields risk 
carrying the same blind spots, the same foreclosures, the same 
ontological foundations, and the same centered claims to universality.
What can a decolonial critique then do to avoid a zero-sum epistemology? 
And how can we develop new decolonial imaginaries as an invitation to 
undo the Eurocentrism of our paradigms, challenge the verticality of our 
pedagogical designs, and achieve an ethics of interpretation, an 
epistemic justice whereby theories from the South or from ‘the margins’ 
in the North are not treated merely as local or subjective? The 
decolonial attitude challenges us to avoid embracing singular 
universalities, and rethink altogether the hierarchies of global-local 
and of universal-particular that underlie this world’s inequality.
This will be the ninth in a series of successful international 
conferences held by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in 
Boulder. The previous meetings have brought together an 
interdisciplinary community of scholars for focused conversations on 
emerging issues in media and religion. Each has proven to be an 
important landmark in the development of theory and method in its 
respective area and has resulted in important collaborations, 
publications, and resources for further research and dialogue.

The 2020 conference is organized in conjunction with SIMAGINE, an 
international and interdisciplinary research consortium bringing 
together partners from the USA, the UK, Europe and South-Africa; it is 
hosted by the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the 
Netherlands, and dedicated to the study of social imaginaries between 
secularity and religion in a globalizing world. SIMAGINE has organized 
conferences on ‘Religion, Community, Borders’ leading to a special issue 
of the open access Journal for Religion and Transformation in December 
2019. In 2018 the consortium published the volume Social Imaginaries in 
a Globalizing World.

The conference will feature keynote lectures and keynote conversations, 
as well as thematic panels and artistic performances. We invite papers 
and panels from across disciplines, intellectual traditions, and 
geographic locations that engage with these questions and beyond. 
Possible topics could include but are not limited to:

•Borders, Bordering, Border Zones between the Imaginary and the Real
•Modernity, Secularity, Religious Legacies and Universality
•Social Imaginaries and (the Critique of) Anthropocentrism
•Coloniality and Decolonial Epistemologies
•What Counts as Critical Theory and Decolonial Critique?
•What Counts as Religion in the Decolonial Imaginary?
•Big Data, Algorithmic Culture, and (De)Coloniality
•Decolonial Intersectionalities
•Decolonial Feminisms
•Decolonizing Race, Ethnicity, and Identity
•Decolonial Pedagogy, Methodology, and Praxis.
•Media, Religion, and Theoretical Provincialism
•Media, Arts, and Decolonial Theory
•Media, Religion, the Other, and the Subaltern
•Religion, Theology, and Social Imaginaries
•Social Imaginaries and (the Critique) of Neoliberalist Globalization
•Geopolitics of Knowledge Production
•Language, Publishing, and Boundaries of Learning
•Imagination and Worldview Education: Interreligious Dialogue
•Queering the Archives

Abstracts of 300-350 words should be submitted to (cmrc /at/ colorado.edu) 
<mailto:(cmrc /at/ colorado.edu)> by June 10, 2019. Please include your email 
address and university affiliation in your submission.

For questions, email Nabil Echchaibi, Associate Director: 
(nabil.echchaibi /at/ colorado.edu) <mailto:(nabil.echchaibi /at/ colorado.edu)>.
or Stewart M. Hoover, Director: (hoover /at/ colorado.edu) 
<mailto:(hoover /at/ colorado.edu)>.

For more information, visit cmrc.colorado.edu <http://cmrc.colorado.edu>

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