Territories in crisis / Challenges of the Humanities
The PhD program in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Stony Brook University invites researchers to its 2025 Graduate Conference, which will address contemporary challenges and debates in the humanities surrounding the concept of territories in crisis.
CALL for PAPERS: en español, portugués e inglés
The contemporary scenario, marked by war and climate collapse, has exposed how the persistence of certain modern categories, such as progress and national identity, not only serves to uphold cartographies inherited from centuries of colonialism and extractivism but also drives the imposition and expansion of borders on a planetary scale. In response, a range of critical methodologies have emerged from the humanities to construct new tools for analyzing a rapidly changing and seemingly unpredictable reality.
The exercise of mapping territories of crisis and tracing the lives of their inhabitants compels us to recognize the need for a new language with which to understand these dynamics. It also necessitates expanding and rethinking the spectrum of what is knowable—of what tradition has defined as thinkable—and delving into the substance and memory of human and non-human transits across geographies, geological, and inevitably, temporal scales at play in storytelling. The question of territories is, in turn, a question of communities: Who belongs to them? From where and how do they speak, if they speak? Who listens to these stories, preserves them, archives them, or weaves them together?
The challenges of our contemporary moment demand a reconfiguration of critical cartographies. We must consider to what extent the humanities can respond to present-day issues and envision possible futures by redrawing the conditions for knowledge production. Rethinking physical and symbolic territories involves reconsidering human and non-human life as shaped by pharmacological, necropolitical, and epistemological regimes, exploring new ways of mapping how bodies inhabit these spaces, and creating new forms of resistance and configurations of memory—especially through sexual and gender dissidence, anti-racist, and anti-colonial thought. We invite researchers and creators in literature, art, film, environmental humanities, history, art history, philosophy, digital humanities, and related disciplines to submit proposals examining one of the following thematic areas:
● Maps, cartographies, landscapes
● Object history and material culture
● Diaspora, migration, dispossession
● Critical explorations of travel in art and literature
● Territories of colonial resistance
● Expansions beyond the center/periphery conflict
● Territories from the perspective of Indigenous thought
● Inhuman geologies of extractivism
● Climate change as a planetary crisis
● “Sexilios” and collaborative networks of sexual dissidence
● Corporalities and performance
● Immaterial cartographies, digitality, and archives
● New methodologies and languages of research
● Disciplinary frontiers of the humanities
Proposals will be accepted in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
Deadline: December 20, 2024
Email: conferenciagraduadaHLL@gmail.com
