Cancelled due to Covid-19:
Watch for news of online AGM in early June
June 1 to June 3, University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
Download Information
List of Open Sessions
Deadline: February 10, 2020
Guidelines provided below
You can respond to a specific open session for which the organizers and their contact information have been provided. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THE LIST OF OPEN SESSION CALLS.
If you are submitting to a specific session, contact the organizers directly using the contact information provided at the end of each session description. If you are submitting as an “all comer” directly to the organizing committee, send your abstract to jones.claudia2020@gmail.com.
Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words.
Socialist perspectives on racial capitalism, colonialism and anti-blackness
In resonance with the Congress theme “Bridging divides: Challenging colonialism and anti-blackness”, the Society for Socialist Studies is calling for papers reflecting this theme from a socialist critique of capitalism and a socialist vision for a future that recognizes that all economic relations are racialized and gendered.
Racialized violence against Black, Indigenous, people of colour is a pivotal feature of the capitalist epoch. The present era of predatory capital, globalized finance and industrial operations, securitization, domestic militarization and endless global warfare has sparked massive social upheaval. Unparalleled numbers of racialized people are being violently dislocated across international jurisdictions. Forced migrations have resulted in multiplying deaths in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific Seas, and unprecedented incarceration at European and US borders. Canada is no exception to these trends.
Canadian cities are racialized, socially stratified and segregated. Years of austerity policies have widened racialized poverty gaps, dismantled public infrastructure, social and social security systems. Black, Indigenous and people of colour face deeply entrenched racialized violence. The poisonous devastation and environmental racism of Canada’s extractive industries are hitting Indigenous and Black communities hard. Canadian cities are riven with racialized segregation and poverty. Black communities are overpoliced and ‘carded’ 3.2 times more than whites and have their personal profiles catalogued in a permanent database. Carceral capitalism is a Canadian issue. Between 2005 and 2016, the federal incarceration rate of black people in Canada increased by 70%, in spite of historically low crime rates. Indigenous women represent more than 35% of the federal prison population and their incarceration rates are rising faster than any other group. Gendered anti-blackness and settler colonialism are clearly the definitive features of racial and carceral capitalism in this country.
The 2020 Society for Socialist Studies conference takes up the theoretical and political implications of white heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and coloniality in Canada. We invite your participation through session, roundtable, panel and paper proposals.
We aim to spark a new conversation about Canadian antiblackness and settler coloniality that will build on and beyond the current base of knowledge.
We are accepting paper proposals related, but not limited, to the following sub-themes.
1. Black, Red and Brown: Decolonizing/Unsettling Marx – Antiblackness, Indigeneity, Antiracism
2. Antiblackness, Anti-Indigeneity and Canadian racial capitalism
3. Gendering and queering racial capitalism
4. Mapping the connections and disconnections of contemporary coloniality in Turtle Island, Palestine, Syria, Kashmir, Rojava among others in the world capitalist system
5. International, Neoliberal, militarized antiblackness/anti-indigeneity in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and emerging BRICS (Brazil, India, China, South Africa) countries.
6. Classed migration in the wake of permanent social crisis: producing gendered, racialized, sexualized, immobilities
7. Environmental racism, and the uneven impacts of climate change, survival, ‘disaster capitalism’
8. Anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity as the front line of emergent white heteropatriarchal Nationalism
9. Consolidation of global fascism
10. Materializing ‘bare life’: carceral capitalism, new regimes of domestic, border, and transnational imperialism
11. The afterlives of Atlantic slavery and Canadian exceptionalism
12. Rethinking the role of ongoing dispossessions of Canadian and International so-called ‘primitive’ (primary) accumulation
13. The role of social reproduction in commodification and decommodification of care, gendered un/underpaid work and violent racial capitalist accumulation in the household, state, and global labour, commodity, value chains.
14. Problematizing the limits of value theory
15. Racial capitalism and the neoliberalism, financialization, securitization, militarization of so-called late capitalism
16. Building future socialisms and solidarities
To send an “all comers” abstract for a paper proposal send to jones.claudia2020@gmail.com
You can also direct general inquiries to Jamie Magnusson at this address.
*The Socialist Studies Society 2020, will be meeting on the unceded terroritories of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapewak and Attawandaron peoples who have long standing relationships to the land and region of Southwestern Ontario and the City of London. The local First Nations Communities are the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation, the Oneida Nation of the Thames, and the Munsee Delaware Nation.