Interdisciplinary Conference on Race
This conference aims to bring together scholars from multiple disciplinary perspectives to broadly explore the intersections of Race, Memory, and Identity. Contemporary social, political, and media discourses demonstrate the continued need to evaluate the differing ways that race and identity impact memory in connection to history, trauma, loss and remembrance. Understanding memory as both a subject and a tool can act to promote conversations about how memories of the past impress upon individual and collective memory to affectively shape racial and cultural identities. How might we remember the legacies of personal and historical injustices in the present while at the same time shaping the future to allow for an exploration of the persistently entangled forces of remembrance, identity, and justice?
The Monmouth University race conference was founded in 2008 by Dr. Julius Adekunle and Dr. Hettie V. Williams. This conference has brought together scholars from more than fifteen U.S. states, four continents, and twelve nations. Robin D.G. Kelley, Tera Hunter, David Roediger, and Jonathan Holloway have all previously served as keynote speakers for this event. This year, historian Dr. William Sturkey, UNC, Chapel Hill, will deliver the opening plenary lecture. Dr. Qiana Whitted, USC, and other distinguished speakers will also participate in this conference (TBA).
The Interdisciplinary Conference on Race program committee eagerly invites proposals from students, scholars, researchers, artists, and teachers around the world on topics related to the scholarly and/or pedagogical aspects of the conference’s themes. Some examples of topics one could pursue under the conference theme include, but are not limited to:
- Art, artifacts, comics, sequential art, visual culture, murals, street art
- Collective, public, and personal memory
- Ethnic, cultural, or national identity
- Fluidity of identity
- Social memory
- Memory construction, remembrance, maintenance
- Identity: imagined and real
- Authenticity, acculturation, appropriation
- Social practice / social relevance
- Erasure / forgetting
- Counter memory
- Social justice
- Individual / Sociocultural processes of identity
- Representations of the past
- Monuments, memorials, markers, museums
- Preservation
- Oral history / storytelling / narrative identity
- Intersectionality
- Commemoration, nostalgia, memorialization
- Transmission of memory
- Sense of place and displacement
- Cultural production and consumption
- Ritual, rites of passage, celebrations