LSE Human Rights Anti-colonial Theory and Social Practice Network is hosting a one day workshop

Dear all,

We would like to distribute a call for participants for a workshop organised at LSE Sociology by the Human Rights Anti-colonial Theory and Social Practice Network. The workshop will be open for PhD students and early career researchers, and we hoped you would be able to distribute it to the relevant people in your department – or forward this email to the relevant person to do so, if not you (apologies if this has been sent to the wrong email address).

Many thanks for your help and please let us know if we should send this email elsewhere or if you have any further questions!

Warm wishes,

LSE Human Rights Network

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS: PhD and Early Career Workshop

LSE Human Rights Anti-colonial Theory and Social Practice Network is hosting a one day workshop at LSE Sociology on the subject ofStruggles of Cartography: Mapping imperial continuums.

The workshop will take place on Friday 30 October, exact timing tbc.

The workshop is open to PhD students and early career researchers who wish to participate. If you are interested in attending, please send a short abstract detailing your contribution so we can have an idea of numbers of themes of discussion. Please email lse.humanrightsnetwork@gmail.com

The aim of the workshop is to provide an informal and collegial space of collaboration to share works in progress in a peer-setting. The emphasis is on sharing and discussing, with the potential for this to develop into a working group of interested researchers.

Warm wishes,

Human Rights Network

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A map might be a line drawn on the ground, on the page, on the body, on the mind. It can be a depiction of interrelationships, commonly spatial, between things within a space and across a space. But it can also mark different ways of knowing – geographies of different stories, memories, relationships and struggles. A mapping exercise which draws connections between entangled spaces, histories and imaginations recognises that these connections are not experienced equally. Maps come into being through a matrix of practices, institutions and relations which might be reconfigured and transformed.

This peer review workshop for PhD and early career researchers aims to trace the lines of different maps of imperial forms of power – and provoke alternative ways of redrawing them today. These might be the maps which connect the past to the present through continuums of imperial power and the spatial imaginations of various anti-imperial struggles. The maps in which imperial hauntings manifest unevenly through materialities, affect and representations, but might be countered through different forms of archives, documents and stories. The cartographies of the street, in which people, place and space encounter ruin and dispossession but reconfigure new inhabitations, movement and spatialities. The maps which connect contemporary imperial infrastructures of power across transnational geographies – from carceral geographies of migration governance to the global energy supply chains underpinning genocide in Palestine. And the maps of our political imaginations, in which communities are brought into being in new ways together, across lands and politics, against ongoing manifestations of imperial power.

Whether through solidarity, internationalism, abolition, countermapping or other means we aim to think through practices of relational world-making from the political margins produced by contemporary forms of imperialism – those emerging in the UK, internationally, and the connections between them. How might these maps be theorised and how might they be redrawn?