Liberating Temporality and Spatiality
Location
MIT STATA Center:
32 Vassar Street Cambridge MA
All sessions will take place on the 1st floor
Find it on the mapConference Theme
Time and space, while often seen as linear and confined concepts, can be stretched, altered, and reconfigured. We move through time and space in fits & bursts; some ways of moving and being are deemed normative or “good” and brought to the forefront, while others might be marginalized and cast aside. Here, we instead cast aside normative ideas of time and and space to focus on how liberating the concepts of temporality and spatiality can help us imagine and create new futures, communities, and ways of being. This conference seeks to look at liberatory conceptions of spatiality and temporality, particularly in the contexts of racial justice, abolition, disability rights, queer/trans ecologies, human development, death studies and practices, embodiment, community building, and more.
How might liberation encourage, if not require, new orientations to the concepts of time and space? What is the messiness that exists in these spaces of creation?
Some questions the conference seeks to explore:
How can the temporality and spatiality of subcultures be used to assess political and cultural change?
How do space and spatiality construct belonging, community and identity? Reciprocally, how do the concepts of belonging, community, and identity impact and construct space and spatiality?
What does access and openness look like in truly liberatory spaces?
How do subcultures or ideological communities produce alternative temporalities and encourage imagination of how our futures can be different from chrononormativity?
How do crises change our understanding of longevity, liberation, and community?
What is the interplay between alternative and hegemonic norms of time and space?
We look forward to welcoming our many graduate student panelists, film makers, artists, and presenters!
Plenary Panel
Our plenary panel will be on March 4 at 10:30 and will feature:
Fatema Ahmad, Muslim Justice League: Fatema Ahmad is the Executive Director at Muslim Justice League, where she leads MJL's efforts to dismantle the criminalization and policing of marginalized communities under national security pretexts. She joined as Deputy Director in 2017 and increased MJL's focus on organizing within and collaborating across impacted communities to resist and subvert surveillance. Fatema leads the StopCVE National coalition and is a leader in abolitionist organizing locally in Massachusetts. She also serves on the Board of Directors for Political Research Associates, a social justice think tank devoted to supporting movements that are building a more just and inclusive democratic society.
Alize Arıcan, Boston University: Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist and a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, the Radical Housing Journal, City & Society, JOTSA, and entanglements, as well as public platforms such as beyond.istanbul, Platypus, Anthropology News, and the Jadaliyya podcast.
Ariella Azoulay, Brown University: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, film essayist and independent curator of anticolonial archives and exhibitions. Among her books: Potential history – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); Among her films: The world like a Jewel in the Hand – Unlearning Imperial Plunder II (2022); Un-documented: Undoing Imperial Plunder (2019), Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012), I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004); among her exhibitions: The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022), Errata (Tapiès Foundation, 2019, HKW, Berlin, 2020), Enough! The Natural Violence of the New World Order (F/Stop festival, Leipzig, 2016).
William Cheng, Dartmouth College & Harvard Radcliffe Fellow 2022-2023: William Cheng, a professor of music at Dartmouth College, works at the intersections of cultural histories, disability studies, media theories, care ethics, and queerness. An avid gamer and lifelong pianist-improviser, he is the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2014), Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016), and Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford University Press, 2019) and coeditor of Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford University Press, 2019), A Cultural History of Western Music in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), and the University of Michigan Press’s Music and Social Justice Series. He’s presently laying the groundwork for two transnational ethnographies.
Format
This conference will be held both in-person and online. The online schedule details whether sessions will be exclusively in-person or have a 'join online’ option. Due to space and labor limitations, we are not able to stream every session of the conference. Zoom links will be posted the day of the event.
Covid Protocols
Vaccinations
All attendees must be fully vaccinated (with the exception of those with medical conditions precluding vaccination) and we strongly encourage receiving the bivalent booster at least two weeks prior to the conference.
Masks
Masks must be worn in conference sessions and common areas except when actively eating/drinking or presenting. We are asking for people to be cognizant of social distancing. We will have a limited supply of masks on-site so please bring your own.
Testing & Symptoms
Please do not come to the conference if you test positive or display signs of covid (or other contagious illnesses).