Envisioning Cascadia: 7th Regional Geography Conference Announced, September 2012
The seventh annual Critical Geographies Mini-Conference, temporarily renamed “Decolonizing Cascadia? Rethinking Critical Geographies,” will be held at the University of British Columbia on November 16th and 17th, 2012. The focus will be on envisioning and critically challenging known geographies of the Pacific Northwest, and that of Cascadia.
Consistent with the previous mini-conferences’ goals, the emphasis is on creating a fun, engaging, and friendly atmosphere that embraces an unsettling of the ‘traditional’ conference structure. The conference’s organizers welcome a wide range of spatially-oriented critical scholarship and encourage creative media on various themes from geography and other disciplines. There is no fee to attend the conference and graduate students are particularly encouraged to apply.
Responding to discussions at previous meetings, the plenary theme will be decolonization in which participants critically engage with (neo)colonial practices in knowledge production, pedagogies, academic institutions, and regionalisms. Decolonization involves a reimagining of relationships among land, people, and the state. This process requires study, conversation, and continual unlearning. As two of multiple decolonization strategies at this year’s conference, the organizers recognize meeting in unceded Coast Salish territory and work towards the inclusion of non-academic knowledges.
More information can be found at: http://www.geog.ubc.ca/cascadia2012/
