APIRG Events Listings!

APIRG’s annual general meeting is OCTOBER 13 at 6pm

A. Alberta Regional Convergence for the National People's Social Forum

B. Grassroots effort, multiple organizations and individuals have come together to make this possible

C. Room 129 Education South, University of Alberta 11210 – 87 Ave

June 14, 2014 9:30am-4:30pm

D. Alberta Peoples’ Social Forum, June 14th – A grassroots initiative to promote and coordinate Alberta’s participation in the Peoples’ Social Forum in Ottawa from Aug 21-24 and beyond.

Attend a day-long Alberta Regional Convergence on June 14 at the University of Alberta in Edmonton to plan the next steps forward, including ideas for workshops, travel to Ottawa, and continuing to build a Peoples’ Social Forum here in Alberta as well

E. Free event, please register at https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/peoples-social-forum-alberta-regional-convergence-tickets-11637426857

view our website at www.psfalberta.ca.wordpress.com

Follow us on twitter at @psfalberta

Celebrate Environment Week from June 2 to 6, 2014 at UAlberta. Take part in sustainability-related events, tours and workshops on campus (presented by the Office of Sustainability in partnership with Sustain SU and The Lung Association, Alberta and NWT). Register for free by noon on Friday, May 30, 2014 (not all events require registration).

Call for Papers – Complicities, Connections, & Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism / Deadline: August 15, 2014 Feral Feminisms, a new, independent, inter-media, peer-reviewed, open-access online journal, invites submissions for a special issue entitled “Complicities, Connections, & Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism,” guest edited by Ghaida Moussa, Shaista Patel, and Nishant Upadhyay. Indigenous and/or critical race scholars and activists have raised questions about the anti-colonial and decolonization politics of diasporic people of colour living in white settler colonies. Some key discussions include whether people of colour are settlers, what their place is in the structure of white settler colonialism, and what kinds of anti- and de-colonial alliances they can form with Indigenous peoples in white settler colonies. Many of these conversations are heavily informed by the critiques of anti-racist scholarship put forth by the Mi'kmaw scholar Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005) in their article “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Critiquing anti-racist scholars for failing to ground their critiques in the original and ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous peoples of the lands they now occupy, Lawrence and Dua argue that people of colour are complicit in ongoing processes of settler colonialism and nation-building. While several theorists of colour engaged with this article by examining and challenging their own complicity in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, some also challenged Lawrence and Dua’s arguments by critiquing their conflation of settler colonialism and immigration, and by questioning who is autochthonous to the land and what it means to claim rights based on indigeneity (Sharma and Wright, 2008/09).  With careful attention to semantics and with a firm caution to not metaphorize decolonization (Tuck and Yang, 2012), this special issue of Feral Feminisms calls for submissions that center indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, that explore the ways in which anti-racist theory and practice uphold and sustain colonial discourse, and that imagine social movements, communities, and scholarship that work within a social justice framework in ways that resist the reproduction of colonial dynamics. We encourage submissions that pay close attention to the ways in which multiple histories, violences, borders, spaces, time, race, gender, class, sexualities, and genealogies are mobilized to uphold white settler colonialism. We are also interested in exploring sites of solidarity, resistance, and hope between Indigenous peoples and people of colour. We invite contributors to displace the nationstate by engaging with critical feminist transnational perspective(s) and modes of knowledge production. We also take our cue here from Indigenous feminist writings that theorize Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty as challenges to the borders of white settler colonial states. Conjointly, we trace the lineages of these conversations to the contributions of Black feminists, feminists of colour, transnational feminists, and trans/queer theorists who disrupt the violence of settler colonialism by challenging the gendered and heteropatriarchal organizing of bodies in these white settler states. Possible questions for exploration for this issue include: ● What are some of the common grounds between Indigenous peoples and people of colour in struggles against racism, gender-based violence, poverty, exclusionary immigration policies, labour commodification and exploitation, police violence, the prison-industrial complex, ableist policies and structures, invasions, and wars, that need to be urgently (but ethically) examined? ● How are histories and presents of Indigenous peoples in white settler colonies entangled with those of Indigenous peoples of former European colonies, those living within present-day American invasions (outside of the Americas), or those who have been forced on this land through generations of slavery? ● How can we trace and resist histories, legacies and violences of anti-Black racism in settler colonial contexts? ● How can we centre gender and sexuality in critiques of settler colonialism and white supremacy? ● How can we challenge ableism within the nation state as well as in the academy and engage with critical disability theoretical interventions in the making of the settler nation state as well as racial formations? ● How does trans theory help understand the making of gender and exclusionary violences in white settler states? ● What place do migrants/refugees fleeing political, economic, and social wars - some instigated by the “West” and some from within the postcolonial nations - have in white settler societies? ● In what ways do extant imperial and colonial forces operate differently towards these communities in terms of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2002) in determining who is invited into the realm of social life and who, instead, is confined to social death? More urgently, how does “social” death come to be, at its extent, implicated in genocide and concrete loss? We welcome submissions from all fields that relate to Indigenous studies, social and political theory,critical race theory, anti-racism theory, settler colonialism, postcolonial theory, transnational theory, art and literature, critical disability studies, gender, feminist and women’s studies, trans and queer theory, and equity studies.  We extend a hearty invitation to community members and social justice activists who engage in these discussion through their community work or activist endeavours. And, we clearly recognize that these categories of authors overlap and intertwine as resistance and survival are breathed in all spaces that we inhabit and travel in, and thus welcome contributions that challenge “academic writing” and the academic-industrial complex. For submission guidelines, please see the attached CFP and visit: http://feralfeminisms.com/submission-guidelines/. Please direct inquiries and submissions no later than August 15, 2014, by email to the guest editors at Ghaida Moussa ([email protected]), Shaista Patel ([email protected]), and Nishant Upadhyay ([email protected]).