Abstract submissions

Wits Centre for Diversity Studies Conference

Second Call for Abstracts (Re)Imagining Liberations: Institutionalised Despair*Critical Hope

6-8 August 2018, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.


Achievements of anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, queer, disability and other struggles may be facing a reversal as once again dominations, marginalisations and exploitations of those constructed as racial, ethnic, religious, national, sexed/gendered ‘others’ seem to be gaining currency. The planetary ecological crisis, global financial crises, expanding social inequalities, political and religiously motivated violence contribute to a climate of systematised and institutionalised domination and oppression. In such a world, it may seem that the odds are so stacked against the disempowered that they are structurally condemned to despair.


Dominant paradigms and concepts for imagining liberation and fashioning hope, such as nationalism, globalism and liberalism seem inadequate to dismantle intersecting and multiplying forms of domination. Instead, these traditional paradigms increasingly appear to conceal rather than reveal the nature and impact of dominations.


When the systems of domination are so durable and inventive, how can we enhance and redouble our efforts to bring about social justice? How should we reinvigorate our thinking on how contemporary societies may move beyond structures and systems of domination? How do we create horizons of hope envisioning a world in which our diversity is protected and valued? How do we advance efforts at the re-humanisation of the oppressed, and indeed, of the oppressor? How can we sharpen our critiques? How should critical scholarship and activism engage despair? How should hope inform critical scholarship? What kind of hope should this be?


The 5th Annual International Conference hosted by WiCDS will engage questions such as these. We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations followed by open discussions with conference delegates. Proposals may look at the interrelationships of liberation, hope and despair in the contexts of:


  • Achievements and failures of past struggles
  • Normative social formations
  • Emerging centres and margins
  • Social and political institutions
  • Identities and subjectivities
  • Social movements and civil society
  • Migration and nation
  • Ethnic and cultural formations
  • Culture, arts and representation
  • Memory and memorialisation
  • Knowledge production and epistemologies
  • Affective economies
  • Bodies and embodiment
  • Faith, spirituality and religion
  • Law and legislation
  • Institutions and organisations
  • Economic practices and occupations
  • Violences
  • Past, present and future imaginaries


This is the second call for abstracts, which are due by Thursday, 31 May 2018. Abstracts should be between 250 and 300 words, and should be sent to info.wicds@wits.ac.za , accompanied by a single paragraph bio. We will respond by 15 June 2018.


Confirmed Keynote Speakers


Professor Drucilla Cornell


Drucilla Cornell is a Professor at Rutgers University in Political Science and a Professor Extraordinaire and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. From 2003 to the present Professor Cornell has run a project called the uBuntu Project in South Africa which combines research into indigenous ideals and values, and advocacy for their importance in all aspects of the new dispensation, including law. From 2007 to 2010 she held the National Research Foundation Chair in indigenous values, the customary law, and the dignity jurisprudence for the Constitutional Court. She has written numerous books, her most recent being /Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity and Constitutional Transformation.


Professor Lewis Gordon


Lewis Gordon is Professor of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President and Core Professor at the Global Center for Advanced Studies; and Honorary Professor at the Unit of the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa. Gordon’s most recent books are What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (NY: Fordham UP; London: Hurst; Johannesburg: Wits UP, 2015; in Swedish, Vad Fanon Sa, Stockholm: TankeKraft förlag, 2016), La sud prin nord-vest: Reflecţii existenţiale afrodiasporice, trans. Ovidiu Tichindeleanu (Cluj, Romania: IDEA Design & Print, 2016), and, with Fernanda Frizzo Bragato, Geopolitics and Decolonization: Perspectives from the Global South (London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).


Dr. Lydia Potts


Dr. Lydia Potts is a social scientist with specialization in migration studies as well as in gender studies. She teaches at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany and has vast experience in transnational research, teaching and curriculum development with European, Asian and African partners. Since 2011, she is the consortium coordinator of EMMIR, the African-European Erasmus Mundus Master Course on Migration and Intercultural Relation. From 2012 - 2015 she directed the research project ALMIN (Migrant One-Parent Families in Lower Saxony/Germany).


Professor Garth Stevens


Garth Stevens is a clinical psychologist by training, he holds the position of Assistant Dean for Research in the Faculty of Humanities, as well as Professor in the Department of Psychology. From 2010-2012 he held the position of Co-Assistant Dean for Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is currently a B-rated researcher by the National Research Foundation (NRF), interested in psychosocial understandings of human development, and applying psychosocial thinking to our personal and social worlds where appropriate. The thrust of his research is however in critical and community psychology. His primary social research interests include foci on race, racism and related social asymmetries; racism and knowledge production; ideology, power and discourse; violence and its prevention; historical/collective trauma and memory; and masculinity, gender and violence.


Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard


Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Ph.D. (Associate Professor, African American Studies, University of California, Irvine) researches black political thought and the material conditions of knowledge production, black movements, and raced gender consciousness and queer and trans sexualities internationally. She has several new roles in publishing as the Managing Editor of the National Political Science Review and is one of the History/Social Science Book Review Editors for Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. She is the author of Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability (University of California Press 2015) which emphasizes transnational linkages that made “poor whites” the central currency for US and South African intellectuals, philanthropists, and race relations policy makers and she is the editor of Theories of Blackness: On Life and Death (2011) and guest editor of numerous Special Issues.


An issue of the International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies (IJCDS) will publish selected papers from this conference. All attendees are required to register via our conference website www.liberations2018.com 


Registration will remain open until 20 July 2018. Students and staff of the University of the Witwatersrand who wish to attend should also register via the website.


We look forward to receiving your contribution to this critical discussion.