SUMMER INSTITUTE
UNC, CHAPEL HILL AND DUKE UNIVERSITY (U.S.A), MAY 14-22, 2016
Toward a non-Eurocentric Academia:
Border Thinking and Decoloniality from Africa and Asia to Europe and the Americas
FACULTY: WALTER MIGNOLO, CEMIL AYDIN, JULIANE HAMMER, SABINE BROECK, SEBASTIAN WEIER, MORGAN PITELKA, PRISCILLA LAYNE, LEO CHING, IQBAL SEVEA, ENGSENG HO, CHERIE RIVERS NDALIKO, ROBERTO DAINOTTO, CLAUDIA MILLIAN, PEDRO LASCH
The moral and the political crisis of the contemporary world order have recently prompted renewed urgency in the humanities and social sciences. While the current problems of the international system have led many scholars to examine the normative values of the inter-state system and global governance, the impact of cultural border constructions and contestations are generally overlooked. Civilizational borders, racial borders, or other cultural borders are often taken as constants to think from despite their internal instability and failures.
In May 2016, the Summer Institute Toward a non-Eurocentric Academia: Border Thinking and Decoloniality, will assemble advanced graduate students and junior scholars from different parts of the world to create a platform for crosscutting, inter-sectional, and trans-disciplinary research that seeks to think through the contemporary crisis of post-colonial epistemologies with a focus on border making, border contestation and new border imaginations. The workshop will aim to re-evaluate the state of humanities and social sciences in a non-Eurocentric global order today. The terms ‘Decoloniality, Borders, Borderthinking, Borderlands’ will not only be approached in their immediate political and physical sense, but also as tropes of thinking about the complexity of modern human experience that can not be understood with the analytical tools of civilizational, national and religious containers. Gathering contributions from Gender Studies, Black Studies, Religious Studies, Post-colonial Studies and Decolonial Thinking the workshop will offer various theoretical critiques rooted in multiple humanities and social science fields, yet exceeding them in their significance.
The goal of the Summer Institute is to enable its participants to generate a better understanding of contemporary global conflicts and developments, and to offer them starting points for further progress in their own research. It will consist of a mixture of interactive work in small groups focusing on projects proposed by the participants and a series of keynote lectures. The Summer Institute will be held at the Universities of Chapel Hill and Duke (U.S.A) from May 14, Saturday to May 22, Sunday. It will be the second of a yearly Summer Institutes organized in cooperation between the Bremen Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies, UNC’s Carolina Asia Center, and Duke Center for Global Studies and the Humanities. (The First Summer Institute was held in Bremen University campus in May 2015).