Globalization, Diversity, and Education Conference (September 14-16th.)
Globalization, Diversity, and Education Conference (September 14-16th.)
KINSHIP-IN-ACTION: Relationality and the Spaces We Occupy in Time of Ecological Precarity
Globalization, Diversity, and Education Conference (September 14-16th.)
KINSHIP-IN-ACTION: Relationality and the Spaces We Occupy in Time of Ecological Precarity
KINSHIP-IN-ACTION: Relationality and the Spaces We Occupy in Time of Ecological Precarity
“Using kin as a verb reminds us that kin is always alive. It’s a movement and it’s
a flow and it’s a process, kind of like how wind and air flow. Or water, again
getting back to that river, as ‘kinning.’ We’re kinning with the river. …”
After a three year absence, we reopen the Globalization, Diversity, and Education (GDE) conference, centering Wall Kimmerer, Hausdoerffer, & Van Horn’s (2021) conversation surrounding Kinship-in-action, one which conceptualizes and embodies the wisdom of living kin as a verb–kinning. Kinning asks us to re/member and attend to our relationships through spatial and temporal contexts. In a planet-time of ecological precarity–inextricably linked ecological and human crisis after crisis–we ask, where do we go from here?
Where is that place where what should not ‘happen to nobody’ happens every day? Why is it that, in so many places found in every corner of the global space, so many human beings face that which ‘no one deserves’?
Ferreira da Silva’s (2009) questions are rhetorical because that place of spectacularized and mundane mass violence, hate, extractivism, ecological collapse, expendability, inhumanity, and social suffering is here, wherever you are reading this from.
Nxumelo, Nayak, and Tuck (2022) remind us that this moment is, “Too big to imagine and too urgent to ignore, climate crisis is the text or the subtext of many of the news headlines…we are in times of guaranteed precarity” (p.97) made bare and magnified by the pandemic. Settler-colonial values of individualism have frayed and severed human, and more than human relationships. Are they beyond repair?
For this year’s GDE conference, we (re)gather through engaged scholarship, research, and dialogue. We hope to deepen our awareness of spaces that we occupy, question the energy that we bring with us, and interrogate the language that we employ. Our call for proposals is rooted in our yearning for dynamic exchange. Through a holistic lens, we invite proposals for paper presentations, workshops, panels, artistic expressions, and posters that flow, move, and process ideas and conversations connected to nature-culture relations inside of ecological precarity and the climate crisis.
As educators, how do we rightly relate? What risks are we taking to build brave spaces, bridges, and non-hierarchical, rhizomatic networks as brilliant as the forest floor? What rutted pathways do we, ourselves, walk? How will you support a world that supports future generations? As Kimmerer, Hausdoerffer, & Van Horn (2021) assert: “…kin as a verb is permeable and it’s movable, and it requires [of us] some action or intention.”