CONVENERS
Peter Kulchyski grew up in northern Manitoba and was one of the few non-Aboriginal students to attend a government-run residential high school. He has a PhD from York University and is one of the senior Canadian scholars in Native Studies. He is head of the department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba.
Smaro Kamboureli is the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, specializing in diaspora studies. She is the editor of Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves: Oratories (forthcoming in the fall of 2015).
Praba Pilar is a Colombian multi-disciplinary artist, technologist and cultural theorist exploring aspects of emerging technologies which generate globalized forms of economic and ecological crisis. She has spent the last decade and a half presenting counter narrative performances, street theatre, interactive installations, digital artworks, writing and websites.
LOCATION
7/18 – 7/20: H302 Tecnoaulas FEN
7/22: B23 FAU
DESCRIPTION
This work group explores collective practices, spaces, temporalities, and movements that surface as alternatives to global homogenization and the neoliberal project in particular.
From the experience of the groups that participants work with, this work group focuses on embodied practices that expose and counter the complicit role of the state in the spread of neoliberalism and/or creative practices that spark grassroots emancipatory social transformation. We question the idea of “the citizen,” the unchecked universality of human rights, the State as the ultimate unifying force for social organizing, the fantasies of uprooted global thought, and the current meltdown of capitalism. Our bodies mark our dissent, our dissent marks our bodies.
We hope to reflect on possibilities for the future, looking at examples of social practices that are working today throughout the hemisphere as glimpses of that “other world” that it is possible to build.