Thursday, February 27-Friday, February 28
H.J. Patterson Hall, rooms 2124 & 2130, and virtually
Join us for the 2nd Annual UMD ATLAS Conference on February 27-28! This year's conference offers two full days of sessions exploring the theme of “Agency, Decolonization, and the Politics of Knowledge Production.” With this theme, we hope to foster interdisciplinary, critical discussion broadly related to the recent calls for an epistemic break with Western forms of knowledge and control. Engage on topics related to issues of power, domination, and agency (broadly defined) within and between communities and identities; histories and intellectual traditions; politics and policies; social movements; migrations and displacements; natural and built environments; religion and spiritualities; languages and literatures; and other forms of cultural production in African and African-diasporic contexts.
Our Keynote Speaker is Dr. Kwame Edwin Otu, Associate Professor in the African Studies Program at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and author of the ethnography, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana. His Keynote Address, "Colonial Inhalations: E-waste work and Wastemen in Necropolitical Ghana," will illuminate how colonial configurations of power and dispossession are reproduced by the Ghanaian nation-state in its e-waste workers.
The conference is free for all attendees and a virtual option is available. We ask all conference attendees to register whether they are attending a single session or the full conference. Registration will remain open for all sessions for both in-person and virtual attendees for the length of the conference. Registration will also be available both days at the door, but advanced registration is strongly encouraged.