The Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites graduate students of any discipline and any period to submit abstracts for papers addressing the theme of Beyond Marginality: Race, Ethnicity, and Memory. Borderlands are spaces where people of different ethnicities, cultures, religions, political systems, or linguistic traditions come into contact, often without one authority exercising complete control. These contacts reveal imbalances of power and senses of belonging, developed and maintained through areas of contact that may be physical, conceptual, or metaphorical. Studying the borderlands reveals marginality as a decentralizing process, treating the marginalized subject as the center of the discourse rather than at its outskirts.
The 2018 Borderlands International Graduate Student Conference seeks papers that address how interactions in the borderlands may be framed through constructs of race, ethnicity, and memory. This
topic encourages inquiries into the constructed production of race and ethnicity, recognizing these categories as contested narratives of inequalities and difference developed across time and space and
inscribed or blurred through the collective experiences of memory. We are interested in how race and ethnicity are understood through these memories, and how these memories have the potential to blur
borders and re-examine marginality as a process of boundary-transgressing and hybridity. Some topics of interest to the conference organizers include, but are not limited to: racialization processes, histories of race and ethnicity, conflicting memories of difference, and the imagination of race or ethnicity.
The study of borderlands encourages an interdisciplinary approach. As such, the conference seeks to include a wide range of perspectives and methodologies across disciplinary boundaries, in any geographic region or historical period. We welcome paper submissions from scholars in history, anthropology, art history, theology, classics, religious studies, literature, linguistics, and all related disciplines. We also encourage, but do not require, papers that engage with theorists whose work has relevance for borderlands studies, such as: Gloria Anzaldúa, Fredrick Barth, Daniel Boyarin, Bradley Parker, Pierre Bourdieu, Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak, Thomas Tweed, James Romm, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.