CPA Conference 2015
Shifting the Geography of Reason XII
Technologies of Liberation
Riviera Maya, Quintana Roo, Mexico - June 18-21
Call for Proposals
Technologies of Liberation could refer to the interrelated use of the computer, Internet, radio, mobile phones and applications including social media that, through their decentralizing character, enable people to reach large numbers of others who they can engage in multi- directional communication as journalists, commentators, and organizers. Facilitating the exposing of wrong-doing and the mobilizing of protest, scrutiny, and expanded participation, in the recent history of democratic rebellion in North Africa and the Middle East, we might think of liberation technologies as including the utilization of social media to organize the events that together culminated in the Arab Spring. The centrality of technology to processes of liberation, social justice and political transformation remain apparent across generations and across the world.
The Zapatistas were among the first to use digital technologies in the struggle against neoliberal globalization, and their efforts attracted the attention of many sympathetic intellectuals and non-governmental organizations throughout the world. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) used social networks to cross borders and build transnational alliances in real time; they were able, through their use of the World Wide Web, to promulgate their message and capture the imagination and support of other marginalized peoples fighting for liberation.
The meeting of reflections on liberation and technology is also present in Frantz Fanon’s reflections on the radio and medicine in Algeria during its war of national independence from 1954 to 1962, in addition to many of the similar reflections in the speeches of Malcolm X. As Malcolm X and Fanon’s 90th birthdays will respectively be on May 19th and July 20th, 2015, this theme could be addressed in celebration of ancestral contributions and recent world events.
Considering whether under the right conditions, in Fanon’s language, technologies can take on positive coefficients, please send individual paper and panel proposals to caribphil@gmail.com by December 15th, 2014. Be sure to include the full name, email address, institutional affiliation, and paper title of each potential participant and an abstract outlining the nature of the proposed panel and/or paper(s). As always, we will also accept proposals that do not directly address the conference theme.
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Founded in 2003 in Mona, Jamaica, the principal goal of the CPA is to support the free exchange of ideas and foster an intellectual community that is truly representative of the diversity of voices and perspectives that is paradigmatic of, but not limited to, the Caribbean. The Caribbean is thus understood not solely as a geopolitical region, but as a trope to investigate dimensions of the multiple undersides of modernity. Likewise, philosophy is conceived, not as an isolated academic discipline, but as rigorous theoretical reflection about fundamental problems faced by humanity. Understood in this way, Caribbean philosophy is a transdisciplinary form of interrogation aiming to elucidate fundamental questions that emerge with discovery, conquest, racial, gender, and sexual domination, genocide, dependency, and exploitation as well as freedom, emancipation, and decolonization.
