February 7-10, 2024
Deadline EXTENDED: November 1, 2023

The African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Center at James Madison University invites proposals for its annual interdisciplinary conference, to be held from Wednesday, February 7 to Saturday, February 10, 2024.  The conference brings together scholars, archivists, and practitioners from a wide variety of overlapping and intersecting fields. This year’s theme is “Reckoning,” a term that evokes the multitudinous ways responsibility and accountability may be linked to forms of measurement, methodology, and knowledge-constitution.

We invite proposals for both virtual and in-person presentations. We welcome proposals from scholars from all relevant disciplines at any point in their scholarly careers. Proposals for individual presentations or pre-constituted panels could address, but are not limited to, topics such as these:

Accountability
Standards and measures
Responsibility and mutuality
Justice and its systems
Truth and reconciliation
Transparency
Assessment in education and other professions
Reparations and restorative justice
Decolonization
Ecological reckoning
Racial reckoning
Consequences and repercussions
Narratives, testimonials, exposés, archives, and historiography
Equity
Dead reckoning and wayfinding
Education as reckoning
Crisis and its resolutions
Recursions
Vengeance and/as/or justice
Endings, aftermaths, and futurities
Takhar, Ngozi
Haints, soucouyants, duppies, and other hauntings
Black geographies
Digitizing reckoning
Reckoning the body
Healthcare systems
Intersectional reckonings

This year, in partnership with the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation (GovInn) at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, we will be hosting a special stream of panels devoted to “Accountability in African Public Policy and Administration.” Further details may be found here. If you are interested in presenting your work as part of this special stream, please specify on your proposal.

Please send 300-word presentation proposals, or 1000-word panel proposals, to aaadstudies@jmu.edu by November 1, 2023. Proposals should include a presentation and/or panel title, along with each presenter’s name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a brief bio. Please specify whether your proposal is for an in-person or virtual presentation. Panel proposals must include at least three panelists. Further information and updates about the conference may be found at sites.lib.jmu.edu/aaadjmu.

International respondents traveling to the United States in need of Visa documentation are encouraged to submit their abstracts as early as possible. International respondents will be notified on an ongoing basis. US respondents will be notified within a month after the deadline listed above.