Work, Sustainability, and Resilience in the Post-Pandemic
Date TBA
Virtual or In Person TBA
Denver, CO is being considered as our conference site
Call for Papers, Workshops, Presentations
The NACCS 2023 Conference theme, “Work, Sustainability, and Resilience in the Post-Pandemic,” invites your participation by submitting requests to present papers, to organize workshops, or to facilitate presentations. The theme focuses on how we tackle our forthcoming challenges, as a national organization focused on a particular field of study, but also as an intellectual space that has fed generations of thinkers, activists, artists, organizers, teachers, and planners. The geographic space for Mexican America continues to grow, nationally, internationally, and bi-nationally; the intellectual space, Chicana/o/x Studies, also has grown and changed.
A plenary session will address the conference theme with 3-4 speakers tackling each topic. Three NACCS Chair-sponsored, invited panels or workshops will provide additional opportunity to deepen the discussions that will inevitably ensue after the plenary session(s) allowing students, younger and senior scholars, artists, community activists, and local representatives to explore and generate ideas.
Cognizant of shifting priorities, understandings, and transformation, potential questions for presenters include:
- How does the topic of this year’s conference guide your work, or are we really in the post-pandemic?
- A prior NACCS conference in the midst of COVID addressed the disease’s differential impact, but what do we know today about the pandemic’s lingering, detrimental effects on Chicana/os?
- Labor and working class, lower middle class communities find themselves constrained by many forces, but especially in housing shortages (push out) and in neighborhoods experiencing food deserts. What are some Chicana/o/x responses to the national housing crisis, the global food shortages, and the unsustainable environmental practices that limit access to health, food, and shelter?
- Where and how we labor is a guiding NACCS theme; in our current and challenging climate, how do we surmount barriers and address inequities (in education, by gender/sex, sexuality, in rural areas or small communities, via our community engagements that are often labelled as “service” in the academy?); in institutions of education, what impact does fear and terror play (Uvalde, for one, as well as campus assaults, sexual harassment, survivorship), for us as educators, as students, as workers at the University?
- Now over fifty-four (54) years of age, is NACCS a senior organization? An academic one in its intellectual origins? A political change agent? A teaching environment? Are we dedicated to enumerating its challenges and sustainability? If this organization began with a social science orientation, and expanded, where do the humanities and the sciences fit today?
- If Chicano/as/x are a resilient people, driven by resilient academic cultures aware of their historical roots and of the need for organized areas or fields of study, how do we address and plan for future challenges? What might those be? What is the value of generational and intergenerational expertise? Immigration and racial status? Intersectional identities?
- What, in a post-pandemic or an epidemic environment, are our gravest barriers to social, gender, sexual, racial, and economic justice? What type of leadership do we need and want? Who will be our next generation of teachers, professors, scholars, lawyers, medical doctors and nurses, politicians, organizers, representatives, artists, or business owners in this coming decade?
- Given our diverse perspectives, levels of preparation, academic homes (departments), political orientations, historical roots, home communities, how do we maintain a Chicana/o/x Studies core and communicate our vision for the future in our collective work together? Where is, and what is, “la causa” today?
Submit your single, poster, thematic, roundtable, and/or workshop proposal here. Submissions are due by November 15.
Fall 2022 – Vol. 48, No. 1