William & Mary acknowledges that the land on which we teach and we live was stolen from:

the Kiskiack (KISS-kee-ack)

Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) (cher-eh-NOCK-a NOT-away),

Chickahominy (chick-a-HOM-ih-nee)

Eastern Chickahominy (chick-a-HOM-ih-nee)

Mattaponi (matta-po-NAI)

Monacan (MON-a-kin)

Nansemond (NAN-seh-mund)

Nottoway (NOT-away),

Pamunkey (pah-MUN-kee),

Patawomeck (PAH-tah-wo-meck)

Upper Mattaponi (matta-po-NAI)

and Rappahannock (rap-a-HAN-nuk) people.

We acknowledge that they were dispossessed and dispersed with the signing of the Treaty of 1646, which legally assigned them as subjects of the Crown, subjects who did not hold the same rights as "free white men.”

William & Mary acknowledges that it owned enslaved black people, dehumanized them and deprived them of their human rights and civil liberties, and exploited their labor from its founding to the Civil War; and that it had failed to take a stand against segregation during the Jim Crow Era and beyond.

To speak about the disciplining of culture, of the desire of discipline and the desire to discipline, these configurations of cultural form and the radical heterogeneities they can generate, a matrix of violence, dispossession, possibility, and becoming--it is in an effort to understand such desires that (Inter)Disciplining Culture coheres. The condition of possibility for that coherence, for the intellectual and political work currently pursued by members of our campus community, is the dispossession of Indigenous lands and the dehumanization of enslavement. This conference aspires to keep these histories keenly in the forefront of its organizing and to continuously urge a self-reflexive reckoning with their consequences.