The English Graduate Organization at the University of Massachusetts Amherst presents the Methods Symposium 2024, where we explore both methods and methodologies that reframe archive, temporality, and disciplinarity, in relation to questions of decolonization. In addition to decolonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial thought, this year the symposium will explore the sibling methodological categories of migration & mobility studies, as well as critical geographies.
The Methods Symposium 2024 will occur in two parts—the latter of which will take the form of a graduate-led workshop in Spring of 2025. The first part will take place on November 9, 2024 and will feature concurrent workshops in De/postcolonial Studies, Critical Geography, and Migration & Mobility Studies, followed by a roundtable discussion. Each workshop group consists of six graduate students from UMass, who have been chosen on the basis of a short abstract that describes their research’s relationship to at least one of these fields. Invited faculty will lead these workshop conversations and share insights about the use of methods and methodology in their particular field. The closing roundtable—as well as the reception that follows it—will allow the entire group to reconvene for a discussion about methods and will be open to the public.
The first time we organized this event in 2016, we brought to campus Profs. Lisa Lowe, Christina Sharpe, and Heather Love. In 2019, we were fortunate to have Profs. Kathryn Bond Stockton, Pheng Cheah, and Jayna Brown led our workshops. This year, Profs. Sanjay Krishnan, Nicholas Caverly, and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo will join us at the symposium.
The Fall 2024 symposium is co-chaired by Janell Tryon and Manasvini Rajan. The Spring 2025 event will be co-chaired by Meenakshi Nair and Raihan Rahman. We would like to thank Adrianne Ackroyd, Sarah Ahmad, Olivia Barry, Alejandro Beas-Murrillo, and Jon Hoel for their help in organising the symposium.