Imagining Indigenous Futurities

Join the UCSB AIIC's

9th Annual (Virtual) Symposium

Imagining Indigenous Futurities

We virtually welcome you to UCSB while acknowledging the region's traditional custodians, the Chumash people. We pay our respects to Chumash Elders past, present and future for they hold the memories, the traditions, and the culture of this area, which has become a place of learning for people from all over the world.

When: Friday through Sunday, April 22-24, 2022

Where: This year's symposium will be held virtually over Zoom. 

To attend, please register on Zoom: https://ucsb.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvcOytqTouHdJ7037MfXMV326vMbCpqC_L 

Dr. Dolly Kikon is a Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology and Development Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. She belongs to the Lotha Naga Indigenous community from Northeast India (Asia). She received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, and was a Post-Doctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Prior to that, she practised as a lawyer in the Supreme Court of India and the Gauhati High Court in Assam. She is also a Senior Research Associate (SRA) at the Australia India Institute and serves on the Council of Advisors for The India Forum. Her research focuses on resource extraction, militarisation, development, human rights, migration, gender, and political economy. Some of her workds include, Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics & Militarization in Northeast India (University of Washington Press, 2019), Leaving the Land Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism and Urbanism in Dimapur (co-authored, Oxford University Press, 2021) and Life and Dignity: Women’s Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Dimapur (Nagaland). She has published several articles in academic journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Current Anthropology, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies, The Highlander: Journal of Highland Asia, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Contemporary South Asia, etc. Dr. Kikon is currently working on a research project titled, “Practicing Food Sovereignty: Indigenous Peoples and Agroecological Relationships in the Eastern Himalayas.” 

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and an independent educator in American Indian environmental policy and other issues.  At CSUSM she teaches courses on environmentalism and American Indians, traditional ecological knowledge, religion and philosophy, Native women’s activism, American Indians and sports, and decolonization. She also works within the field of critical sports studies, examining the intersections of indigeneity and the sport of surfing. As a public intellectual, Dina brings her scholarship into focus as an award-winning journalist, with her work appearing at Indian Country Today, the Los Angeles Times, High Country News, Time.com, Slate, History.com, Bioneers, Truthout, the Pacifica Network, Grist, CSPAN Booktalk, The Boston Globe, and many more. Dina is the author of two books; the most recent award-winning As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. She is currently under contract with Beacon Press for a new book under the working title Illegitimate Nation: Privilege, Race, and Belonging in the U.S. Settler State, and is also a co-editor of a new collection from Cambridge University Press’s Elements Series on Indigenous Environmental Research. 

Dr. Grace L. Dillon  (Anishinaabe with family, friends, and relatives from Bay Mills Nation and Garden River Nation with Aunties and Uncles also from the Saulteaux Nation) is Professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Department in the School of Gender, Race, and Nations and also Affiliated Professor at English and Women, Gender, and Sexualities Departments at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on a range of interests including Indigenous Futurisms, Queer Indigenous Studies, Gender, Race, and Nations Theories and Methodologies courses, Climate and Environmental Justice(s) from Indigenous Perspectives, Reparations Justice, Resurgence Justice, Science Fiction, Indigenous Cinema, Popular Culture, Race and Social Justice, and early modern literature.   She is the Senior editor along with Editors Isiah Lavender III, Taryne Taylor, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay of the upcoming Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms including areas such as Afrofuturism, African Futurisms, Indigenous Futurisms, Latinx Futurisms, Asian Futurisms, Gulf Futurisms and BIPOC Queer and (Dis)ability Futurisms, (forthcoming 2022) She also edited the first scholarly collection of Indigenous Futurisms with John Rieder and Michael Levy for a double-special edition of the journal Extrapolation (2016) and was the Non-fiction editor of Light Speed: People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (June 2016). She is the editor of Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (University of Arizona Press, 2012) and Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest (Oregon State University Press, 2003). 

Heartfelt thanks to our 2022 AIIC Symposium co-sponsors:

American Cultures in a Global Context Center (ACGCC); Blum Center; Bren School of Environmental Science and Management; Center for Black Studies Research; The Global Latinidades Project; Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative; Hull Professor and Chair of Women's Studies Program; Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC); the IHC’s American Indian and Indigenous Collective Research Focus Group (the IHC AIIC RFG);  Literature and Environment Research Initiative; Literature and the Mind Research Initiative; UCSB College of Letters & Science; UCSB Department of Asian American Studies; UCSB Department of English; UCSB Department of Environmental Studies; UCSB Department of Feminist Studies; UCSB Department of History of Art and Architecture; UCSB Graduate Division; UCSB Graduate Student Association; UCSB Office of Equal Opportunity & Discrimination Prevention; UCSB Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.