CALL FOR PAPERS

Land Back/Language Back

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Tenth Annual American Indian & Indigenous Collective Symposium

Saturday - Sunday April 22-23, 2023

In-person at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Call for Papers

The 10th Annual American Indian & Indigenous Collective (AIIC) Symposium, Land Back/Language Back, calls for individual papers, performances, or panel proposals from across many disciplines (humanities, fine arts, social sciences, ITEK, and STEM) within and outside of the academy, including practitioners and community members. In pondering the lush promise of living languages, worlds, waterways and lands, we ask our participants to share conversations on Indigenous praxis on the survival and continuance of living worlds linked to living words through relationships to the land. With this theme, participants can locate these conversations in language (re)vitalization work, but these discussions are also open to many approaches in focusing on the Land Back imperative. There are crucial non-spoken/non-written languages addressed through land-based pedagogy and knowledge reclamation more broadly, which braids Land Back/Language Back as a call for place-based restoration. Language is an embodied practice that intimates and animates the land and relationships to the land.

Confirmed speakers: Sweeney Windchief (Fort Peck Assiniboine), Montana  State University; Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Luiseño and Cupeño), Georgetown University ; Beth Rose Middleton Manning (Afro-Caribbean, Eastern European), UC Davis, ; Arkotong Longkumer, University of Edinburgh; Liudmila Nikanorova, Open University UK; Bjørn Ola Tafjord, University of Bergen; Greg Johnson, UCSB.

We will invite scholars and community members to a two-day Symposium April 22nd and 23rd that will allow us to bring in even more perspectives. We will also have a welcome event for our AIIC center. Keynote announcements to follow. 

Questions:

+What insights does ITEK provide in connecting language and land?

+What are some innovative practices in land-based pedagogy?

+In what ways are lands and waterways central to our Indigenous methodologies?

+How does language function in Indigenous methodologies and land-based praxis?

+What relationships form when considering language and land with visual and spatial practices? 

Submission Instructions:

The symposium is intended for students (undergraduate and graduate), faculty, staff, and community members. 

Undergraduates, Graduates, Faculty, Staff and Community Members: 

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a one page CV by following the instructions on this Google Form.

Due: Tuesday, March 14th.

**Please reach out to ucsbaiic@gmail.com with any questions.**  

***For more information, please visit our Symposium website.***

Heartfelt thanks to our 2023 AIIC Symposium co-sponsors:

Bren School of Environmental Science and Management; The Global Latinidades Project; UCSB Walter Capps Center; UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC); English Department’s American Cultures in a Global Context Center (ACGCC); Hull Professor and Chair of Women's Studies Program; American Indian and Indigenous Collective Research Focus Group (AIIC RFG); English Department’s Literature and the Environment; The Blum Center ; UCSB Department of Environmental Studies; UCSB Department of Asian American Studies; UCSB Department of Chicana/o Studies; UCSB Department of English; UCSB Department of Feminist Studies; UCSB Department of Global Studies; UCSB Department of History; UCSB Department of Linguistics; UCSB Department of Religious Studies; UCSB Graduate Division; UCSB Office of Equal Opportunity & Discrimination Prevention; UCSB Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; UCSB Executive Vice Chancellor’s Office; UCSB Associated Students (AS); AS Food Bank