Globalization Conference 2023 Overview
KINSHIP-IN-ACTION:
Relationality and the Spaces
We Occupy in Time of
Ecological Precarity
September 14th—16th, 2023
Airway Heights, WA
“Using kin as a verb reminds us that kin is always alive. It’s a movement and it’s
a flow and it’s a process, kind of like how wind and air flow. Or water, again
getting back to that river, as ‘kinning.’ We’re kinning with the river. …”
After a three year absence, we reopen the Globalization, Diversity, and Education (GDE) conference, centering Wall Kimmerer, Hausdoerffer, & Van Horn’s (2021) conversation surrounding Kinship-in-action, one which conceptualizes and embodies the wisdom of living kin as a verb–kinning. Kinning asks us to re/member and attend to our relationships through spatial and temporal contexts. In a planet-time of ecological precarity–inextricably linked ecological and human crisis after crisis–we ask, where do we go from here?
Where is that place where what should not ‘happen to nobody’ happens every day? Why is it that, in so many places found in every corner of the global space, so many human beings face that which ‘no one deserves’?
Ferreira da Silva’s (2009) questions are rhetorical because that place of spectacularized and mundane mass violence, hate, extractivism, ecological collapse, expendability, inhumanity, and social suffering is here, wherever you are reading this from.
Nxumelo, Nayak, and Tuck (2022) remind us that this moment is, “Too big to imagine and too urgent to ignore, climate crisis is the text or the subtext of many of the news headlines…we are in times of guaranteed precarity” (p.97) made bare and magnified by the pandemic. Settler-colonial values of individualism have frayed and severed human, and more than human relationships. Are they beyond repair?
For this year’s GDE conference, we (re)gather through engaged scholarship, research, and dialogue. We hope to deepen our awareness of spaces that we occupy, question the energy that we bring with us, and interrogate the language that we employ. Our call for proposals is rooted in our yearning for dynamic exchange. Through a holistic lens, we invite proposals for paper presentations, workshops, panels, artistic expressions, and posters that flow, move, and process ideas and conversations connected to nature-culture relations inside of ecological precarity and the climate crisis.
As educators, how do we rightly relate? What risks are we taking to build brave spaces, bridges, and non-hierarchical, rhizomatic networks as brilliant as the forest floor? What rutted pathways do we, ourselves, walk? How will you support a world that supports future generations? As Kimmerer, Hausdoerffer, & Van Horn (2021) assert: “…kin as a verb is permeable and it’s movable, and it requires [of us] some action or intention.”
References
Ferreira da Silva, D. (2009). No-Bodies. Grith Law Review, 18(2), 212–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2009.10854638
Kimmerer, Hausdoerer, & Van Horn (eds.) (2021). Kinship: Belonging in a world of relations. Center for Humans and Nature Press: Libertyville, Illinois. https://humansandnature.org/kinship/
Nxumalo, F., Nayak, P., & Tuck, E. (2022). Education and ecological precarity: Pedagogical, curricular, and conceptual provocations. Curriculum Inquiry, 52(2), 97–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2022.2052634
WHY?!?!
We asked three doctoral students WHY GDE2023 was important and WHY they’re each excited for it.
Angel Bonilla
“With the ongoing climate crisis, we’ve been presented with questions and issues that require community, collaboration, and vulnerability. So this year, it is crucial that we deliberately make space for conversation and connection with the conference’s overarching themes of Globalization, diversity, and equity to move toward a generation of kinning for a better future.
“This is my first time having the opportunity to experience GDE, so I am looking forward to hearing the stories, ideas, and realities that folks will bring to the space.”
Sequoia Dance
“The Globalization, Diversity and Education Conference is an opportunity for our college to collaborate and learn with and in community. This conference gathers community members, students, teachers, and researchers to make space for both formal and informal conversations about our shared futures. Our college has the opportunity to host these conversations and facilitate the discussions to better understand the ways in which we can strengthen our relations with each other, and this year specifically, the responsibilities we carry to be good relatives. What an opportunity it is for us, as an institution and college, to be included in this conversation and to begin to understand our responsibility in our question, “Where do we go from here?”.
“This year I am excited to join our guests on the homelands of the Spokane to gather and to listen with each other center conversations around our environment and the responsibility we hold as educators. I am excited to build new connections, deepen relations, and learn more about the ways in which I-and we-can work towards a future that shifts the tides to something that is more caring, collaborative and community-both human and more than human- based.”
Zulekha Khamisi
“As climate crisis reckon our world today, Covid-19 didn’t spare us either. Covid-19 affected the most critical part of society, the social aspect of it. By restricting movement and socialization, we lost the relational aspect. Many of us recoiled into our cocoons. As we regather this year for the globalization conference, we seek to awaken these relational spaces that covid-19 almost destroyed. We strive to rebuild these kinship ties as we discuss critical issues affecting our world today and how as educators we can do to create awareness and alleviate the situation.”