4th International Critical Muslim Studies Conference

The fourth Critical Muslim Studies conference invites scholars, researchers and thinkers to engage with the theme of ReOrienting Resistance. This conference is a provocation as well as an invitation to conceptualise and confront the necessity and possibility of resistances in the 21st century. The current conjuncture is characterised by diminishing political imaginations of both the methods and objectives of resistances. By resistances, we refer to endeavours, orientations, experiments, and creative practices that cultivate and galvanise forms of re-imagining, escaping, and overcoming colonial regulation and objectification scenarios, with new decolonial strategies. The idea of new decolonial strategies embraces the politics of the resistances to come, with reflections on the imbrication of theory and practice underpinning the great liberation struggles of the 20th century that now seem out of time.

The logic of white supremacy finds expression and extends to other forms of ethno-nationalisms increasingly characterised by xenophobia against refugees, migrants, and minorities, with Islamophobia emerging as a key vector for apartheid and genocide. By targeting expressions of Muslimness and its various cognates, and by demonising immigration and cultural ethnicities, white supremacists and others have sought to enclose the commons within sovereign boundaries of colonial-racial policing. The liberal-democratic compact is being hollowed out; even the fictions of human and civil rights are being abandoned. The space (intellectual, cultural, economic) to build solidarities and identifications around global emancipatory horizons is under threat, necessitating the urgency of the political reimagination of the decolonial question: what is to be done that has not been done?

This conference aims to create a generative space for critically examining the challenges and exigencies of our current moment, as well as formulating counter-histories of the future. Our discussions will explore various forms of resistances, including—but not limited to—decolonial investigations, the cultivation of post-Western horizons, the overcoming of white sovereignties, and reflections on the limits and challenges of resisting the colonial-racial formations of Westernese.

This conference will be held in Istanbul, building upon the success of its three predecessors. As before, this international and interdisciplinary conference seeks to facilitate dialogue among researchers who may not explicitly identify with Critical Muslim Studies but share overlapping concerns and interests

For more information and to register visit:

https://criticalmuslimstudies.co.uk/project/4th-international-critical-muslim-studies-conference/