August 15-21, 2019
On-Line

The Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) cordially invites participants for its Third Virtual Forum:

Beyond Borders: Refuge, Asylum, Solidarity

The On-Line Forum aims at establishing a virtual and safe space to share information, experiences and analysis, for networking, and for the formulation of ideas that can enhance our understanding of processes related to solidarity on behalf of refugees and asylum seekers. It seeks the construction of collegial dialogue to better inform both scholarship and practice.

The forum will follow 4 major axes:
(1) Solidarities from the South, decentering our understandings of solidarity as a political resource;
(2) The role of the arts in solidarity organization;
(3) Activist-scholar relationships;
(4) Statelessness, refuge-seeking, and setting the desired outcomes of solidarity actions.

We cordially invite the participation of Indigenous peoples and their organizations, non-governmental organizations that work on these issues and who collaborate with Indigenous peoples, specialized academic institutions and researchers, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, governmental organizations and agencies, and regional and local communal authorities.

The Forum will be coordinated by Jessica Stites Mor, University of British Columbia; Anthony Alessandrini, City University of New York; and Anna Bernard, King’s College London. Additional moderation including moderation in all association languages will be conducted by Alexandre Raymond-Desjardins (UQAM), Amer Younes (UBC), Ariel Nicolaides (UBC), and Jacey Anderson (Montana State).

Coordinators will propose academic and non-academic reading material and launch the conversation for each axis. Each participant will then be invited to engage as desired with the conversation, answering questions of the coordinators or comments from other participants, sharing experiences or communicating thoughts and analysis. Participation is free of cost and is expected following everyone’s own availability, forum is accessible 24 hours/7 days. Discussions and suggested readings will be mostly in English and Spanish. Coordinators will work at providing insights of the discussions in each language to increase the dialogue.

The Forum will begin at 8:00am (Pacific Time Zone-PST) on August 15th and will run until midnight (PST) on August 21st. The readings will be available via the website, and participants will be encouraged to familiarize themselves with the on-line platform in order to make comments and post their own contributions.

Interested participants must register between August 7-14th 2019, by completing the
registration form at www.can-latam.org. Registered participants will receive a certificate of
participation upon completion of the forum.

Questions or concerns about the forum can be directed to jessica.stites-mor@ubc.ca.

We kindly ask you to distribute this call within your list-serves and to send it to potentially interested participants.

Looking forward to having these conversations with you.

Regards,
Jessica, Tony and Anna