Hegemonic discourses of globalization emphasize interconnectivity that is reliant on constructed local and global borders and boundaries while overlooking the lived realities within different types of borders that themselves harbor counter discourses, histories, and experiences. Constructed standards for culture, religion, gender, and sexuality are displacing, marginalizing, and persecuting peoples around the globe. Historically, scholars and activists alike, through various collectivites, spaces, and ideologies, have transgressed and disrupted mainstream globalizing networks and narratives that reinforce borders in the service of capitalism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and the state.

 

Global transgressions, which we define as disobedience to the foundations of globalization thinking that rely on borders and institutions, manifest in both theory and praxis. Transgressive actors and forces challenge colonialities that raise borders to segregate cultures and ethnicities, to exclude undesirable ‘others’, or to validate populist discourses and constructed ideas of belonging, which are long-established imperialist mechanisms.

 

Thus, the 2019 Society for Global Scholars conference is a call for scholars, activists, social movements, and students to regroup, rethink, and respond to the strengthening of borders and explore spatial colonialities, while highlighting and discovering Global South voices and subjectivities. We invite interdisciplinary scholars working on critical concepts that engage and challenge, but are not limited to, the following:

 

-Border thinking and border crossing                                     -Climate change and environment

-Militarization, securitization, and policing of borders          -Social, cultural, and political borders

-Constructions of nationalism and citizenship                        -Transculturation

-Urban segregation, gentrification, marginalization               -Abolition geography

-Critical prison theory and critical criminology                     -Marronage and Fugitivity                                                                        -(Im)migration, dispossession, and displacement                    -Diasporic and refugee autonomies