Sixth Annual ACGS Conference: Racial Orders, Racist Borders

17-18 October 2019, Amsterdam.

Please click here for the provisional programme.

Racial Orders, Racist Borders is the sixth annual conference of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies, organized in cooperation with the collaborative research center Dynamics of Security at the Universities of Giessen and Marburg, Germany. The conference brings together papers that examine how forms, discourses, and practices of racism have materialized in various institutional contexts.

The Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) was established at the University of Amsterdam in 2012, as part of the Cultural Transformations and Globalisation Research Priority Area. The Research Priority Areas represent the best the University of Amsterdam has to offer in terms of research in the field of the humanities.

ACGS focuses on the profound and lasting ways in which globalisation is transforming our world. From new patterns of migration and diaspora, to new trends in city and nation-building, to new techno-informational networks of communication and knowledge, the world is in rapid flux.

While the socioeconomic dimensions of globalisation have been widely studied, less attention has been paid to its cultural dimensions. And yet, the need to identify and understand how globalisation is effecting cultural change—spanning from Asia to Europe and from Africa to the Americas—is central to any effort to form a comprehensive picture of our contemporary world. ACGS responds directly to this need and, in the process, provides a strong humanities perspective that is frequently lacking in existing academic and public debates.

The researchers brought together by ACGS have a longstanding tradition of analysing discourses and representations of the nation state, European citizenship, migrants, minorities, new media, and other related issues that are undergoing rapid and dramatic change as a result of globalisation. ACGS researchers build on their shared research momentum and knowledge to generate new ways of understanding and explaining the relationship between globalisation and cultural transformation.

The collaborative research center Dynamics of Security was established in Germany in 2014 at the Justus-Liebig University Giessen, the Philipps University Marburg, and the Marburg-based Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe. This interdisciplinary research center brings scholars from the fields of history, political theory, media studies, conflict studies, art history, gender studies, and legal studies together to analyse critically the consequences of problematizing societal phenomena such as migration, minorities, religion, state formation, finance, urban planning, and health through the lens of security. While the research center builds conceptually on securitization theories and critical security studies, it aims at advancing current debates through the examination of practices, technologies and discourses of security from a historical perspective.

The research center Dynamics of Security is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and annually offers guest scholarships for a period of three to six months to scholars interested in critical research about narratives of crisis, conflict and security.

The international conference “Racial Orders, Racist Borders” is the outcome of the productive and inspiring collaboration between critical scholars of culture, society, media, race and security at the Universities of Amsterdam, Giessen, Southern California and Southern Maine.