CFP: Teaching Critical Race Theory

This panel queries the notion of “critical race theory” and how to teach racial issues whether or not one is specifically a “critical race theorist.” This topic is especially urgent during a time of right-wing “anti-‘woke’” agendas that seek to erase the very concept of race from public education and to attack as “divisive” any effort to offer a historically informed and rigorous accounting for ongoing inequality and racism in American society. Race is perversely both denied and invoked as that topic which is too disturbing to teach and yet absolutely necessary for the maintenance of normative political structures. How do we bring such issues into the classroom and discuss them critically even as “race” is the fulcrum by which regressive political forces seek to eliminate public education itself as a space of free inquiry in an increasingly eroded polity? Diverse perspectives welcome: psychoanalytic, ethnic/gender studies, feminist, Marxist, new historicism.

This is session #18782 in the Call for Papers for the 2023 PAMLA (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association) conference, which will be held in-person only in Portland, Oregon, USA in October 2023. Please see PAMLA.org for further details. All panelists must be members of PAMLA to participate. The deadline for abstract submissions has been extended to 30 Jun 2023.

Celia Carlson