Awards for Seminars and Workshops
Fall 2018
Oct. 19–20, 2018
Medieval Unfreedoms: Slavery, Servitude, and Trafficking in Humans before the Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade
Elizabeth Casteen, history, and Olivia Holmes, English
This interdisciplinary conference, hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê×ÊÁÏ, brought together scholars whose research relates to unfreedom before the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to foster conversations across traditional disciplinary boundaries about the definitions, cultural significance and evolution of unfreedom in disparate parts of the medieval world.
For information, contact Elizabeth Casteen at ecasteen@binghamton.edu.
Fall 2015 — Workshop 1
Nov. 20, 2015
Challenges of Structural Injustice
The concept of structural injustice plays a prominent role in recent debates about
the global economic order but also about sexism and racism. It promises to uncover
the way in which injustices are deeply rooted in the constitution of social spheres
and not reducible to individual acts of injustice. However, human-made structures
are constituted by institutions, which are perpetuated by individual and collective
agents who are, in turn, fundamentally shaped by these institutions. The interdisciplinary
workshop "Challenges of Structural Injustice" will discuss the complex interplay of
these dimensions with regard to economic, cultural, social and political structures.
Spring 2016 — Workshop 2
Time, date, location TBD
Traffic, Territory, Citizenship
This project considers new approaches to the circulation and interchange of people
and goods between the Americas and Asia during the long nineteenth century. Critical
in contemporary global political economy, this traffic has been consequential since
establishment of regular trade between the two regions – which crossed and connected
the Indian and Atlantic Oceans as well as the Pacific – in the 16th century. This
movement also reconfigured place, as capitalism's shifting priorities redefined the
scope and density of extant interconnections. Maritime traffic not only linked ports-of-call,
it hastened movement into interior hinterlands, configuring them as territory to contest,
control, and conquer. Where some territories became extractive colonies, others became
settler colonies where immigrants settled and worked (and often conflicted with indigenous
populations), and to which they developed new social and cultural attachments. By
the end of our period, these circuits of interactions produced the pre-conditions
for interrelated political economic concepts that defined global relations in the
20th century: the nation-state, territorial sovereignty, and citizenship. The project
will host a workshop in Spring 2016 where participants will both discuss and compare
their research and produce an annotated bibliography of relevant scholarship and a
digital archive of primary sources, both to be published online in an integrated exhibit.