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National Council For Black Studies

39th Annual Conference

The Foundation and Future of Black Studies:  

Reaffirming Our Emancipatory Mission & Value

The National Council for Black Studies 39^th Annual Conference will be held in Los Angeles on March 11-14, 2015. The Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA is one of the co-sponsors of the event.

The National Council for Black Studies (NCBS) is one of the leading organizations of Black Studies professionals in the world, driving the development of Black/Africana Studies as a respected academic discipline.

Theme: NCBS welcomes presentations for the upcoming annual meeting on all topics pertinent to Africana/Black Studies. In addition to topics from all disciplinary, inter- and trans-disciplinary perspectives, they especially call for papers that explore the foundations and future of the work of cultural grounding, academic excellence, and social responsibility. In the diverse, international metropolis of Los Angeles, CA, papers that examine the emancipatory mission of the discipline/field from local to global spaces are invited. As a special feature, NCBS will host a legislative hearing in partnership with members of the California Legislature who are engaged in a statewide effort to save and build Africana Studies in state universities. The session will hear from leaders in higher education, discuss recent and pending legislation as well as efforts to get the state chancellor to put a moratorium on all program reductions and elimination, and to engage in a statewide study on the value of ethnic studies to California and beyond.

General Guidelines: Submit a 150-400 word abstract for a panel (one for the panel subject and one for each panelist), individual presenter, and poster presentation. For a roundtable discussion submit a 500-word abstract for the discussion topic. Panels, presentations, posters, and roundtables should explore the experiences and perspectives of African people, locally, nationally, globally or comparatively from interdisciplinary frameworks rooted in the agency of African people. Of particular interest are presentations that approach the discipline of Africana/Black Studies using multi-layered frameworks and mixed methodologies that incorporate various combinations of class, gender, race, and sexuality, through the lens of Afrocentric, cross and multicultural, postmodernist, post-colonial, transnational, comparative, and diasporic interpretative schemes.

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