CFP: DDFC - RESISTANCE
A Two-day Virtual Conference (Zoom)
Date: November 4-5, 2022
Organizers: The Diversity, Decolonization, and the French Curriculum Steering Committee (DDFC)
Twitter: @DdfcTweets
Since our inaugural conference in 2020, “Diversity, Decolonization, and the French Curriculum”, DDFC has become an organized collective with a steering committee, action groups, and regular events to work towards our mission of fostering conversations in French & Francophone studies that center social justice and empower scholars and practitioners. Following our first conference, a number of participants joined Dr. Siham Bouamer and Dr. Loic Bourdeau (DDFC founding members) to put together Diversity and Decolonization in French: New Approaches to Teaching (April 2022). This volume reconceptualizes the French classroom through a more inclusive lens and is grounded in “complaint as a feminist pedagogy” (Ahmed 2021, 7). The chapters “provide testimonies of instructors’ experiences in the classroom and point out the shortcomings and inequity they have encountered, contested, and untangled” and ultimately call for different forms of resistance, whether against the canon, assessment, textbooks, socio-historical frameworks, etc.
Our goal as a collective is also to bring together scholars, teachers, and practitioners on a biannual basis to share new resources and ideas around a specific theme. In a time of rising authoritarianism across many global contexts, which includes but is not limited to legislative attempts in the United States to control curricula and thwart social justice (e.g., attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and trans people), RESISTANCE, the 2022 DDFC conference theme, is as urgent as ever. We invite proposals for 15-min presentations, complete panels (of 3 or 4), or other formats such as roundtable discussions, book club, etc. We ask that all proposals offer concrete examples and practical tools to benefit all attendees. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Complaint as resistance
Forms of resistance in the profession: collectives, organizations, unions, mentoring programs, etc.
Graduate education and power dynamics: how to resist?
Learning from past traditions of resistance
Resistance and positionality: who resists? Who can resist?
Resistance and tokenism
Resisting “la francophonie”
Resisting and defending one’s (language) program
Resisting authorities: legislatures, parents, school leaders, etc.
Resisting outside the classroom
Resisting textbooks and traditional curricula/resisting traditional pedagogies and assessments
Resisting the (literary) canon
Surmounting internalized resistance to change
Abstracts of 250 words (single papers) - 600 words (other formats) should be sent to ddfcemail@gmail.com by August 1, 2022. Selected contributors will be notified in September. In addition to your proposal, we ask that you submit the name of 3 to 5 references of your choice that resonate with our theme, Resistance. These may but do not have to relate directly to your proposals. We will build a database to share with all participants during the conference.
This event is free and open to all. In lieu of conference fees, we encourage you to donate directly to local organizations and mutual aid networks that support diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. We will provide a list of organizations/networks once conference registration opens.