Methods Symposium
Announcing UMass Amherst English Graduate Students’ 2024-25 Methods Symposium, November 9, 2024
The English Graduate Organization (EGO) is organizing the Methods Symposium on November 9, 2024. The Symposium offers a space to reflect on method and methodology: how we employ them in our research, how they are informed by discipline, and how they transform and are transformed by politics. The event will feature concurrent workshops followed by a public roundtable discussion. The faculty-led workshops on De/postcolonial Studies, Critical Geography, and Migration & Mobility Studies will be conducted by Sanjay Krishnan (BU), Nicholas Caverly (UMass Amherst), and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (NYU) respectively. While the workshops are limited to selected participants only, the Roundtable Discussion is open to the interested audience. The public roundtable is a space for all of our invited scholars to showcase their perspectives on methods and to engage in conversation with each other and the audience. The roundtable will take place the same day at South College W245 from 3:30-5 PM followed by a reception. Please RSVP to let us know if you will attend the roundtable and the reception.
In response to the dilution of “decolonization” in academic spaces, scholarship that aims to be decolonial must investigate not just its content, but also its tools. More so, decolonial scholarship must emerge from and contribute to a decolonial politics. This year, graduate students within the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst will host a “Methods Symposium,” to explore both methods and methodologies that reframe archive, temporality, and disciplinarity, in relation to questions of decolonization. In addition to decolonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial thought, the symposium will explore the sibling methodological categories of migration and mobility studies, as well as critical geographies.
The Methods Symposium will occur in two parts. The first will take place on November 9, 2024 and the second in Spring 2025. The November Symposium will feature concurrent workshops in De/postcolonial Studies, Critical Geography, and Migration & Mobility Studies, followed by a roundtable discussion. Each workshop group will consist of eight to ten graduate students from UMass, who will be chosen on the basis of a short abstract that describes their research’s relationship to at least one of these fields. Invited faculty will lead these workshop conversations and share insights about the use of methods and methodology in their particular field. The roundtable portion of the day—as well as the reception that follows it—will allow the entire group to reconvene for a discussion about methods and will be open to the public.
Alumni are invited to participate in the public roundtable, 3:30pm in W245, South College and reception to follow. Students imagine the public roundtable as a space for invited scholars to showcase their perspectives on methods and to engage in conversation with each other and the audience. Scholars will make brief remarks (roughly 15 minutes each) and then have an interactive session with the audience. This will be followed by a reception in Old Chapel.
For more information contact:
Janell Tryon, @email
Manasvini Rajan, @email