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The World Studies Interdisciplinary Project (WSIP) at UMass Amherst will host a conference titled “Decolonial Reconstellations” at Old Chapel on Friday, April 18 and Saturday, April 19. A full schedule and program details for the event, which is free and open to the public, are available at the WSIP conference website.

The conference celebrates the publication of the new three-volume “Decolonial Reconstellations” collection, a product of the WSIP collective published by Routledge and edited by Laura Doyle, professor emerita of English at UMass Amherst, Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji, associate professor of economics at UMass Amherst, and Simon Gikandi, professor of English at Princeton University.

The conference also marks the launch of the nation’s first Decolonial Global Studies Graduate Certificate (DGS) program. Supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the DGS offers graduate students an opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary, team-taught courses across the social sciences, humanities and environmental studies at UMass Amherst. 

Conference sessions will include a keynote panel on emergent frameworks, featuring:

• Mishuana Goeman, chair of Indigenous studies at the University at Buffalo and President of the American Studies Association
• Arturo Escobar, distinguished professor emeritus of anthropology and political ecology at the University of North Carolina
• James Ogude, professor and senior research fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria
• Shu-mei Shih, professor of comparative literature, Asian languages and cultures, and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles

Additional panels will feature UMass doctoral alumni and current DGS students reflecting on decolonial interdisciplinarity, as well as authors’ panels discussing the contributions of the Decolonial Reconstellations collection to global studies and to decolonial methods and thought.

While registration for meals and receptions has closed, no pre-registration is required to attend the conference’s panels and keynote sessions.