Where are all the Girls and Indigenous People at IGSA@ND?

We adopt an autoethnographic approach to share critical reflections from the Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia girls’ group about our experiences attending the 2019 International Girlhood Studies Association conference at the University of Notre Dame (IGSA@ND). Moments of inspiration included sharing our work and connecting with local Indigenous youth. Challenging moments included feeling isolated and excluded since the only girls present at the conference were Indigenous people in colonial spaces. We conclude with reflection questions and recommendations to help future conference organizers and participants think through the politics and possibilities of meaningful expanded stakeholder inclusion at academic meetings.

Green it! Planning more sustainable conferences

Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic challenge us to re-evaluate the way we live and work. In the academic sector, this includes organising and attending conferences and other scientific meetings. The pandemic has led EAHIL 2020 to be moved online, which is “greener” than physical meetings, but has interactional drawbacks. On the other hand, planning of physical conferences can make use of existing guidance to improve the environmental impact in areas such as venue and travel arrangements, catering, waste reduction as well as communication. In the future, conference organisers can draw upon insights into remote and virtual collaboration gained during the pandemic. Hybrid conferences that allow physical and remote attendance might become an option for increased sustainability of scientific meetings.

Orthodoxy and the Politics of Christian Subjectivity: A Case Study of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON)

Informed by theories of biopolitics and necropolitics, I argue that Christian orthodoxy is a colonial power formation that manufactures the subjectivities of those within the Church and those without. The operation of biopolitics and necropolitics coalesces around two Christian bodies – the local body and the corporate body catholic – and is thus explicable according to the synthetic framework of ‘body politics.’ Within the body-political calculus, orthodox Christians qualify as genuine lives and, consequently, benefit from biopolitical interventions to promote their flourishing; heretics, by contrast, represent (non-)subjects whose bodies orthodoxy/colonialism consigns to destruction. As a case study to illustrate the import of my theoretical analysis for ecclesiological reflection, I examine the rhetoric of the leaders of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), who, despite presenting their movement as a decolonial project, espouse a body-political theology and, therefore, remain firmly within the matrix of Christian colonial orthodoxy.

Coping with the Future: The Brexit Kodak Moment

This short article is based on a keynote talk at the "Coping with the Future" conference at the University of Agder in October 2018. It has been updated to take account of the situation in September 2019.