Call for Papers - Grounds of Displacement
A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Spring 2026 Symposium
Thursday, March 5—Friday, March 6, 2026
CFP Deadline: Friday, January 9, 2026 (11:59 p.m. ET)
The current administration of the United States has bombastically escalated two constitutive strategies of imperial expansion: extraction and displacement. Through trade and border wars, arms and chips races, US promises of power and prosperity have become inextricable from a hardened national security vocabulary of critical mineral resources, alien enemies, and unbounded technological progress.
To scholars of Asian/Pacific/American studies, these contemporary trends do not break new ground for US empire, but rather renew its foundational forms. The lust for rare earths extends the rapacity of westward expansion through the continued dispossession of Indigenous nations and exploitation of enslaved and racialized labor. The weaponization of artificial intelligence in border and citizenship regimes reiterates the modern security state’s emergence through the criminalization of migrant workers and radical political movements. Fortifying the boundaries of the nation and scouring the depths of the earth may produce new commodities and technological breakthroughs, but these processes remain rooted in enduring logics of racial capitalism and settler colonialism.
This year’s symposium, “Grounds of Displacement,” invites interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the structures of accumulation, removal, extraction, and dehumanization that have shaped Asian/Pacific/American worlds through the construction of global empires and superpowers. Topics can include, but are not limited, to:
Energy imperialism (carbon, oil, and mineral) and displacement
Activism in defense of land, resource sovereignty, and migrant justice
The global Gold Rush, transpacific railroad, migrant labor policing as histories of the present
The Decolonizing Pacific and the US empire of bases and client states
Border militarization, migrant detention, and anti-radicalism surveillance
Technologies and paradigms of national security
We are especially interested in work that is in conversation with fields such as Indigenous studies, migration studies, environmental studies, science and technology studies, logistics and infrastructure studies, geography, security studies, foreign relations history, and labor history.
Inspired by the A/P/A Institute’s focus on “Asian/Pacific/American Prospects,” we see Asian/Pacific/American studies as a form of critique that can unearth the connections between regimes of extraction and displacement as well as anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance across hemispheric and continental scales. As the US mineral frontier spreads its colonial gaze from the gold mountains of California to the uranium deposits of Navajo Nation and the copper reserves of Central America, Asian/Pacific/American studies can be a critical searchlight upon the processes of accumulation and dispossession that subtend forever wars across the Pacific, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
We invite graduate students across disciplines and fields that address the above issues in A/P/A contexts to submit papers to the Spring 2026 Symposium. For individual submissions, please send abstracts of approximately 250 words, a brief bio, and preferred email address. For panels of three or four papers, please send all abstracts, bios, names, and email addresses of all panelists in addition to a panel abstract of approximately 250 words.
For graduate students outside of NYC, limited funds (to be distributed via an honorarium) of up to $750 per participant are available to support travel to the symposium. If interested, please mention this when submitting your abstract.
Proposals for the symposium are due on January 9, 2026, 11:59 p.m. eastern time.
Please submit proposals via this form.
For any questions, please contact Weiyu (wd2063@nyu.edu), Ayami (aah9012@nyu.edu), or Linda (LL2947@nyu.edu).
About
The A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group is an interdepartmental and interdisciplinary working group for graduate students from local universities interested in and/or working on Asian/Pacific/American Studies broadly defined.
