73rd ANNUAL MEETING
SAARBRÜCKEN: SAARLAND UNIVERSITY
May 20-22, 2027
“IMPERIAL BORDERS”
Call for Panel Proposals
Deadline: September 30, 2026
At a moment marked by shifting geopolitics and renewed imperial ambitions, the 73rd annual conference of the DGfA/GAAS wants to interrogate the (re)making of imperial borders in the Americas. Rather than conceiving of borders as static territorial lines, we want to approach them as dynamic b/ordering processes: material, discursive, legal, and affective practices through which spaces, bodies, and forms of belonging are continuously constituted, contested, and transformed. From digital infrastructures and biometric surveillance to climate-driven displacement and oceanic governance, borders extend far beyond the nation-state’s edges. Imperial bordering processes have exceeded the territorial boundaries of the U.S. through colonial possessions, military infrastructures, hemispheric interventions, and transnational security regimes, operating as diffuse technologies of power that organize mobility, citizenship, and everyday life. Bordering also produces differentiated spatial formations that organize unequal relations of mobility, labor, and governance, from urban neighborhoods and extraction zones to oceans, archipelagos, deserts, and logistical infrastructures.
Foregrounding this wider notion of American borders and borderlands as sites of encounter, conflict, and negotiation, the conference seeks to examine how imperial b/ordering processes reproduce and reconfigure U.S. power across territorial, maritime, atmospheric, digital, and social domains. We will also focus on the biopolitical dimensions of bordering, through which populations are differentially managed, exposed to violence, or rendered disposable. These processes are inseparable from racialized, sexualized, classed, and gendered regimes of sovereignty that structure access to rights, mobility, and recognition while reinforcing settler- colonial formations, militarized governance, and extractive relations to land and environment. Furthermore, we invite contributions that approach bordering as hemispheric processes, examining how imperial formations are negotiated, contested and co-produced across the Americas through migration regimes, transnational governance, and the unequal relations between the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
At the same time, we encourage contributions that move beyond diagnosing imperial formations to explore practices of resistance and transformation. How do counter-imperial orderings emerge through Indigenous resurgence, migrant activism, abolitionist movements, transnational solidarities, and other forms of political and cultural intervention? What forms of decolonial re-ordering challenge dominant epistemologies of territory, sovereignty, and security while opening alternative ways of imagining borders, mobility, and belonging? We also invite contributions that examine how literature, visual and digital cultures, film, performance, media, and the arts imagine, reproduce, or contest imperial borders and borderlands, opening alternative spatial imaginaries and modes of belonging. By centering these questions, we seek to illuminate borders not only as instruments of exclusion but also as sites where alternative political imaginaries and relational futures are forged. We also welcome contributions that trace historical genealogies of imperial bordering from settler-colonial expansion and slavery to contemporary forms of securitization and global governance. Bringing together perspectives from American Studies, Border Studies, Empire Studies, Indigenous Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Environmental Humanities, Legal Studies, Political Science, and related interdisciplinary fields, the conference explores how imperial border regimes persist, mutate, and are contested across time and space. In addressing both historical continuities and emerging configurations, it highlights the porous, uneven, and deeply contested nature of borders in a transforming global order, inviting critical engagement with the shifting architectures of power and the possibilities of more just and decolonial forms of b/ordering.
We welcome panel proposals of up to 4 papers (20 minutes each). Proposals for two-hour panels need to include the name of one confirmed speaker. Panels should allow for up to three more speakers to apply after the proposal has been accepted by the GAAS Advisory Board. If the panel takes the form of a roundtable discussion, more speakers can be invited. Only one of the panel organizers can simultaneously be a presenter on the panel. Organizers and speakers must not serve in more than one panel during the conference. We encourage panel proposals by organizers from different home institutions.
Panels can only be organized by members of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA). Speakers also have to be members of the DGfA by the time of the conference. This rule does not apply to members of the EAAS and ASA.
Please send all panel proposals to executive_director@dgfa.de. The deadline is September 30, 2026.