Conference Sessions

This session will explore the global dimensions of refugee experiences to counter the western-centric discourses on refugee labels and identities. It will challenge and depart from the hegemonic meanings of refugee identity and foreground the colonial and racial continuities embedded in the refugee discourse. Although the intersectionality lens is already being used by scholars to recognize diverse identities of refugees, intersectionality theories often reflect a western epistemological gaze. While not denying their theoretical contributions, this session proposes expanding the existing intersectionality debates and enriching them with alternative epistemologies and paradigms - emerging from multiple global geo-political scenarios, refugee movements, gendered experiences, asylum policies, refugee politics and subjectivities.

This session will explore the global dimensions of refugee experiences to counter the western-centric discourses on refugee labels and identities. It will challenge and depart from the hegemonic meanings of refugee identity and foreground the colonial and racial continuities embedded in the refugee discourse. Although the intersectionality lens is already being used by scholars to recognize diverse identities of refugees, intersectionality theories often reflect a western epistemological gaze. While not denying their theoretical contributions, this session proposes expanding the existing intersectionality debates and enriching them with alternative epistemologies and paradigms - emerging from multiple global geo-political scenarios, refugee movements, gendered experiences, asylum policies, refugee politics and subjectivities.

This session will explore the global dimensions of refugee experiences to counter the western-centric discourses on refugee labels and identities. It will challenge and depart from the hegemonic meanings of refugee identity and foreground the colonial and racial continuities embedded in the refugee discourse. Although the intersectionality lens is already being used by scholars to recognize diverse identities of refugees, intersectionality theories often reflect a western epistemological gaze. While not denying their theoretical contributions, this session proposes expanding the existing intersectionality debates and enriching them with alternative epistemologies and paradigms - emerging from multiple global geo-political scenarios, refugee movements, gendered experiences, asylum policies, refugee politics and subjectivities.

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In the development of fat studies and other disciplines analyzing the experience of social inequality, race as an analytic has been left out of discussion as the focus has been very single-axis (Collins 1990; Hobson 2018; Strings 2020). There has been a wave in the theorizing of fatness that considers the intersectional aspects to the lived experience of fatness. Feminist sociology focusing on fatness and the body must be intersectional in nature. As Amy Farrell (2011) notes, “intersectional feminist theory, then, clarifies the ways that fatness as both an identity and as a category of discrimination and stigma must always be understood in context and in relationship to other forms of identity and oppression.” (p. 49). While many scholars have explored the intersections of gender and class with fatness, there is a need for stronger exploration of the ways in which race and fatness intersect (Strings, 2020). Strings (2020) argues that fatness is a ‘floating signifier’ of race. From this, Strings (2020) highlights how “given the necessary ambiguity of the race-craft, the meaning of fatness (as beautiful or grotesque) became politically contested and unstable. In this context, various elites … engaged in competing racial projects to either exalt or reject fat female bodies” (p. 7). The regulation of the fat body is a part of a larger system of regulation, and fatness is used to maintain categories of difference that are informed through other systems of marginalization, such as race, class, sexuality, gender, and ability (Jones, 2016). The intersection of fatness with larger systems of oppression has been underserved in fat studies literature, often essentializing the experiences of fat women (Friedman, Rice, and Rinaldi, 2019; Jones 2016; Wykes, 2016).As Baker-Pitts (2011) notes, “without an anti-racist, body-affirmative stance, all of us - fat, thin, of any size, are at risk of dwelling in body shame and spreading weight-based biases, regardless of how many hours we have spent analyzing our mind” (p. 19).

In the critical dialogues of fat studies, fat futurity has always been explored to distinguish ‘a life’ worth living for outside the confines of sizeism and its interlocking systems of oppression. In the current worldmaking processes, Dorinne Kando (2018) argues, there is a production of structures of inequality rooted in the personal registry, thus enacting a multidimensional understanding of aesthetics of genre, affect and subjectivities limited to these very structures. The capacity of worldmakings in the realm of the personal registry prioritizes and privileges the “colonial matrix of power and its multiple industrial complex”, so it is pertinent to think outside these systems of domination across time and space (Mignolo, 2021) Critical fat praxis fulfills a version of ‘love ethics’ (bell hooks, 1999) by pushing forth a narrative on the intersectional interplay between bodies and worlds. As a theoretical framework rooted in fat liberation and projects of abolition, the practice of fat-worldmakings centers on fat-being, intersectionality, care and wholeness as a mode of reimagining, resistance and resurgence (Kafai, 2021). In line with multiple fields that study marginalized bodies and experiences, such as feminist studies, disability studies, critical race studies, and/or Indigenous studies, there is a thorough examination of how bodies intermingle with social discourses, structures, and members to understand fat experiences. In re-imagining a worldmaking that considers the interconnectivity and community, scholarship uses a critique of social, political, cultural, medical and other notions of fatness that have ascribed fat bodies and people as ‘non-normative’, ‘unhealthy’, ‘unproductive’ and lacking any futurity whatsoever. Through such critiques of the fear, grief, and violence of the hegemonic power relations that frame fat people with the negative connotations of sizeism; visions of fat futures and life are thought through with a sense of love and care. In doing this, critical fat praxis becomes practice as it cultivates an intersectional and interdependent fat epistemology and methodologies that bring upon a process of unlearning and nurturing of communities and stories.

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