Call for Papers: Fifth Global South Graduate Student Conference

December 18, 2025, 12:00 PM to January 30, 2026, 11:59 PM EST

 

Call for Papers

Global South Research Hub at
 

 

Fifth Annual Global South Graduate Student Conference

Hybrid Conference: April 16-17, 2026

 

Conference Theme: Unsettled Lives: Making and Unmaking of Worlds in the Global South

Deadline for submission of abstracts: January 30, 2026

Link for submission of Abstracts: Abstract Submission Form

Deadline for submission of full papers for the best student paper award: March 6, 2026  

The Global South emerges through historical and ongoing relationships of power, exchange, and solidarity that have placed regions such as Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania in asymmetrical connection with industrialized centers. Rather than a fixed geographic category, it describes how socioeconomic inequalities are produced and reproduced through colonial legacies, transnational circuits of capital and labor, and unequal terms of global integration. The Global South is therefore not defined by inherent characteristics but by its relational position within interconnected yet hierarchical global flows. 

In this context, research on unsettlement is needed to foster transformative change and agency, and to address the mechanisms that perpetuate global inequality and precipitate global crises. Ongoing conflicts, shifting social structures, mounting environmental crises, and the collapse of infrastructures bring together lives marked by deep precarity and forced displacement. Yet unsettlement is not merely rupture or loss; it also sparks new forms of sociality, new aspirations, increased mobility, and inventive strategies for survival. The Global South becomes a standpoint for rethinking social, economic, and political conditions that render lives unsettled, interrogating both internal dynamics and entanglement with global capitalism and dominant ideological narratives. 

We invite papers that explore unsettlement and instability in the Global South. The term itself warrants unsettling. We also ask presenters to examine how the Global South, as an analytical framework, organizes knowledge production, what relations it obscures or reveals, and what solidarities or erasures it enables. This conference treats unsettlement not only as a condition to study in particular places but also as an approach to geography, categorization, and academic knowledge production. 

We request submissions from graduate students working in the humanities and social sciences whose research is contextualized in the Global South. We also welcome submissions from any other discipline that examines how unsettlement shapes technology, ecology, and built environments. Ethnographic, historical, theoretical, comparative, interdisciplinary, and transnational approaches that foreground voices and experiences from the Global South are welcome. We are especially interested in papers that challenge crisis and resilience narratives, explore the affective dimensions of precarity, and examine how people forge connections and reimagine futures amid ongoing political and cultural volatility. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Unsettlement and ideas of belonging, alienation, and migration
  • Unsettling the concept of the Global South: epistemological interventions
  • Intersectionality, caste, and situated experiences of unsettlement
  • South-South relations, solidarities, and asymmetries
  • Displacement, refuge, and the remaking of home
  • Resistance through care, kinship, and community
  • Digital infrastructures, platform labor, and AI futures in the Global South
  • Accountability cultures and the governance of public discourse
  • Climate displacement, extractivism, and ecological breakdown
  • Intimate economies and the unsettling of gender and sexuality
  • Youth cultures, futurity, and generational ruptures
  • State violence, militarization, and everyday security

Please submit a 250-word abstract with your name and academic affiliation by the deadline of 11:59 p.m. ET on January 30, 2026, using the abstract submission form provided above. We will notify you about acceptance by February 6, 2026. Presentations should be given in English and should not exceed 15 minutes.

Additionally, we invite draft papers from students with accepted abstracts to be submitted for the best student paper awards competition by the deadline of 11.59 pm ET on March 6, 2026. The award will carry a cash prize of $300 for the winner and $200 for the runner-up, along with a certificate.  

Note: Paper submission is only for the award and is not a requirement for the conference. All students with accepted abstracts will be invited to make conference presentations. Paper awards shall be granted provided submissions meet graduate-level conference standards and align with the conference theme.


Past Winners of the Best Student Paper Award:

Soumodip Sinha, Delhi School of Economics, India. "Transnational collective action via digital activism: Using student political activism as a frame of reference to facilitate South- South interactions"

Shruti Gupta, National University of Singapore. "The Dynamics of (Im)mobilities within the Global South: Understanding gendered migration between India and UAE"

Sayendri Panchadhyayi, Presidency University, India. "Intimate Transactions in Carework: Precarity, Purpose and Pleasure"

Uthara Geetha, University of Oviedo, Spain. "Decolonise and Debrahminise: Bridging Transnational Feminism and Dalit Feminism"

Sevin Sagnic, Bernardo Mackenna, Tianyu Yu, UC San Diego, USA. "Coloniality of Knowledge and Global South in Refugee Studies"

Shreyashi Ganguly, York University, Toronto, Canada. "Facebook as a site for Indian diasporic mobilization: A digital ethnography of the ‘Global Protest#RGKar’ protest group"

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