EVOLVING RHYTHMS CONFERENCE 2027
Rhythms of Sovereignty
African Diasporic Performance, Cultural Capital, and Self-Determination
Conference Dates: May 24 – 30, 2027
CALL FOR PAPERS
Evolving Rhythms 2027 invites artists, scholars, elders, cultural workers, educators, and community practitioners to explore African, Caribbean, and Black diasporic performance as cultural capital — a living source of knowledge, value, memory, and community authority. Building on the transnational dialogues of 2026, this year asks how embodied performance is understood, transmitted, stewarded, and enacted, and what self-determination means when culture is treated as knowledge rather than spectacle.
Where cultural capital has often described how dominant groups turn culture into advantage, Evolving Rhythms 2027 asks the inverse question: how do ACB communities reclaim cultural capital as their own? Thinking with Nkrumah, Falola, Hall, and Bhabha alongside Bourdieu, the conference holds the tension between rooted ancestral authority and the in-between spaces the diaspora navigates — the categories of diaspora and Canadian multiculturalism, the grant frameworks of conditional recognition, and the persistence of anti-Black racism.
How do African, Caribbean, and Black communities understand, transmit, and steward embodied performance as cultural capital — and how does it become a foundation for cultural authority and self-determination across the diaspora and its lands of origin?
Conference Themes
- Cultural Capital as Knowledge — dance, drumming, music, ritual, and storytelling as systems of memory, pedagogy, and philosophy.
- Cultural Capital as Archive — the body as a living archive; documentation, digitalization, biomechanics, and embodiment as ways of holding what written records neglect.
- Cultural Capital as Stewardship — ownership, transmission, and intergenerational care; the right of communities to teach and protect their own traditions.
- Cultural Capital as Sovereignty — cultural authority, self-definition, policy recognition, and self-determination.
- Cultural Capital as Transnational Exchange — connections between diaspora communities and lands of origin through artists, elders, lineages, and archives across North America, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.
We Welcome
- Academic papers and panels
- Practice-based and performance presentations
- Workshops and embodied sessions
- Community dialogues and collaborative sessions
- Films, media, and visual work
Proposals that move across these forms — so that ideas are both argued and embodied — are especially welcome. Submission details and deadlines are below
Abstract submission deadline: October 31, 2026.
Feedback on Abstracts: November 9, 2026.
Please send all abstracts and questions to ersymp@ualberta.ca
Conveners:
Eric Awuah
Professor Marko Zivkovic (Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta)
Producing Partners:
The Canadian Center for African Immigrants Movements Research Society (CCAIMRS)
