For the People: A Loving Defense for Ethnic Studies
California State University, Los Angeles
October 15- October 17, 2026
For the People: A Loving Defense for Ethnic Studies
The Association for Ethnic Studies (AES) invites community leaders, teachers, students, academics, early scholars, teacher practitioners, artists, poets, and grassroots organizers to join us for the 53rd annual AES conference focusing on: For the People: A Loving Defense for Ethnic Studies. The Conference will consist of paper and panel presentations, and workshops. AES is committed to drawing upon ethnic studies scholarship and praxis to address intellectual and social questions facing Black, Chicana/o/x, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, immigrant, Arab, Muslim, transgender/genderqueer, and marginalized communities. We call upon Ethnic Studies communities to engage in resistance through humanizing and liberatory theories, methodologies, and pedagogies to study and confront the holistic contemporary social and political onslaught of ethnic studies across K-12 and higher education. This year’s theme, For the People: A Loving Defense for Ethnic Studies. draws upon Ronald Takaki’s (2008) A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. It reminds us that the dehumanization of people of color and immigrant communities is a historical reality entrenched within the pillars of nationhood, which are slavery, genocide, colonization, and immigrant labor exploitation. Within this current context, Ethnic Studies teachers and scholars have been purged and redlined, diluting and diminishing the historical fight to protect marginalized voices and stories and the development of movements and collective consciousness.
AES welcomes all participants, including community activists, professors, graduate/undergraduate and high school students, independent scholars, first-time presenters, artists, poets, and community healers to present strategies, studies, curriculum, and pedagogies on how we lovingly defend our people—facing exploitation, expropriation, discrimination, and struggle in this historical moment of erasure and precarity of Ethnic Studies. As the anniversary of the formation of the United States as a nation-state approaches, the work to defend an ethnic studies standpoint, which confronts epistemological racism and recognizes the multidimensional struggles of people everywhere is necessary for social transformation.
The conference is hosted by the College of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. On October 15-17, 2026. The city of Los Angeles, California, continues to serve as an example where collectives have historically defended the Ethnic Studies movement, while resisting institutional power and structural violence that has normalized injustice in contemporary times.
Submission Information & Formats:We invite proposals for workshops and paper presentations. Proposals should be no more than 500 words and directly engage the conference theme and foci. Conference submissions will open on May 29, 2026, and close on August 1, 2026.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Historical Memory of Community Resistance
- Retaliation against Ethnic Studies Teaching
- Healing and Resistance
- Imperialism and Colonialism
- Intersectionality and Labor
- (Im)migration and Ethnic Studies
- Art as Resistance Through Ethnic Studies
- Community Beautification as Resistance
- Gentrification and Ethnic Studies
- Deportation and Incarceration
- Grassroots Efforts and Gentrification
- Spirit Murder in Ethnic Studies
- Spirit Protectors in Ethnic Studies
- Youth Resistance and Radicalism
- Transformational Ethnic Studies Teaching
- Politics of Resistance in Ethnic Studies
- Ethnic Studies Literacies
- Ethnic Studies Pedagogies & Methodologies
- Incarceration and Abolition
- Third World and Decolonial Studies and Approaches
For more information, please get in touch with the AES National Office at naes@ethnicstudies.org
