Conference Theme

Curriculum in a World of Borders: Engaging Decolonial Struggles and Confronting Imperial Legacies

At the 2026 Bergamo Conference, we invite curriculum theorists, educators, and scholars to confront the ways curriculum operates within—and against—a world increasingly organized through borders: geopolitical, epistemic, racialized, and institutional. These borders are neither accidental nor neutral. They are the living residues of imperial histories and the active instruments of contemporary governance, enforcement, and exclusion.

Curriculum theory has long claimed a critical relationship to power, knowledge, and emancipation. Yet this moment demands renewed scrutiny of our own habits of thought and practice. As Edward W. Said reminds us, intellectual life is most endangered not by overt repression, but by the internalization of caution—by the quiet avoidance of principled positions in the name of balance, objectivity, or professional safety. In the face of profound injustice, neutrality does not function as distance; it functions as complicity.

Reflecting on this charge that the intellectual must resist the temptation to look away—to refuse the comforts of moderation when truth demands clarity, and to speak even when doing so invites discomfort, controversy, or risk. In a time marked by the militarization of borders, the expansion of federal enforcement regimes, and the reassertion of imperial logics under new names, curriculum theory must ask itself difficult questions about its own location, silences, and possibilities.

We invite participants to engage in questions such as:

• How are the colonized and racialized societies (aka Global South) positioned, represented, or marginalized in contemporary curriculum conversations, knowledge production, and educational reform agendas?

• In what ways do modern federal enforcement practices—including immigration regimes, surveillance, and detention—echo the logics and functions of historical instruments such as the Fugitive Slave Acts, which nationalized racialized control and criminalized solidarity?

• How do our curricular theories, pedagogies, and institutional practices perpetuate imperial legacies, even when framed as progressive, inclusive, or global? Where do we see acts of resistance?

• What does genuine solidarity with the historically colonized and racialized societies require beyond inclusion, representation, or comparative analysis? How might it demand epistemic humility, material accountability, and political clarity?

• What role can curriculum play in cultivating abolitionist imagination—not only as a critique of carceral and colonial systems, but as a generative space for liberation, collective futures, and ethical responsibility?

In centering these questions, the Bergamo Conference calls for a curriculum theory that refuses retreat into abstraction, that recognizes the political stakes of knowledge, and that embraces the role of the intellectual as an unafraid and compassionate witness to injustice. This is an invitation not merely to analyze the world of borders, but to interrogate how curriculum itself might become a site for crossing, unsettling, and ultimately dismantling them. How is the Global South positioned in today’s curriculum conversations?

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Keynote Speakers:

Karim Mattar’s work engages Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education. A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, his scholarship and public work explore questions of culture, memory, and responsibility across generations. He is the author of Specters of World Literature: Orientalism, Modernity, and the Novel in the Middle East and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East, and is currently completing two book projects focused on ethics, pedagogy, and Palestine.

In addition to his academic work, Mattar is an active community organizer and public intellectual, working locally and nationally to advance conversations around Palestinian literature, history, and academic freedom. His teaching and research span comparative Middle Eastern literatures, critical theory, and the role of higher education in addressing urgent global challenges.

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Isabel Nuñez, Professor & Dean, School of Education, Purdue University- Fort Wayne

Isabel Nuñez is professor of educational studies and dean of the School of Education at Purdue University Fort Wayne. She holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum Studies from the University of Illinois, Chicago; an M.Phil. in Cultural Studies from Birmingham University; and a J.D. from UCLA Law. She has been a classroom teacher in Los Angeles and Birmingham, England; a newspaper journalist in Tokyo; and a visiting professor at the University of San Francisco. She has published four books with Teachers College Press and a textbook with McGraw Hill. She has authored chapters in books from Peter Lang, Routledge, SAGE, the Oxford University Press, and the Cambridge University Press. Her work has appeared in Curriculum Inquiry, Educational Studies, the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, and Teachers College Record.

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Proposal Guidelines: 

We invite proposals for individual papers, panels, symposia, alternative session formats, and artistic contributions that align with the conference theme. Each proposal should include: 

• Title
• Abstract (up to 500 words) 
• References  
• Names and affiliations of all presenters 
• Special requests or accessibility needs 

Proposal Submission: hum.link/Bergamo2026    

Key Dates: 

• Deadline to Submit: August 10, 2026 
• Notification of Acceptance: August 24, 2026 
• Initial Program Release: September 14, 2026
• Early Registration Ending: October 5, 2026
• Conference: October 15–17, 2026 

Please direct questions to the Conference Committee at raghasaleh@jctonline.org or tgleason@jctonline.org