One of the core activities of the Association is the annual convention. Held in the fall in a different city in North America, this international forum makes possible a broad exchange of information and ideas, stimulating further work and sustaining the intellectual vitality of the field.

2024 ASEEES Convention Theme

Liberation

2024 ASEEES President: Vitaly Chernetsky, University of Kansas

Building on the productive discussions stimulated by the 2023 theme, decolonization, we offer liberation as the 2024 focus. Dictionary definitions of liberation’s spectrum of meanings include “being set free from imprisonment, slavery, or oppression,” “the achievement of equal rights and status,” “being freed from domination by a foreign power,” and “release from social stereotyping.” It can refer both to the act of liberating or the state of being liberated. Human history offers us multiple examples of movements advocating social change that use this term, including women’s liberation, Black liberation, gay liberation, and many others. The term gave us a different way of approaching spirituality, by focusing, in liberation theology, on the perspective of the poor and the oppressed. In his book Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o proposes as a decolonizing goal the “search for a liberating perspective within which to see ourselves clearly in relationship to ourselves and other selves in the universe.”