CfA: South African Society for Critical Theory, 8th Annual Conference
Kayleigh Timmer
Call for Abstracts
South African Society for Critical Theory
8th Annual Conference
26 – 28 November 2026
Hosted by the University of Pretoria
Conference Theme:
Appropriation
The theme “Appropriation” should be understood in its broadest sense as engaging with Critical Theory’s longstanding concerns with how culture, land, knowledge and identity are claimed or commodified through power. In the broadest sense, scholars describe appropriation as a “capacious” term indexing relations of power, culture and property. In other words, appropriation names the processes by which dominant forces claim and transform the artifacts, ideas and spaces of others – a dynamic which Critical Theory has analysed as central to domination, alienation and ideological control.
Contemporary geopolitics provides vivid examples of appropriation in action. Israeli state practices, for instance, can be seen as appropriating Palestinian land and culture, with observers describing a process whereby “Israeli appropriation of land, then settlement, then annexation” is followed by the expulsion of Palestinians, separating them from their heritage (Rabo 2025). Likewise, analysts characterize Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a new type of war waged not primarily for political or economic resources but instead for the appropriation of Ukrainian cultural identity and historical heritage in order to restore a “lost empire” (Mishalova et al. 2024). Similarly, within recent US politics rhetoric about the territorial acquisition of Greenland has escalated from a preposterous proposal in 2019 to purchase the world’s largest island to a credible military threat given recent events in Venezuela (Heartle 2026). These cases show that even within what is commonly described as the “modern rules-based international order”, the appropriation of land, resources and cultural symbols remains a burning issue in struggles over sovereignty and identity.
These contemporary dynamics reflect deep historical patterns of land seizure. Throughout colonial history, European powers appropriated vast territories in Africa and elsewhere. In South Africa, for example, settler laws transferred almost all arable land to a tiny minority, with the 1913 Natives Land Act granting white settlers rights to 93% of the country’s land (Chigumadzi 2025). The legacy of such dispossession is a central concern in present-day South African politics. The Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, for instance, explicitly authorizes the government to seize land from any private owner for public purposes – without compensation in certain situations – as a means of redressing historical injustice. Debates over “land appropriation without compensation” thus explicitly invoke colonial-era expropriations, highlighting appropriation as a structural feature of settler-colonial and racial-capitalist orders.
Appropriation is also a key concept within cultural and symbolic arenas. Scholars of cultural appropriation point out that dominant groups frequently adopt elements of marginalized cultures (in fashion, music, art and language, for instance) in ways that lead “to commodification, distortion, and the erasure of the original cultural meaning,” reinforcing existing power imbalances by allowing privileged groups to profit from others’ heritage (Marzal & Kafri 2025). In this view, appropriation is inseparable from power and amounts to a mode of cultural extraction whereby subordinated communities’ styles, symbols or knowledge are treated as objects for consumption.
Critical Theory – from the Frankfurt School through to postcolonial and decolonial thought – offers conceptual tools for unpacking these processes. The Frankfurt School’s focus on commodification means that critical theory inherently addresses appropriation: labour is appropriated as profit, culture is appropriated as mass media and even human subjectivity is appropriated by consumerism (Adorno & Horkheimer 1972). Later critical theorists (Marcuse, Habermas) have also explored how modern life entails the appropriation of needs and desires by systemic forces while for their part, postcolonial scholars have examined appropriation as both resistance and domination. Here, one the one hand, colonial discourse constitutes and appropriates colonized cultures, as analysed in Said’s contention that Western scholarship has “appropriated” the East by constructing it as an exotic Other, thus justifying domination (Said 1978), as well as in Spivak’s notion of the subaltern, which highlights how colonial and neo-colonial narratives speak for – and therefore appropriate the voice of – the oppressed (Spivak 1988). On the other hand, Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry and hybridity describe how colonized peoples may appropriate elements of colonial culture in ways that can subvert power (Bhabha 1994), reflecting the complex manner in which appropriation is bound up with identity, representation and resistance. Taking this analysis further, decolonial theorists have also focused on “epistemic appropriation”, showing how Western regimes of knowledge have expropriated (and marginalized) indigenous knowledges and languages.
Together, these strands of theory insist that appropriation must be analysed economically, politically and ideologically: who takes what from whom, and to what ends? Such analysis can illuminate how appropriation functions within media and art, within international relations and neoliberal capitalism, and even within everyday language and discourse.
Possible Subthemes
Possible subtopics for papers might include (but are not limited to):
· Geopolitical appropriation and neocolonialism
· Cultural appropriation and identity
· Epistemic appropriation and knowledge production
· Appropriation in media, art, and aesthetics
· Economic and resource appropriation
· Resistance, reappropriation and decolonial strategies
· Appropriation and language politics
· Digital and techno-appropriation
· Appropriation in ideology and religion
The conference welcomes approaches from all aspects of Critical Theory, broadly construed. In particular, the conference welcomes papers that address challenges relating to: Critical environmental theory, African critical theory, critical digital studies, Frankfurt School critical theory, critical feminism, critical masculine studies, critical film studies, critical race theory, critical theory of technology, critical legal studies, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, critical hermeneutics, liberation theory, critical pedagogy, critical theology, and critical anthropology.
The conference would also consider papers that draw on the work of thinkers outside of the ‘canon’ of Critical Theory, but that nevertheless extend current research in Critical Theory or embodies alternative forms of Critical Theory.
Submissions
Please submit a 250-word abstract to sas...@gmail.com by the 13th of July 2026. Abstracts will be refereed, and acceptance letters will be sent out by the 17th of August.
Special issue
Note also that a special issue on the theme of the conference will be published by Acta Academica: Critical Views on Society, Culture and Politics, a DHET-accredited journal. Submitted papers will be subject to the usual double-blind peer review process.
Contact us
Should you have queries regarding any aspect of the conference, then please do not hesitate to contact us at:
Alternatively, please feel free to contact a member of the SASCT8 Organizing Committee:
Benda Hofmeyr (host): benda....@up.ac.za
Aragorn Eloff (host): ara...@further.co.za
Lungelo Manona: lungelo...@mandela.ac.za
Kayleigh Timmer: kayleig...@gmail.com
Anusha Sewchurran: Anush...@dut.ac.za
Bibliography
Adorno, T. W. & Horkheimer, M. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder.
Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Chigumadzi, P. 2025. “The Land Question”, in Boston Review https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-land-question/ (accessed 14.01.2026)
Marzal, N. & Kafri, S. A. 2025. “Cultural Appropriation in Popular Media: A Critical Analysis of Globalization and Identity”, in Asian Journal of Media and Culture 1(1): 57-73.
Mishalvova, O., Hordiichuk, O., & Sokolovskyi, O. 2024. “Russia’s War in Ukraine as a “War for Identity” and Appropriation of Cultural Tradition”, in Ethics in Progress 15(1) 73-94. https://eprints.zu.edu.ua/41074/1/4.pdf (accessed 14.01.2026)
Rabo, O. A. 2025. “Under Threat of Appropriation and Destruction”, in This Week in Palestine.
https://thisweekinpalestine.com/under-threat-of-appropriation-and-destructiona/ (accessed 14.01.2026).
Said, E. W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Spivak, G. C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Nelson, C. & Grossberg, L. (Eds.) 1988. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 271–313.
Heartle, R. 2026. “When Allies Become Targets: Trump’s Greenland Threat and the Unraveling of Nato”, in Medium. https://medium.com/@writterslink/when-allies-become-targets-trumps-greenland-threat-and-the-unraveling-of-nato-27823e63a878 (accessed 14.01.2026)