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?