conference took place from April 30-May 2015 at York University in Toronto and it is titled, Sovereignties and Colonialisms: Resisting Racism, Extraction and Dispossession. In some instances, ethnic studies has become entrapped within and similar to the mandates of liberal multiculturalism, which relies on politics beholden to US nation-building and capitalist imperatives. Ethnic studies is in a difficult position, because as it gets more legitimized within the academy, it has frequently done so by distancing itself from the very social movements that were the triggers for its creation. On the other hand, ethnic studies departments have always existed on the margins of the academic industrial complex, and became further marginalized through funding cuts due to the 2008 global economic crisis. Instead of just dismissing or wholly embracing identitarian nationalism, CESA seeks to construct an open dialogue around issues like white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, militarism, occupation, indigenous erasure, neocolonialism, anti-immigration anti-Islam, etc. in order to expand the parameters and capacities of ethnic studies. CESA's goal is not to romanticize all movements or dictate a specific relationship between scholars and activists. Instead, it questions the emphasis of professionalization within ethnic studies, the politics of the academic industrial complex, or the engagement of larger movements for social transformation. It recognizes that at times Ethnic Studies has been complicit in neutralizing the university, rather than questioning the university's ideologies, actions, regulation and production of knowledge, and power. It works to situate the university as a point of contention, as a location among many for political struggles. CESA invites participation from all types of people: scholars, students, activists, arts, media makers, and educators of all fields, generations, and disciplines. The Critical Ethnic Studies Association was founded as a transnational, interdisciplinary, and un-disciplinary association of scholars, activists, students, artists, media makers, educators, and others who are directly concerned with interrogating the limitations of ethnic studies in order to better engage the historical stakes of the field. It organizes projects and programs to reimagine ethnic studies and its future through new interventions, both scholarly and activist based. They aim to develop an approach to scholarship, institution building, and activism animated by the spirit of the decolonial, antiracist, and other global liberationist movements that enabled the creation of Ethnic Studies in the first place. It hopes that this approach will continue to inform its political and intellectual projects. Within the organization, there is an emphasis