UCLA LGBTQ Studies’ 25th Q-Grad Conference is seeking graduate student papers and creative work that speaks to the theme: Queer Temporalities: Resisting straight~forwards.

We invite scholars to explore and embrace questions, ideas, and alternative understandings of time in a queer(ed) context. We seek to elevate work that challenges, resists, operates outside of, and/or wrestles with the burdening pressures of the “straight~forwards”, such as perpetual linear progress and clock time. Prompts for potential lines of inquiry include: How does the past linger, echo, and haunt to inform and reconfigure our understandings of the present and the future? How might temporal (non)pathways such as spirals, cycles, eruptions, and disintegrations relate to, or change the nature of your work? How do forms of movement and non-movement create alternative relationships to time? We seek diverse and interdisciplinary interpretations and applications of this year’s theme and encourage proposals from and between all disciplines. Other possible topics and areas of interest for contributions include, but are not limited to:

⁕ Touchstones, strategies, and portals for queer world~building
⁕ Processing public feelings through ritual and ceremony
⁕ Queer sonics: resonance, echoes, silence, cacophony, and reverberations
⁕ Queering the clock: crip time, earthy cycles, moving in reverse, and the longue durée
⁕ Geographic stories: land, im/migration, stillness, gathering
⁕ Grief, haunting, memory
⁕ Indigenous, Afro, and queer of color futurisms, alongside other radical imaginaries
⁕ Knowledge making ~ rebel archives, (dis)epistemologies, embodied knowledge, and
other epistemic interventions
⁕ Queering forms: morphings, meltings, coalescence, and beyond
⁕ Political imaginations, visionary organizing, revolutions, and resistance
⁕ Ruptures, emergences, transformations, and conclusions

This year’s conference will be held on Friday, May 27, 2022 at UCLA, a land grant institution whose formation rests upon the dispossession of the Gabrielino and Tongva/Kizh peoples, the traditional caretakers of this land, whose history and presence resonates through this event and our every day.

The last day to submit to the CFP is Sunday, April 10th at 11:59pm PST. Contributions are welcomed from all disciplines and can take the form of a research paper, workshop, or other creative proposition in alignment with the theme. The conference is scheduled to be held in-person, though virtual contributions will also be considered. Interested students should submit 250-word abstracts of their idea along with their CV, and a short 150-word bio as part of their applications. 

Please direct questions to Haley Roeser, UCLA Q-Grad Conference Coordinator and Master of Urban and Regional Planning candidate ‘22:  q-grad@humnet.ucla.edu. 

Application link: https://forms.gle/qXgvPnDBtyqPB9Y6A