Call for Papers: Sites Queer Conference
31.08.18
February 7-9, 2019
9AM-5PM
@Auditorio Jesús Amaral, School of Architecture, University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras
Much of queer theory, history, art and performance have been discussed from Anglo American and European perspectives. Sites Queer is an international, interdisciplinary three-day conference exploring the multiple ways in which LGBTQ+ spaces and identities get reconfigured, performed and contested through the technologies and spatial politics of diverse ethnic cultures. We welcome submissions from all cultural backgrounds, and are particularly interested in inviting research projects rooted in Latin American, Asian, Aboriginal and African cultures.
From within the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, Sites Queer will be a space to discuss, foreground and analyze divergent queer histories, narratives and spatial practices. Subsequently, playing off the word 'site' as a physical locale as well as a digital space, the conference will problematize the ways the Internet, digital technologies, mobile apps and social networks are informing, changing, shaping or contesting queerness for ethnic minorities at urban and rural levels.
The outcome of the conference will be to create a book proposal acting as a critical, cultural memory; a written and visual record; and a speculative, spatial cartography of queer spaces, drawing them out from their Otherness and situating them within contemporary sociopolitical debates—which are fundamentally about the politics of space, citizenship and democracy.
Potential themes and sub-themes of the conference include but are not limited to:
-Autoethnography, Autobiography and Performance
-Non-normative Relationship Structures
-Intimacy and Romance
-Chem-sex
-Digital Economies and Transactions
-Distance and Proximity
-Postcodes and Addresses
-Urban Infrastructures
-Ephemerality, Transcience and Permanence
-Nighttime Culture and Economies
-Migration
-Bias and Marginalization
-Resistance and Activism
-Looking for Others
-Politics of Space
-Citizenship and Otherness
-Tourism and Mobility
Sites Queer is part of Dr. Regner Ramos’s larger research project at the University of Puerto Rico, funded by Fondos Institucionales Para la Investigación.
We are inviting research papers, performances, workshop sessions, roundtable sessions and pre-constituted panels to participate. Please send 250-word abstracts and a 150-word biography to regner.ramos@upr.edu . In the case of group submissions, please provide biographies for each individual. We accept abstracts in Spanish and English.
Submission Deadline: 31 August 2018
We are delighted to have the following four keynote speakers at Sites Queer:
Sharif Mowlabocus is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, at the University of Sussex. Since 2001, he has been involved in research that explores intersections between digital media technologies, gender and sexuality. He is the author of Gaydar Culture: Technology Embodiment and Gay Male Culture (Ashgate, 2010), which offered one of the first detailed explorations of gay men’s digital culture outside of the USA. He was one fo the first scholars to publish research on hook-up app culture, and he has worked with health organisations, commercial enterprises and public institutions. He was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England in 2017, and a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2018.
Richard Miskolci is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of São Paulo and researcher of the National Council on Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). He is also the coordinator of Quereres - Research Group on Differences, Human Rights and Health (www.quereres.sites.unifesp.br). One of the founders of Queer Studies in Brazil, Miskolci has published in 2017 Desejos Digitais: uma análise sociológica da busca por parceiros online (Digital Desires: a sociological analysis of the online search for partners).
Rebecca Ross is Senior Lecturer and leads the MA in Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her work is concerned with the agency of images, media and data in processes of urban change. She is also increasingly interested in graphic design as a knowledge practice and alternate forms of academic publishing. Her recent projects include a discussion about the future of London staged on large-scale digital billboards around Central London (London Is Changing) and the development of the Urban Pamphleteer, a series of publications confronting key contemporary urban questions from a diverse range of perspectives. She has a journal article forthcoming about graphic design and research and is currently at work on a written history of the London postcode as a distinctly open interface between communities, machines and the complexities of urbanization.
Ben Campkin is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (IB Tauris, 2013), which won the Urban Communication Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Award, 2015. He is co-editor of three anthologies: Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (IB Tauris, 2007), Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (IB Tauris, 2016) and Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression (Bloomsbury, 2017), and of the series Urban Pamphleteer (2013-). Ben is Professor of History of Architecture and Urbanism at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where he directs the Architectural and Urban History doctoral programme. He is Co-director of the UCL Urban Laboratory and was Director from 2011-18.
We are also happy to announce that Sites Queer's main workshop will be run by Lucas LaRochelle, founder of Queering The Map, a community-generated mapping project that geo-locates queer moments, memories and histories in relation to physical space. Queering the Map aims to collectively document the spaces that hold queer memory, from park benches to parking garages, to mark moments of queerness wherever they occur.
Images:
Dovydenas, Jonas, photographer. Chicago Ethnic Arts Project collection (AFC 1981/004), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.