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Present Tense / Future Possibilities Conference

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Call for Submissions

Present Tense / Future Possibilities: The 4th Annual WGSS Interdisciplinary Conference
 
The 黑料网吃瓜爆料Department of Women鈥檚, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for the Present Tense / Future Possibilities Conference to be held on February 13, 2026, at the 黑料网吃瓜爆料Tampa campus. Students, staff, and faculty from the 黑料网吃瓜爆料community are encouraged to submit an abstract, along with students, staff, and faculty in Florida-based WGSS programs and those doing related, relevant work in the State of Florida.
 
In a moment that feels as if it is defined by fear, vulnerability, and chaos, we celebrate ways in which artists, academics, and community members work against these dark themes to imagine, create, and live worlds that offer more.
 
Aimed at exploring, developing, and implementing feminist, queer, crip and other politics of refusal, this conference explores what Lauren Berlant described as their commitment 鈥渢o the political project of imagining how to detach from lives that don鈥檛 work and from worlds that negate the subjects that produce them鈥� and to create possibilities 鈥渢o live beyond survival, toward flourishing not later but in the ongoing now.鈥�
 
This conference centers conversations that wrestle with the realities of the moment while creating more livable presents and futures. We ask: What does it mean to live in this present with a politics rooted in futurity? How do movements centered in the intersections of antiracist, queer, and feminist politics imagine, build, and sustain alternative worlds? This space engages with these questions and welcomes intellectual explorations, artistic expressions, and embodied practices that challenge normative temporalities and oppressive structures while acknowledging and celebrating the mess, resistance, and labor of this politics of transformation.
 
Submissions may include creative projects, full panels, single papers/presentations, and posters. Topics could include but are not limited to: strategies of resistance; using oppression and suppression as fodder for expression; turning confusion, anger, or other such emotions into fuel for change; practices of self- and other-care; teaching, learning, and thinking in these times; the role of artistic expression in times of political foment; how the past subtends the future; reviving past action for present progress.
 
We encourage collaboration, and we welcome multi- and interdisciplinary research from the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, and applied/professional disciplines. Proposals for performances, readings, and other artistic presentations are welcome.
 
 Deadline for submissions: December 12, 2025

 

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