Liberatory Practices for Worlds in Crisis: 2025 GCWS Grad Student Conference: Full Schedule

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9:00am EDT

Identity Making & Displacing the Dominant Didactic

Sunday March 23, 2025 9:00am - 10:15am EDT

Brianna Doe, "Black on Purpose: Studying Tragedy From an Africana Epistemology Toward a Black Cosmology Tragedy"
By chronologizing and captioning our family photos, this emergent and experimental archive is a continuation of quotidian praxis initiated by my research interlocutors, the women in my own family whose shared experiences form a genealogy of routinized violence. This work suggests that a queer of color critique intimates the ways that Black matriarchs make and keep life amidst the material constraints of antiblack violence. It is a working complement to my dissertation research, where I examine how Black women (re)produce black subjectivity in the thrust of modernity. In the wake of enslavement and its many afterlives (Sharpe 2016), and in a time-space where the plantation is the conceptual terrain of the inner-city (McKittrich 2013), some theorists argue that African-American culture-bearers operate "...in the absence of the rights of man or the assurances of the self-possessed individual [...]" (Hartman 2010:66), and are thus still enslaved. As a result of antiblackness in the modern world, places of origin, lines of descent, chronicles of cosmology and ritual practice are markedly ephemeral. My art is a sought articulation of something and somewhere else, an alternative metric or horizon through and upon which to tell the story of a family where men do and do not exist, where the worst has already happened, is happening, and is bound to happen again unless they stay anticipatory. For these women, family is counter-historical and alternatively made in the purposeful excommunication of men rather than despite them.

Elio Harlan, "Embracing the Queer Monstrous Body as an Act of Survival and Self-Love"
How is it possible to find joy, let alone live, in a society that desires conformation or cremation as your only path of existence? It is constantly demanded of queer people to somehow prove our own humanness and worth, yet measures of this are held to an entirely arbitrary standard that is infeasible short of self extermination. We are made demon, imp, mutant, and monster: the very borders of our bodies legislated by those willfully ignorant of our own experiences and humanity. But what happens when we embrace this image of monstrosity forced upon us rather than appeal to the humanity of those who choose not recognize us as human? we take the claws and fangs given to us and use them to finally bite back? How does the reclaiming of these narrative devices give us the means to survive and learn to not only accept, but love oneself in our entirety? Through this I want to look at queer monstrous bodies created or imagined in the works of Andrew Joseph White, bodies that are deemed broken and ill by an outside force, ones that are left marked by their own survival, that defy or otherwise confront a conformed society. In combining the creative work of Andrew Joseph White with the theoretical works of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Margrit Shildrick, and several additional scholars, I aim to construct a framework for embodying queer monstrosity as a source of empowerment and reenforce the notion of a queer monstrous—and especially current or post-transitioning—body as a healed body deserving of existence and love above all.

Jeiselynn N. Ríos Rivera, "When Existence is Denied: Identifying Crisis in the Bi+ Community"
How do we know when we are in a crisis?

As a group that has been relegated to the realm of non-existence, Bi+ people are disproportionately likely to suffer from chronic illness, mood disorders, and loneliness. Further, they experience a double constraint from both hetero- and homonormative understandings of sexuality, exposing them to inordinate amounts of violence from both groups. Within academia, this also becomes prevalent as research on Bi+ populations must still continuously justify the uniqueness of this group despite having scholarship since early 1900’s that may very well situate bisexuality studies as a distinct subfield of its very own. Activism faces a similar pitfall, where Bi+ activists are rarely mentioned despite being foundational in the development of the broader LGBTQ movement. How can Bi+ people know we are facing a crisis when there is still an open refusal to acknowledge our existence—never mind recognize the importance of Bi+ specific scholarship?

I argue that both academic and activist approaches must be deployed in order to understand what makes bi+ experiences unique. Through autoethnographic reflection, I examine the practical effects theoretical understandings of oppression can have, especially when articulated in highly accessible and sustainable ways. By grounding myself in a theoretically informed activist project Bisexual Killjoy Podcast, I reveal exactly what can be gained from articulating highly abstract concepts in relatable ways.

For this subjugated population faced by allied political interests in their oppression, theory can emerge as a liberatory practice. It is by asking what theory can do for this group of people that we can begin to understand how we know when we are in crisis – and what steps we can take to liberate ourselves from it.

Tiffany Thompson, "Women and 'the Troubles': Navigating Crisis and Displacement during the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1969--1979"
When studying Northern Ireland’s Troubles, scholars have largely focused on paramilitary violence, militant republicans and their imprisonment, and the peace process, all of which were not only male-dominated spheres, but also subsequently narrated in ways that obscured women’s involvement. My research investigates volatile moments in the first decade of the conflict with consideration to the intersectional, transnational, and post-colonial contexts of the Troubles in order to reflect a broader range of experiences, particularly in terms of working-class women on both sides of the sectarian divide. Burnt-out homes and barricaded neighborhoods were familiar sights in Belfast in the 1970s as the violence of the Troubles left entire families displaced, but it was overwhelmingly women, usually with children in tow, who fled the North. As such this paper will explore the relationship between the British state’s often heavy-handed attempts to manage the armed conflict and the crises that ensued. It also considers the role of institutions in Northern Ireland, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland that responded in these moments of acute crisis. However, in doing so, my research recenters women and their place in this story, interrogating their particular experiences of violence at the hands of predominantly male crowds, police, and paramilitaries; asking about their experiences of displacement and life in refugee camps; and examining their decisions to accept or reject support offered by various states when navigating the conflict. Through a feminist analysis of Northern Irish women’s experiences of violence and displacement, I ultimately seek to highlight their agency, resiliency, and struggle to protect and care for their families and communities.

Speakers

Brianna Doe

PhD, University of Virginia

Jeiselynn N. Ríos Rivera

PhD, Boston University

Elio Harlan

Masters, Northeastern University

Tiffany Thompson

PhD, Boston College

Sunday March 23, 2025 9:00am - 10:15am EDT
Room 141 Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167

In-Person

9:00am EDT

Resounding Resilience: Sound Based Activist Practices

Sunday March 23, 2025 9:00am - 10:15am EDT

Room 155

Jeffrey Ng, "Resonant Resistance: The Role of Sound and Song in Hong Kong's Recent Liberatory Movements"
In times of crisis, artistic expressions often emerge as powerful tools of resistance and liberation. This paper examines the pivotal role of sound and song in Hong Kong's political movements from the late 20th century to the present, highlighting how music has served as a site of resistance and a catalyst for solidarity both locally and within the diaspora. Beginning with the 1967 Leftist riots, moving through the emotional aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests epitomized by the band Beyond, and culminating in the recent Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the 2019 protests featuring the banned, pseudo-anthem "Glory to Hong Kong," this study traces the sonic landscape of dissent in a region perpetually navigating crisis.

By analyzing these key historical moments, the paper argues that music and sound function as liberatory practices that transcend linguistic and cultural barriers, fostering a shared identity and collective memory among Hong Kongers. The chants, songs, and melodies not only mobilize protestors on the ground but also resonate with the Hong Kong diaspora, reinforcing ties of remembrance, solidarity, and a reaffirmation of core values amidst geopolitical upheaval.
Furthermore, the enduring impact of these sonic expressions extends beyond temporal and spatial confines, influencing intercultural dialogues and pan-Asian solidarity movements. This paper explores how the echoes of Hong Kong's protest music contribute to a larger narrative of resistance in the global context.
This paper underscores the necessity of acknowledging and studying non-traditional forms of resistance. It invites a reevaluation of how sound and song not only reflect societal tensions but also actively participate in the construction of new worlds and communities. Through this exploration, we aim to illuminate the transformative power of music as both a response to and a means of enduring crises, ultimately contributing to more caring and collaborative practices in scholarship and activism.

Hayley Qin, "Composing with Nature: How Can Music Respond to and Reimagine Data and Environmental Research"
I want to use the music examples from two ongoing projects - collaboration with forest researchers in New Hampshire to translate data of the forests into musical compositions and collaboration with Marine scientists in Massachusetts to compose music from field recordings of the ocean. The two projects go through drastically different approaches to how to integrate scientific data, technology, and environmental knowledge with music and sound art: one is based on data collected over years, where music reveals the patterns of climate change or potential threats to the forest systems and takes liberty of how to uses harmonies and pitches to display different layers of the issues. The other project builds acoustic and emotional experiences based on research and field recordings that still leave huge gaps of understanding the sounds and the narratives behind.
Sharing the process of accessing, studying, curating, composing, and reimagining scientific data and environmental research for a general audience as a composer is a way to deconstruct professional and social barriers of accessing environmental science and data, and advocate for environmental education and awareness. It is also a process of breaking the boundaries between arts and science and aiming for emotional and sensory experiences that will lead to an audience’s deeper, personal connections with science and nature.

Questions that I have been asking include: How can music express environmental changes, fluctuations, and crises over time? How can our senses, ears, hearts tell us beyond what our eyes and mind can read and think about? How can music evoke advocacy and activism differently than science does? What will future collaborations between arts and science look like and what does it mean for composers, for scientists, for the audience? How could these projects shape people’s connection with nature in the future?

Chao Tian, "Unheard Sounds: Exploring Immigrant Identities Through Sound in a Multicultural Context"
Unheard Sounds explores immigrant artists' identities and self-expression through musical improvisation in a multicultural context, presenting their experiences of "cultural drifting" within a host culture. As cultural drifters, immigrant artists continuously reshape their identities, navigating between their native culture and new surroundings. These drifting highlights both the fluidity of identity and the challenges of preserving personal and cultural memory during times of change. Through improvisation, Unheard Sounds invites audiences to sense the immigrant artist's movement between tradition, integration, and individual expression, exploring the balance of these interconnected facets.

There and Here, proposed as part of Unheard Sounds, combines the cultural heritage of the Chinese dulcimer with innovative techniques and a prepared setup. By placing objects on the instrument’s strings, I explore the boundary between musical tone and noise, expanding its expression between tradition and experimentation. Here, sound moves beyond melody to embody layers of culture and emotion. Notes and altered sounds interweave, creating a distinctive soundscape that blends historical depth with a modern edge. This sonic terrain invites audiences to experience both the beauty of musical tones and the nuanced, transformed sounds carrying personal and cultural memories.

Improvisation in this context becomes a liberating practice, allowing exploration between musical heritage and modern sound, carving a distinctive space for self-expression. Through this presentation, audiences gain insight into how immigrant artists achieve self-renewal while preserving cultural roots, transcending simple transmission or assimilation to form unique, marginal roles within a multicultural
Through Unheard Sounds, music becomes a ritual of self-narration, giving immigrant artists adaptive means of identity expression. This musical drifting lets audiences experience cultural continuity and transformation, revealing the resilience and regenerative potential of identity under multicultural influences.

Valentina Gabriel San Juan-Villamizar, "Ancestral Voices, Emancipatory Rhythms: Bullerengue as a Feminist and Decolonial Practice Against Crisis"
This paper examines Bullerengue, a traditional musical genre from the Caribbean Colombian Coast and UNESCO-recognized Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, through the lens of Latin American Afro-feminist theology, as articulated by thinkers like Maricel Mena Lo pez, and the Transforming Historical Harms approach developed by Amy Potter Czajkowski and David Anderson Hooker. Latin American Afro-feminist theology centers on the interconnected struggles against racism, sexism, colonialism, and classism, emphasizing that theological reflection must respond to the lived realities of oppressed women. These lenses allow us to understand Bullerengue as more than just a cultural expression; it is a resilient practice that embodies both spiritual and social liberation. Additionally, the Transforming Historical Harms framework informs this analysis by providing a structure for addressing the legacies of violence and marginalization through Facing History, Making Connections, Healing Wounds, and Taking Action. These elements are embedded in Bullerengue, where ancestral wisdom is orally passed down as a tool of healing, community cohesion, and resistance.

This paper argues that Bullerengue is not only a repository of the lived experiences and resilient identity of San Basilio de Palenque’s descendants—the first liberated Black pueblo in the Americas—but also a practice of resistance that has persisted despite the threats posed by armed conflict, and systemic violence. Central to this resilience are Afro-Colombian women, who play a crucial ro

Speakers

Valentina Gabriel San Juan-Villamizar

Masters, Boston University

Chao Tian

PhD, Boston University

Jeffrey Ng

Masters, Harvard Divinity School

Hayley Qin

Masters, New England Conservatory of Music

Sunday March 23, 2025 9:00am - 10:15am EDT
Room 155 Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167

In-Person

10:30am EDT

Liberated Testimonies: Praxis in words, theater, and narratives

Sunday March 23, 2025 10:30am - 11:45am EDT

Room 141

Elizabeth Dell, "Young Women’s Diagnostic Experiences in an RVU-Driven Healthcare Market: Using Narrative Medicine to Illuminate the Unseen Girls of the Healthcare Crisis"
In the cacophony of the American healthcare crisis, who falls through the cracks of policy debate? Needing to trade anecdote for answers, the care of young women struggling to be heard in doctor’s offices often hinges on storytelling. While 46% of American teenagers live with chronic illness, their stories have gone largely unstudied. This project tells the stories left behind after the clinical encounter of the young women missing school, work, and extracurricular sports as their life is overtaken by chronic illness.

This project uses an academic theory and clinical modality known as narrative medicine to document chronically-ill young women’s experiences seeking diagnosis and explores relative value units (RVU), a healthcare policy, as a contextual factor in these healthcare experiences. This research asks: What is the timeline of diagnosis for a young woman with a chronic condition, how does this diagnostic process not only impact a patient’s understanding of their illness and treatment plan but also their identity and self-efficacy, and what are the constraints on this diagnostic process that may impede timely, effective care? This research uses three methods: narrative case studies on chronically-ill young women, a literature review of physician experiences related to healthcare payment policy, and an interview with a clinician and educator in pediatric and adolescent medicine. The findings indicated that while seeking care, participants experienced disjointed diagnostic timelines which persistently damaged identity formation and self-efficacy through invalidation, scarce information, and lapses in care. The crisis in care depicted concurrently across patient case studies and physician testimony is attributed to systemic barriers in the current healthcare system. This project employs narrative medicine as a modality of study and means of action to combat the inefficiency and erasure present in the practice and study of medical care for chronically-ill young women.

Fedra Cabrera Solano, "Looking Coatlicue in the eyes: Anzaldúa on writing and emancipation"
In Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Chicana philosopher and activist Gloria Anzaldúa characterizes the process whereby members of oppressed groups acquire knowledge of the structures of dominance that marginalize them from society, and where they fit within those structures. She calls this process the ‘Coatlicue state’, referencing the Nahuatl name for a goddess representing ambiguity in the Aztec canon. At times she describes this state as paralyzing, and at others as divine and profound – as something that must be undergone in order to survive. In this presentation, I sketch an aesthetic reading of the Coatlicue state. In my view, this state should be understood as a crucial first step in the process of forming coalitional networks of insurrect action. This is because it can provide the basis for the creative act of writing, which Anzaldúa describes as crucial in making the experiences of marginalized individuals meaningful and shareable. Importantly for Anzaldúa, the task of writing requires us to rest in the paralysis brought about by the Coatlicue state. Once the agent allows themselves to process this paralysis, they can give it words, which then allows them to render their experience intelligible with the aim of finding allies and dismantling oppressive tropes and stereotypes.

Speakers

Elizabeth Dell

MA, Boston College

Fedra Cabrera Solano

PhD student, Harvard University

Sunday March 23, 2025 10:30am - 11:45am EDT
Room 141 Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167

In-Person

10:30am EDT

“Palestine Will Be Free”: Visual, Spatial, Digital Resistance in Public

Sunday March 23, 2025 10:30am - 11:45am EDT

Room 155

Marybelle Issa, "Artistic Interventions in Times of Struggle: Resistance and (Re)Imagination Within the Palestinian Context"
Art has historically been at the center of resistance and has been studied as forms of protest (Lorde, 1988; Scott, 1986, 1990; Rich, 1993; Peteet, 1996; Vinthagen & Johansson, 2013, 2019; Awad, et al., 2017, among many others). In the Palestinian context for example, a call to freedom united artists across diverse creative fields during the First Intifada (1989), resulting in influential works merging symbolism and realism in the aesthetic articulation of Palestinian experiences (example: New Visions group). More recently, as Palestinians face unprecedented violence at the hands of the Israeli state, art serves as a major force in the expression of experiences across the diaspora. Beyond providing an aesthetic and intellectual dimension to processes of recovery and rebuilding in times of devastation, art serves “as a medium through which relationships with power and authority are formed” (Darkhabani, 2025). As such, art can be a generative way of thinking about liberation and can serve as a lens through which resistance is fostered. In writing on the necessity of art in post-Assad Syria, Syrian architect Ahmad Darkhabani defends that “only through art’s fragility and elasticity can we make sense of the incomprehensible conditions and insanity we have endured”. If art can serve as an expression of personal and collective views on a world in crisis, then what role does it play in resisting these conditions?
From a linguistic anthropological lens, this early-stage project proposal explores art as a cultural artifact and a potential communicative tool. It explores artistic interventions across the Palestinian diaspora as forms of (re)narrativization and (re)inscription of the self in times of erasure. Using a semiotic approach to better understand the political and symbolic meaning that art can generate in the world, this project addresses the following central question: what does art narrate and can it serve to imagine new ways of living, being and thinking about identity, life, and liberation beyond the constraints of catastrophe?

Mikaila Rummage, ""I Am Still Alive:" Bisan's Journalism as Livingness"
Since 7 October 2023, Palestinians in Gaza have experienced a rapid intensification of violence by the occupying Israeli forces, but their persisting, steadfast existence informs us, as observers to this crisis, of alternative modes of resistance. Through an analysis of Bisan Owda’s citizen journalism and her tireless work to document the genocide of her people, I demonstrate a genealogy of multimodal forms of resistance to erasure that are emblematic of the Palestinian ethic of sumud (steadfastness) and provide an example of McKittrick’s theorizing on livingness (2021). Further, Owda’s self-representation subverts narrow Western constructions of what Palestinian womanhood should look and sound like. Despite algorithms of oppression (Noble 2018) on social media that aid in both the censorship of Palestinian voices and the maintenance of a violent world order, I highlight how Bisan’s daily-to-weekly return to social media to inform the world that she is, indeed, still alive is indicative of liberatory Palestinian speculative futures; despite ongoing crises, displacements, and the weight of apartheid, Palestinians maintain the hope of emancipation, to return to the whole of their homeland. As Bisan boldly speaks truth to power, I contend that Bisan’s livingness and method of dissent is nested in her voicing, even as the threats of the war machine loom large over journalists in the Gaza Strip. Bisan’s online documentation that will forever showcase both the atrocities experienced by Palestinians and their relational care for human and non-human life under bombardment is made monument to the struggle for liberation.

Minh Hyunh Vu, "“there is less and less living room”: On the shifting shapes of crisis and the politics of refurbishment"
Writing amidst the 1982 Lebanon War and the ongoing Palestinian struggle for life and liberation, June Jordan observes how “there is less and less living room” due to the colonial encroachments of “bulldozer[s],” “observation posts,” and “soldiers.” The “living room” Jordan mentions, though, does not refer to a delineated space of the domicile/domesticity. It is not an actual living room; it is just living room: an amorphous shape diffusing across borders—of the nation, of the Human—and bringing relations of uneven life/death to close proximity, despite the sundering and siloing logics of colonial violence.

This paper is a meditation on the vital methods of living that emerge amidst and against the unlivable conditions of crisis manufactured by empire. I intend to move through a series of case studies on the everyday politics of refurbishment: the makeshift couches made by incarcerated Japanese American internees who were given “nothing but a big room”; the rearrangements around the Kitchen Table Series by Carrie Mae Weems; the bookcases and supply centers of student encampments across universities; and the blueprints for liberation by Palestinian martyrs and fighters. These ongoing acts of refurbishment—at the cusp of refuse and refusal—constitute what Christina Sharpe calls “beauty as a method,” which is “a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness.” Altogether, these acts of refurbishment orient us toward other geographies and geometries of care despite the “less and less living room” of the present world.

In her notebook, Jordan asks herself: “How to design tables and chairs for a really new life?” Altogether, this paper gathers its texts and theories as a series of overlapping blueprints that can inform us not just how to “imagine” otherwise, but how to inhabit otherwise, right here and now. These are some "designs of Revolution" (Jordan) that force us to reorient ourselves and "see in discrete angles, planes, plots" (Sharpe).

Speakers

Marybelle Issa

PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Marybelle is a Lebanese-Canadian PhD student in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research finds itself at the intersections between language, art, and resistance, with a particular interest in semiotic landscapes, protest rhetoric, poetics, and... Read More →

Mikaila Rummage

M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Minh Huynh Vu

PhD, Yale University

Sunday March 23, 2025 10:30am - 11:45am EDT
Room 155 Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167

In-Person

1:15pm EDT

Conceptions and Contexts of Decolonization

Sunday March 23, 2025 1:15pm - 2:30pm EDT

Room 155

Sukanya Bhattacharya, "An Exploratory Attempt to Contextualize Dominant/Western Abolitionist Thought in India"
During the independence struggle against British colonial rule, India saw countless political prisoners locked in jails and prisons. Many of the same colonial rules under which freedom fighters were imprisoned, however, still exist and have been widely used by the central government since 2014 (and before) to arrest dissenters, while the police have continued to serve as a loyal arm of the state by carrying out arrests, oppressing minorities, and beating up protestors. In this context, abolition of the prison and the oppressive state become a dream and a goal. However, even though abolition continues to be a liberatory thought and practice, there are unique challenges in applying it freely as it is built around and by North American academics and activists. Hence, to read and engage with dominant streams of abolitionist thought that has emerged in the Global North is also to reckon with how different the Indian context is. This paper is an exploratory effort to think through and engage with those differences based on my own experience in a summer school facilitated by the Feminist Autonomous Center (FAC) on ‘Abolitionist Care Practices’. The summer school and its participants dealt with questions of care practices but also found a tension in the relationship between scholarship (especially one that uses English language and mostly academic terms) and practice in India. The key questions that emerge are - Is abolitionist thought restricted to the academic class with access to social, cultural, and economic capital? How do we then attempt to de-westernize and contextualize abolitionist thought to address different socio-cultural contexts and roadways to abolition?

Işıl Karacan, "Decolonizing Turkish-rule Kurdistan: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance"
The self is reflexive, historical, and contextual. I grew up listening to my grandmother (dayikê) lament in a language that the majority of the society I live in does not understand. I watched her mourn for every soul and soil she lost. In the following generations, I witnessed the exile of my father, uncles, and aunts. I was surrounded by generations of people weeping for a place, for a dream. It was a place that could not be described without mentioning the name of Turkey, where it was forbidden even to utter its name, a place only associated with backwardness and terrorism: “Eastern” Turkey, Kurdistan, or Bakur. As I grew up, I realized that people around me were traumatized by years of humiliation, assimilation policies, and state repression. When I got a little older, I noticed that trauma is not always disempowering. My family and relatives were, in fact, prominent Kurdish political activists in the struggle for equality and democracy.

Walter Benjamin argues, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” This approach to unveiling the “tradition of the oppressed” addresses the fact that there are alternative and often drastically different narratives circulating in the geographies of both the colonized and the colonizer. However, a subaltern-focused mode of history writing is less common for the Kurds who live under Turkish rule. Therefore, my paper aims to adopt an analytical lens—settler colonialism—to contextualize the northern part of Kurdistan within a longer history of, and intersection with, military occupation.

Settler colonialism does not have to be bound by certain presumptions derived solely from the New World contexts, which are reductive of the peculiar nationalist dimensions for the Middle East cases. Recent approaches have initiated a research dialogue that connects the histories of various settler colonialisms, aiming for a globally integrated model. My project emerges in response to this academic inquiry. Although recent studies linking the Ottoman Empire to global history and imperialism challenge former trends, only a few accounts explore the Turkish state from a broader perspective in relation to the colonial legacy. This paper seeks to situate the Kurdish experience within the global context and contribute to understanding distinct settler colonialism patterns in the Middle East.

Francesco Liucci, "Decolonizing a "postcolonial" world: A critical response to "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor""
This essay seeks to respond to and problematize Tuck and Yang’s article, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” a seminal contribution to decolonial literature that has received surprisingly few direct responses despite being cited over 8,000 times since publication. For the authors, true decolonization demands a total land return to Indigenous peoples.

I agree with Tuck and Yang’s critique of performative uses of decolonization; genuine justice for Indigenous peoples requires foundational societal restructuring, including significant (not symbolic) land reclamation. Nonetheless, their rigid view of modern colonial violence may undermine broader efforts toward justice and transformation. In the first part of this essay, I argue that their notion of Indigenous struggles as separate from other liberatory movements represents a simplistic characterization of colonial-capitalist oppressions while depriving us of the mass organizing mechanisms necessary for substantive decolonial aims. I also discuss how their interpretation of decolonization on exclusively material grounds is insufficiently unimaginative and detached from broader human concerns in ways that may condemn decolonial projects to irrelevance. I hold that decolonization should be a holistic process that permeates every aspect of life. This project should attempt to respond to the all-consuming nature of colonialist violence with all-encompassing solutions, following the totality of various Indigenous cosmologies and the interrelated continuum of biological life.

In the second section, I make a case for a decolonial project defined by a myriad of transdisciplinary solutions – developed in deep dialogue and horizontal collaboration with and by Indigenous people – by exploring a diverse landscape of decolonial projects being implemented globally. Such an expansive interpretation of decolonization is strengthened by its mutually reinforcing pursuits, making decolonization more politically possible and impactful for humanity. Moreover, I contend that non-land-centric projects – focused primarily on ontological, epistemic, sociopolitical, and personal consequences of colonialism – are just as valid and urgent forms of decolonization.

Speakers

Francesco Liucci

PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Işıl Karacan

PhD, Rutgers University

Sukanya Bhattacharya

PhD, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Sunday March 23, 2025 1:15pm - 2:30pm EDT
Room 155 Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167

In-Person

1:15pm EDT

Re-Foresting & Sowing Seeds with Eco-Literature: Entanglements, Climate Joy & Annihilation

Sunday March 23, 2025 1:15pm - 2:30pm EDT

Room 141

June Bumgardner, "To Love a Breaking World: Mediating Climate Crisis, Compassion, and Grief in Contemporary Literatures"
As the climate crisis creeps forward we experience many gradual losses: the passenger pigeon, the slowdeaths of reefs and rainforests, of communities, of stable weather patterns, and of the senses of place they inform. As things deteriorate, their old forms and the processes of their decay are recorded, modeled, thus used to (re)mediate our senses of loss, informing our imaginations of climate change/crisis. As part of a wider scholarly project of building affective, present-situated paradigm for understanding the creeping climate crisis indebted to theorists like Donna Haraway (Staying with The Trouble), Lauren Berlant, Deepesh Chakrabarty, Glenn Albrecht, and Terry Harpold, this critical-creative paper focuses on the feelings evoked by images of environmental decay and loss, asking how mediations aestheticize our temporalities of climate change/crisis and how we can improve those crisis mediations to engender climate joy and compassion in a changing world.

I begin by thinking about temporalities of crisis, moving towards a speculative, queering temporality wherein the present is caught up in a grief-laden, soon-to-be-always-already approaching future incident-horizon. I then explore how mediations of changing ecologies work within our temporalities, using specific examples of documentation (the passenger pigeon, Eastern Australian temperate forests, and Gauley mountain). Finally, I examine how those mediations are registered through three works of climate resilience literature: a speculative fiction video game Kentucky Route Zero, Ann Pancake’s watershed novel about disaster in rural West Virginia Strange As This Weather Has Been, and a speculative essay by Trans Caribbean writer Gabrielle Bellot “Starshift.” In my analyses, I ask how we can love a world as it fractures, and how to best mediate, record, and enable that love, working towards an imagination that liberates our crisis vision from the guilt, confusion, and anxiety about crises, and can instead focus on caring through them.

Kelsie Crough, "Abjection in Area X: An Eco-Psychoanalysis of Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer"
Jeff Vandermeer’s 2014 eco-fiction and sci-fi horror novel, Annihilation, works to reshape the public understanding of the environmental crisis as an external, material that humanity must physically solve and shifting that understanding to include the crisis psychological, nearly existential impact it has on humans. Vandermeer achieves this shift in perspective on the crisis through the horrifying and unsettling setting of Area X in which his adventuring party of characters enter, try to understand, fail to understand, and come out changed—if they come out at all. Characters who survive Area X returned changed, not physically, but mentally, and readers see this mental change in the narrator as the story goes on and she increasingly encounters more and more of Area X’s creatures and landscape. This change occurs because the characters are facing something, in this case Area X as a living setting, known as the abject.

According to Julia Kristeva’s essay “Approaching Abjection,” the abject is a psychological phenomenon that people encounter that is not part of themselves, yet not part of the other or an object outside of themselves, but something entirely different that stands opposite of the person and upsets everything that person understands as true. This is true of Area X for the adventurers in Annihilation, in which characters question their own motivations, capabilities and even language through encounters with different parts of Area X.

Vandermeer uses Area X as a manifestation of the abject and, by having his characters encounter it, hands the reader uncomfortable questions about the environmental crisis, human life, and what it means for the environment to affect humans in the same detrimental ways humans affect the environment.

Lauren Rudewicz, "S/care Tactics: Tending to Entanglements Haunting Environmental Literature”
As the writers of Haunted Nature, ed. Sladja Blazan, have shown, entanglements haunt environmental literature. Narratives of entanglement in environmental literature are intended to inspire action in response to crisis, underscoring an urgent need to mitigate humans’ planet-sized capacity for harm (and being harmed) in the Anthropocene. These narratives, however, leverage feelings of fear, shame, and overwhelm that are ultimately contrary to action. Entanglement thus becomes itself a crisis in and for environmental literature, often more horrifying than it is inspiring. Building on the case Blazan makes in Haunted Nature for viewing environmental crisis through the lens of horror and the “Ecogothic,” I compare narratives of entanglement in environmental literature with the trope of the porous and multiple self of psychological horror. Although the nature of the fears here are similar, the meta-narrative concerning where these fears come from and what kinds of responses they inspire are importantly different. Environmental literature focusing on entanglement tends to take for granted the connection between the fear it generates and the action it encourages. Theorizing this gap between fear and action, I consider the “failed readers” environmental literature projects – ones who fail to be moved to action because they must not be scared enough, or ashamed enough, or simply don’t care enough. How might the narrative structures of psychological horror reframe this supposed failure?

While I approach this question in part through literary analysis, my paper is also interwoven with personal narrative, in acknowledgement and exploration of the fact that my analysis of the environment through psychological horror has been intimately shaped by my encounters with real-life psychology and experience with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy during graduate school. I consider how IFS might further frame a liberatory reading practice which challenges and re-interprets received narratives of entanglement and the environment.

Speakers

June Bumgardner

Graduate Student, University of Michigan

Right now, I'm interested in talking about time, togetherness, media, and affect. I am generally interested in transness, remediations, experimental writing, and studies of craft.

Kelsie Crough

MA, Rhode Island College

Hello! My name is Kelsie Crough and I am a graduate student at Rhode Island College studying English and Creative Writing. My academic research pertains to 21st century speculative literature with a special interest in psychoanalytical and eco-critical approaches. My creative work... Read More →

Lauren Rudewicz

PhD, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

I am a PhD Candidate in English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I study contemporary American science fiction and fantasy through the lenses of queer theory and queer ecologies, affect theory, and genre studies.

Sunday March 23, 2025 1:15pm - 2:30pm EDT
Room 141 Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167

In-Person

3:15pm EDT

Build Your Own Economy: An Interactive Storytelling Experience (Workshop)

Sunday March 23, 2025 3:15pm - 4:30pm EDT

Room 144

Build Your Own Economy is an hour-long interactive storytelling experience that uses fictive micro-stories and poetry based on real-life happenings, to discuss transformative communal economies, which can be defined as group-based economics. The storytelling delves into global histories and logistics of collectives, exploring the ways they have allowed Indigenous and other diasporan people to survive (and sometimes thrive) throughout time, e.g. before money was invented; amid forced displacement; during enslavement, post-emancipation, and colonialism; in times of inflation; through financial meltdowns; or within war-torn areas.

The workshop will be an immersive experience where participants engage in collaborative decision-making to address specific financial scenarios the facilitator provides. The activity will showcase ways attendees can be economic agents of change and perhaps consider starting economic projects in their families and/or communities. The communal economy stories will weave in Indigenous knowledge around grassroots approaches to develop imaginative economic possibilities that foster collective responsibility and solidarity for families and communities.

As a scholar whose work is grounded in African ways of knowing and community economies, I designed the workshop format to embody the way that African Indigenous people have always shared knowledge, that is via stories. The workshop is committed to keeping the art of African oral histories and storytelling culture alive in an increasingly digital world. In the Build Your Own Economy experience, I will share African Indigenous Knowledge nuggets that will demonstrate the value and importance of ancestral wisdom, and show its relevance, even in modern times. My goal is to illustrate African ways of knowing, which are amenable, agile, and flexibly responsive to the needs of their localities, and reflect on how such knowledge might be adapted to attendees’ contemporary lives and spaces.

Speakers

Sonya Squires-Caesar

PhD, University of Maryland - Baltimore County

Sunday March 23, 2025 3:15pm - 4:30pm EDT
Room 144 Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167

In-Person, Workshop

3:15pm EDT

Celebrating the Possible: Joy, Pleasure & Abundance

Sunday March 23, 2025 3:15pm - 4:30pm EDT

Room 155

Aiman Rahman, "The Mycelium of Liberatory Delights: Ross Gay’s Exploration of Black Joy"
Despite the impression rendered by popular stereotypes, the Black experience is much more capacious and abundant than trauma narratives. In this paper, I shall be exploring how Black joy operates as a radical act of self-preservation and defiance, tapping into the phenomena of pleasure activism, nonconsumptive delight, counter-narratives of representation, and the surge of reformative hope through the lens of Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. Gay challenges the idea of conflating pain with the Black experience by proclaiming his book as evidence of a Black creative’s potential to identify and produce beauty liberated from the entangled suffering enforced by white oppressors. My research will be backed up by Kleaver Cruz’s The Black Joy Project wherein he discovers the ‘double-bind’ nature of joy and grief, and Adrienne Brown’s Pleasure Activism wherein she examines the politics of healing and joy within social structures. I shall be probing how Black joy serves as a retaliatory mechanism for reclaiming Black Humanity in a world geared toward reducing Black communities to victims and overlooking their potential as agents of change. Consequently, these ‘delight-garnering rituals’ serve as methods of resistance in the face of anti-Blackness. I shall explicate how an alter order of compassion and tenderness can be laid down through the framework of Gay’s poetic amendments while also analyzing the way he goes against the grain of capitalism by advocating for an introspective, percolating pause. This paper hopes to unveil the ways Black people reimagine and re-envision their place in the world by radically and wholeheartedly embracing joy. I will examine how pleasure is not a signature of vanity or frivolity; it is freedom, especially for historically undermined groups for whom it was always inaccessible.

Avik Sarkar, "Possibility beyond the Present: Keioui Keijaun Thomas’s Black Trans Futures"
Anti-trans violence is nothing less than a global crisis. Tragically, it is well documented that Black trans women continue to be disproportionately targeted by fatal violence. In both the popular imagination and scholarly discourse, the Black trans woman is either located squarely in the past, where she has already passed (Marsha P. Johnson, for instance) or precariously in the present, where she is barely surviving. In other words, she is represented as a figure with no future, always dead or on the verge of death. As Dora Silva Santana reminds us, “there is a risk that… Black trans women are discussed only as a corpse” (215).

How might Black trans aesthetic practices reckon with this ongoing crisis? In my presentation, I will discuss visual and performance artist Keioui Keijaun Thomas’s project Come Hell or High Femmes: The Journey of the Dolls, which envisions a postapocalyptic world where only “the dolls”—Black trans women—remain. In her own words, Thomas investigates “camouflage and metamorphosis as modes of survival and transcendence,” strategies that allow the dolls to reproduce themselves from day to day. This speculative work challenges us to conceive of futures in which Black trans women can not only live but indeed flourish, beyond the persistent threat of premature death.

I will argue that Come Hell or High Femmes responds to José Esteban Muñoz’s call for “the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1). In the spirit of Muñoz’s reflections on utopia, Thomas refuses the precarity and violence that marks the present, transporting us instead to a space of abundance and pleasure, where Black trans femininity represents possibility as opposed to negation. She invites us not to ignore the current crisis but to consider what could—and should—come next.

Works Cited:
“Keioui Keijaun Thomas.” Wexner Center for the Arts, June 2022. https://wexarts.org/exhibitions/keioui-keijaun-thomas.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009.
Santana, Dora Silva. “Mais Viva!: Reassembling Transness, Blackness, and Feminism.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 2 (May 1, 2019): 210–22.

August Wei, "Queer Joy as Resistance: Reframing Transgender and Nonbinary Narratives"
Background: As the sociopolitical climate becomes increasingly hostile toward transgender and non-binary (TNB) individuals, celebration is an act of resistance. When research and media on TNB individuals is heavily focused on struggle and hardship, reframing TNB narratives to include joy is a necessary shift that demonstrates the complexities of the lived experiences of TNB people. In this proposed paper, we highlight the hope born out of crises and emphasize what is possible for TNB-centered research beyond documenting damage.

Aim: We aim to better understand how TNB individuals conceptualize the term and experiences of “queer joy”, including the contexts in which they experience queer joy. A secondary aim is to examine the impact of a queer joy brief expressive writing exercise on TNB individuals’ positive affect.

Method: We propose conducting a thematic analysis of written responses to prompts that assess understanding of and experiences with queer joy (e.g., “Think of a time when you experienced strong positive emotions (e.g., joy, happiness, euphoria) related to your sense of self as an LGBTQIA+ person.”; “Please define the term queer joy.”) A paired samples t-test will be used to compare positive affect prior to and after a queer joy brief expressive writing exercise. Data are from a TNB subsample of the International Queer Joy Survey (2023-2024), including 311 TNB participants residing in the United States and New Zealand (ages 16-71).

Discussion: This evidence of trans joy reflects a paradigm shift away from deficit-based TNB narratives and toward a growing literature base that accentuates the joyous resistance experienced by TNB individuals. In a period of anti-trans rhetoric, these results can radically inform how researchers, educators, and practitioners view and discuss TNB communities and their needs.

Speakers

Aiman Rahman

Masters, James Madison University

Aiman, also known as the 'Youngest Novelist of Pakistan,' is an English graduate student and teaching GA at James Madison University. She is a former gold medalist from the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Aiman is a published literature aficionado who has written for The... Read More →

August Wei

PhD, University of Delaware

avik sarkar

Masters, University of Oxford

Sunday March 23, 2025 3:15pm - 4:30pm EDT
Room 155 Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167

In-Person

3:15pm EDT

Transforming Family Formations: Protecting Queer Individuals & Reforming its Socio-Political Structures

Sunday March 23, 2025 3:15pm - 4:30pm EDT

Room 141

Kamazhay Bermagambetova, “Liberatory Practices as Oppression: Why Parents Are Obsessed with the Queer Community in Kazakhstan”
In many countries, same-sex marriage remains illegal, yet queer communities continue to exist and fight for their basic rights, including the right to safety and visibility. In Kazakhstan, queer discourse was relatively present from the country’s independence through the early 2000s. However, in recent years, discussions of queerness have become increasingly taboo. Although there is no law explicitly criminalizing queer identities, anti-queer sentiment has intensified, driven in part by organized parent groups who claim that queerness is a “Western phenomenon.” These groups have systematically targeted and threatened queer individuals, framing queerness as a danger to Kazakh children and society.
Under the pretext of "protecting children from perversion," these parent groups have aggressively opposed new legislation aimed at addressing domestic violence, claiming that the law will undermine traditional family structures and leave children without parental guidance. This opposition reveals a paradox: while advocating for the "protection" of children from queer influence, these groups simultaneously defend forms of domestic violence, which have historically been normalized in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. The conflict highlights a troubling contradiction in Kazakh society's stance on child welfare—a clash between an alleged moral imperative to shield children from queerness and an enduring tolerance for family violence.
This paper examines how these so-called “protective” practices mask an underlying resistance to progressive change and seek to scapegoat the queer community as a means of preserving authoritarian family structures. This analysis questions the true motives of ‘protecting the family’ and explores how the queer community in Kazakhstan has become a scapegoat in debates around children’s rights and domestic violence.

Miranda Dotson, “Gender Heritage: The Organization of Labor in Nonbinary Households”
At a time when diverse expression and identity configurations gain visibility and acceptance, little is understood about the influence of such gender configurations on social interactions within interpersonal relationships. To explore this question, my ethnography focuses on the organization of domestic labor and care work in households where at least one romantic partner identifies as non-binary. This paper combines data from in-depth interviews and field notes from non-participant observation from at least twenty diversely-configured households (n=45) across the United States to understand how nonbinary identity does (or does not) affect the organization of household labor. Preliminary findings suggest that it is the gender heritage of all partners that exerts the greatest influence on the distribution of household and care labor. Specifically, partners assigned female in relationships with partners assigned male (who are not transfeminine) are more likely to take on the cognitive labor in the maintenance of their household and relationship. This finding challenges the assumption that non-binary identities pave a clear path toward interactions wherein one's experience is not shaped by assigned gender. Rather, it is the confluence of binary heritage and identity that best predicts the distribution of historically gendered burdens. Households where all partners have a relationship to feminization, either by way of assigned heritage or trans-femininity, are most likely to report evenly distributed experiences with cognitive labor. This research addresses the persistence of gender-binary inequity, the extent that it is undermined by non-binary identities, and speaks to the broader question of how we get free.

Trung M. Nguyen, “Queering the Home & Care as Tactics for Environmental Crisis in Vietnam”
Lower-middle-class housing in Ho Chi Minh City is not the ideal accommodation for queer individuals in Vietnam, especially with the lack of personal space between family members due to the rising living cost in a post-colonial state. Utilizing the critical lens of autoethnography, the paper explores the author’s own journey of queer escapism to find hope to return to a house that is no longer the same: different boundaries yet wreaked with deterioration under the effect of the climate crisis. Constant and severe floods have led to inaccessibility to the toilet and hygiene-practicing space. Wielding concepts and theories from eco-feminist writers such as Dina Gilio-Whitaker and Jessica Hernandez, the author dissects the queer structure of their own “nuclear” family formation, troubling the easy contemporary understanding of the standard heterosexual Vietnamese family of two children, while facing such constant environmental threats of uninhabitable living space. At the center of critiques, the mother figure stands out as a survivor of various crises, family, gendered, and environmental, who keeps strategizing and reconstructing the family. Tapping in Patti Duncan’s work on motherhood in East/Southeast Asia, the paper maps out practices of hope and perseverance against the debilitating ecology of the Vietnamese governed state under the transnational context of the hierarchical global economy in relationship to consumerism and waste management. Lastly, there is a call for communal solutions where, in reality, it is the neighborhood that usually offers help, which complicates the issue of personal homes and undergirds the notion of collective hope in moments of crisis. Through that, the paper addresses how to center queer mode of families as praxis of care in the Global South communities where exacerbating climate crises threaten their livelihood & futures.

Speakers

In-Person

Liberatory Practices for Worlds in Crisis: 2025 GCWS Grad Student Conference