Please use this form to submit your proposals and abstracts. If submitting a workshop, roundtable, or panel, please fill out this form for each presenter.

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
Queer Emergencies
A symposium organized in conjunction with the Toronto Queer Film Festival (https://torontoqueerfilmfest.com/)
Toronto, Canada
April 24 & 25 2021
Proposal deadline: January 25, 2021
Everyone is welcome to apply. All participants will be paid.

Questions or concerns? Email symposium@torontoqueerfilmfest.com
 
Confirmed speakers: Dean Spade with more TBA

The Toronto Queer Film Festival is seeking proposals for a symposium on the theme of Queer Emergencies that aims to address queer, trans, and two-spirit experiences and challenges in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

This is a landmark time for humanity. Homebound and with resources dwindling, many of us continue to create art and engage in solidarity practices from within our communities. Queer Emergencies celebrates the resilience, resistance and creativity of our community in its response to the intense pressures and transformations wrought by the global pandemic. It seeks to engage work that is vital in this moment, speaking to the unique challenges that precarious and marginalized queer and trans communities are facing today.

We’ve noticed a prevailing capitalist logic to the disbursement of resources, while artists are incurring losses of incomes and/or assets due to the economic contraction caused by widespread social distancing measures. Current structuring of funds prioritizes the privileged among us, leaving most people who were already struggling with few to no resources.

The Queer Emergencies 2021 Symposium asks the question: what are our current limitations and how can we work within them in creative ways?  What are the issues facing queer, trans and two-spirit communities in the current moment and how can we allow them to radicalize our collective future?

As ever, TQFF’s mandate remains to decolonize queer and trans art and media histories and practices. This symposium seeks projects with a unique perspective who frame their work in a critical, anti-oppressive and future-bound model.

We are interested in papers, workshops, roundtables, readings, performances that critically engage and reckon with and through media and the arts.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

* Queer and/or Indigenous histories of organizing and resistance to public health crises
* Unpacking inclusion & building social alliances
* Queer and/or Indigenous perspectives on climate emergency, both locally and beyond
* Mutual aid & food justice
* Solidarity & allyship both within the queer/trans/2S communities and beyond
* Community resilience & self-care
* Envisioning the future of queer and trans resistance
* Queer and trans organizing and activism before, during and after COVID
* Mental health and artistic production/practices during and after COVID
* Queer/trans pandemic crip time: living and working with chronic illness and disability
* Essential and abandoned: intersectional (anti-racism, decolonial, disability justice) approaches to the
  disproportionate impact of economic and public health failures on our queer/trans/2S communities
* Coalitional organizing and solidarities: defunding the police, abolishing prisons, workplace safety, and
   envisioning a world where public health and art are prioritized over property, police, prisons, and imperial global
   militarism
* Combatting, strategizing/organizing against, and documenting the present and future of genocide (pandemics,
   climate emergency, structured institutional/infrastructure neglect and abandonment)
* Queer migrant justice: open borders, mass migration, and worldwide worker solidarity
* Rent strikes, mass evictions, kangaroo “housing courts,” and housing for all


While papers, roundtables, workshops, and other typical academic conference formats are welcomed, we especially encourage more creative formats including but not limited to: arts-based research, poster presentations, poetry, performances, music, readings, artist talks, and other presentation formats that innovate and encourage online participation. As a symposium organized with a film festival, we are particularly interested in contributions that engage in some way with queer and trans media and/or art practices.
 
As a grassroots organization embedded within our communities, the Toronto Queer Film Festival encourages contributions from folks across our community – not just academics embedded within universities, but also independent scholars, activists, artists, community members, and other people with lived experience that would provide valuable perspectives to discussions on global queer liberation art and media.

Everyone is welcome to apply.

This symposium will be held online. We are particularly interested in submissions that take full advantage of the capabilities of online platforms. Individual papers and presentations should be no more than 15 minutes. Roundtables, workshops, panels, should be no more than 1 hour, including opportunity for Q&A. We will also accept submission for proposals with shorter durations (i.e. lightning talks, microsessions, etc).

Participants will be notified of their acceptance by February 15, 2021