Workshop organised by the Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS, University of London
September 15-16, 2025
SOAS, University of London
The genocide perpetrated by Israel against the people of Gaza with the discursive and material support of Western governments, the routine dehumanisation of Palestinians by the mainstream news media, and the censorship and persecution that those who have attempted to speak out against these crimes have experienced, have left many of us who are dedicated to teaching and research within academia in the service of a politics of progressive futurity fearful of the futility of our endeavours.
What is the use of research, study, and knowledge production more generally in a conjuncture marked not only by death and destruction, but also by the intransigence of the powerful in the face of such monumental injustice?
Queer and feminist theory, in their most radical manifestations, have dedicated themselves to the future-impossible – a future where the many so-called deviants of the world who have been made perverse in order to be marked for death could come to own the world. However, in this most deadening and hopeless of conjunctures, it is difficult to invest in let alone imagine alternative futures.
This workshop aims to think through how we might maintain our commitment to impossible futures as we watch the world burn, and witness its most vulnerable communities killed in real time, their deaths live-streamed on social media, and their murder justified by an imperial world desperate to maintain its grip on what, it is often forgotten, is a global majority.
We will think through:
What is demanded of us as queer feminists in this time of ruination?
How do we cultivate the capacity and will to keep going amidst so much loss and horror?
Is the commitment to futurity and the politics of queer utopia the only affective infrastructure that can support our capacity to agitate against the present?
If hope is no longer the modality through which can orient ourselves towards the otherwise, what else might facilitate this orientation?
What is the purpose of study and knowledge production, and how can we free the former from its neoliberal binds and the latter from its extractivist bent?
We welcome interventions on any topics related to the above broad theme, and welcome explorations via a queer feminist lens of:
The politics of transnational solidarity in genocidal conjunctures;
The social reproduction of social movements;
Censorship and subjectivity;
Haunting and the revolutionary past in the present;
Speculation and fabulation amidst ruination;
Study and knowledge production beyond the university;
Narration, voice, and storytelling;
The politics of refusal;
Affect and subjects of and in protest;
Disaster politics and the nervous system;
Archives, afterlives, traces
This is a two-day in-person workshop.
To apply to participate in the workshop, please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short bio via this form by April 30th 2025: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=odBNZ2Kux0Kjn2nuGZU3qOWc89CKU8NNjXtyzZrDyQZUMFBOWk1aN1A5U0w0TVpZMzcySkpWMk1CQS4u&wdLOR=c8249ED7A-720E-7345-ADD9-591A3981951E
Selected candidates will be informed by May 31st 2025, and will be expected to submit a 4000-6000 word paper by July 31, 2025.
Death Time and the Politics of Queer Feminist Pedagogy, Study, and Knowledge Production