Call for Papers & Activism AAG 2019
Queer Memorial Activism: Positionality, Placemaking, Powerplay
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting 2019, Washington D.C., US, April 3-7, 2019
ORGANISER: Martin Zebracki, University of Leeds, UK
CALL FOR PAPERS
This session invites papers to address emerging forms of place-based activism involving commemoration dedicated to the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, including victims of anti-LGBT violence. Such ‘queer memorial activism’ may cover objects such as permanent architectural structures; practices including marches, performances and temporary installations; and interventions mediated through offline and online, or hybrid, spaces.
Queer memorials, and acts of queer memorialisation, are especially meaningful in recalling events, places, persons and stories that affect historically marginalised gender and sexual minorities. Thus, they can be important considering their potential for establishing as well as politicising spaces for the (fuller) inclusion of the lives of LGBT people and their narratives that have remained unheard or unseen, whilst they may simultaneously operate as sources of community struggle.
This session particularly invites papers that interrogate the powerplay embedded in:
(a) How queer memorial activism navigates between ambiguous processes of commemoration, celebration and contestation and their ramifications at socio-spatial scales from the body to the global;
(b) Placemaking as inclusionary vs. exclusionary site strategy, which might combine aesthetic, political, ideological, etc. aspects within the purviews of official commissioning vs. grassroots / do-it-yourself actions, permanent vs. temporary creative practices, and central vs. peripheral sites of activist engagement.
Accordingly, this session seeks contributions that radically engage positionality and placemaking: how can we examine significant uses, but also significant misuses, of queer memorials / memorialisation that may (in)visibilise certain gender or sexual ‘others’ along with wider intersectional concerns with processes of social inclusion and exclusion?
Papers can be theoretical, methodological and/or empirical in focus and draw from any geographical settings and state of research, ranging from work in progress to completed inquiry. Submissions are welcomed from scholars at all stages of career and transdisciplinary backgrounds.
Please send abstracts of max. 250 words to M.M.Zebracki [at] leeds.ac.uk by October 22, 2018.
CALL FOR ACTIVISM
Moreover, I would like to sound out any zest for a potential collaborative queer memorial activist event to be organised on the streets of Washington D.C. during the AAG Annual Meeting. The content, context and location of such event is to be negotiated amongst the pool of interested participants. This praxis, or theory-in-action, would make a statement on how scholarship and scholars can make concrete collaborative creative-cum-politicising contributions beyond the conventional conference room.
As source of inspiration, I would like to geographically expand on my recent joint artivist demonstration entitled (A)WAKE: No kneeling for LGBT violence! https://www.facebook.com/events/516620968759838/
Following a severe incident of gaybashing in the city of Ghent in the summer of 2018, our collective #LHBTMonumntGent organised a ludic demonstration that proclaimed the Fountain of Kneeling Youths in the city centre of Ghent as temporary Monument for Sexual Diversity (until the inauguration of a ‘real’ one) – attracting over more than 200 attendees according to the national press (VRT). A ‘scrolly’ of the event can be retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/p/Bm6eF3mlvD9/?taken-by=martinzebracki
Please send any expressions of interest in such queer activist event to the above email address by October 22, 2018.
Let me know any queries.
Best,
Martin Zebracki
Principal Investigator, Queer Memorials: International Comparative Perspectives on Sexual Diversity and Social Inclusivity (QMem), supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project grant
https://www.queermemorials.org
Dr M. M. (Martin) Zebracki
Associate Professor of Critical Human Geography
School of Geography
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
+44 (0) 113 34 33331
https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/geography/staff/1124/dr-martin-zebracki/
https://zebracki.org
https://twitter.com/zebracki
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