Early Career Event Co-Sponsored by the Sexualities, Space and Queer Research Group (SSQRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG), the Oxford Queer Studies Network, and the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.
This event invites early career researchers (including postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers and early-career lecturers) doing queer work that engages with ideas of precarity and precariousness to submit abstracts for consideration for a one-day workshop on queer precarities, which will be convened at the University of Oxford on Friday 15 May 2020.
Butler (2004) establishes an understanding of all lives as inherently precarious. Certain populations are, of course, differentially exposed to ‘injury, violence, and death’ across time and space, meaning different people experience and feel precariousness differently. Butler describes the experience of enhanced precariousness as ‘precarity’. Moreover, Johnston (2018) suggests that feminist and queer researchers have much to add to discussions of precariousness and precarity. The latter is ‘directly linked to gender and sexual norms since those of us who do not live our genders and sexualities in “intelligible” ways risk violence, discrimination, harassment and death’. The way precarity is lived, felt and experienced, then, is spatially and temporally uneven and has unique effects on LGBTI+ and queer lives.
It is these relations, across various contexts, that this workshop seeks to explore. We aim to facilitate conversation, collaborations and idea-sharing amongst early-career researchers, and to potentially pursue a special issue for a journal drawing from this event. We envisage to include around ten presentations of ten minutes each across five sessions to allow scope for lively collaborative debate.
We invite responses from early-career scholars working across a range of disciplines, who wish to engage conceptually, methodologically and/or empirically with ideas including but not limited to queer precarity, care and activism, queer politics of embodied feelings, and queer interventions.
By 17 March 2020, please submit a max. 200-word abstract for a ten-minute presentation for consideration to Dr Carl Bonner-Thompson and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, at carl.bonner-thompson [AT] ouce.ox.ac.uk and ruth.ramsden-karelse [AT] merton.ox.ac.uk Participants will be informed of the outcome by 20 March 2020.
The SSQRG with RGS-IBG is able to award up to eight travel bursaries of roughly £50 each. The distribution of these will depend on the final number of confirmed participants and relative cost of travel. Lunch and refreshments will be provided on the day.
