Ohio State University 2023 Hiphop Literacies Conference CALL FOR PAPERS
Hiphop and Queer/Trans Black Feminisms
March 30th & 31st, 2023 (THURS & FRI)
OSU Hiphop Literacies Conference (OSU HHLC) is both an academic and public-facing community convening that provides a space relevant to lives of Hiphop generation youth and their communities, in relation to cultural development, education, and overall well-being. OSU HHLC encourages interdisciplinary research, teaching and outreach within and outside of OSU around Hiphop culture. March 30th & 31st, 2023 will mark our 12th year of existence and our 9th conference. OSU HHLC will be hybrid with virtual and live gathering components as well as multiple levels of publicness, featuring keynote sessions, scholar panels and round tables, LGBTQ+ community-led workshops and activities, community youth as well as OSU student presentations, and a concert with local performers, featuring a nationally recognized personality.
Conference Theme: Hiphop and Queer/Trans Black Feminisms
Black women, queer and/trans people across genders and sexualities following in the footsteps of earlier Black feminists of the Combahee River Collective brought to the fore that Black people as a group are queered and non-normative, namely, through racialization of their gender, sexuality, and class by subtle and explicit institutionalized violent social practices (Garza, 2014; Khan-Cullors & Bandele, 2018). Black queer and trans feminist perspectives prioritize movement strategies to uplift multiply marginalized Black identities e.g. LGBTQ+, incarcerated, poor, women, gender expansive/agender, disabled- emphasizing that none of us are free until all are free, and that all forms of systemic oppression must be dismantled (Carruthers, 2018). Many Black activists, artists, healers, and organizers of the twenty-first century invest in coalition-based leadership style as well as ideas about “how we get free’ and invigorate movements among younger and more diverse groups.
Political Scientist Cathy Cohen (2015) observed that for this Black Lives Matter generation, Hiphop is their overall lifestyle and is reflected in their politics and protests, life stories, music, words, and style. They are remixing Hiphop and movement politics to build new worlds and to further radicalize Hiphop. Their work demonstrates a need for marginalized groups to meaningfully work across diverse intersecting identities to build coalitions for envisioning and creating a just world.
Proposed Presentation Topics
Presentations and performances should highlight the Hiphop arts and Black queer and trans feminist influence in education, cinema, television, fashion, literature, digital technology, activism, Black popular culture, politics, criminal justice, issues of bodily autonomy, health care, reproductive justice and more.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20-minute paper presentations are welcome as well as other formats (i.e., ethnodrama, performance, poetry, autoethnography, and fiction). We are also seeking regional and local talent to perform on the bill with a national artist (TBA) on the final night of the conference.
Send abstracts for papers and other formats to Hiphopliteracies@gmail.com by January 15, 2023. Acceptances will be notified by January 29, 2023. Please include your name, (institutional affiliation) contact information, including email address, and phone number. Local/regional performers should send a link to their brief performance video and 3 sentence bio (with contact info) to Hiphopliteracies@gmail.com by January 15, 2023 (put “performer” in subject line). All details will be posted on the conference website: forthcoming. For updated information about the conference organizers, the final program, confirmed speakers and performers, hotel arrangements, and local attractions, this information will be forthcoming.
*Select papers may be invited to participate in the Hiphop Studies and Queer Black Feminism project Edited by Drs. Elaine Richardson, Gwendolyn Pough and Treva Lindsey
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