Graduate Student Conference on Cultivating Joy and Collective Restoration

This virtual conference, titled “Cultivating Joy and Collective Restoration: (Re)Imagining and (Re)Claiming Pleasure and Liberation”, aims to bring together graduate students, early career scholars, community activists, educators, and creatives of all kinds to explore how Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities are reimagining and reclaiming pleasure and healing, and how this is liberatory and restorative work, particularly during times of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

From April 24-25, 2021, through our offerings of movement sessions, collective imagining workshops, keynote presenters, and graduate student panels, we will virtually convene to: 1) utilize the power of collective imagination to center communities’ joys and ambitions for their present realities and futures, and 2) explore sustainable embodied resilience and what it means for Black, Brown, and Indigenous people to deliberately choose pleasure and healing, especially when the systems governing our world make it difficult to do so.

We are now accepting panel proposals from graduate students/early career scholars until Sunday, February 28, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. EST.