The Cultural Studies Association (CSA) has shared a call for proposals for participation in its twenty-fifth annual meeting, which will be held fully online from June 3-5, 2027. Proposals on all topics relevant to cultural studies will be considered, with priority given to those that engage the conference’s theme of Thresholds.
From the call for proposals:
In more ways than one, we exist at the threshold: the resurgence of fascist governance; the potential elimination of Black studies, Ethnic studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies from the University; the tipping point of runaway climate change; mounting violations of privacy via AI and other technology. Yet, scholars push back against presentist conceptions of the threshold. Black, Indigenous, and Queer scholars, for example, have illustrated how their communities have long been impacted by colonial and environmental catastrophe. Our political rhetoric, our economic forecast, our climatological outlook, and our popular imagination calls attention incessantly to our “momentous moment”–perpetually on the brink, at the edge, at an inflection point. This rhetoric of impending catastrophe and permacrisis often serves to maintain the status quo, or obfuscate the actual sites of suffering and loci of power that perpetuate that physical, political, economic and environmental violence. Thus, scholars raise the question, who and what histories are left out by certain framings of the threshold? At the same time, this threshold does not only gesture to an impending doom, but possibilities for imagining otherwise: How might we detour away from the destinies prescribed by Western colonial regimes? How might we re-conceptualize our understanding of difference? The liminality of thresholds calls attention to the increasingly blurry boundaries between assumed oppositions: the human and the technological, the natural and the artificial, along with myriad taxonomies and categories of race, gender, sex, sexuality, ability, and identity. What new possibilities for subversive agency exist among those unruly bodies which exceed the limited categories placed upon them?
Submissions should be made by November 20, 2026, through the EasyChair link on the CFP webpage.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Melissa Horak-Hern, Mariam Ismail, Trip Kirkpatrick, and Mimosa Shah (Editors-at-Large), Molly McGuire and Rachel Starry (Editors for the week), Claudia Berger, Ruth Carpenter, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Pamella Lach, Hillary Richardson, and Christine Salek (dh+lib Review Editors), and Tom Lee (Technical Editor).