The 2026 Conference

Check out what happened in Chicago!

Some photo Highlights from the conference

Any sessions cancelled after September 15, 2026 will be listed below:

  • “Abject Pleasures and Fugitivity in African Diasporic Women’s Visual Art and Performance”
  • “Abolitionist Accountability Across Prison Walls: Contesting Carceral Barriers to Knowledge Production”
  • “Are You Sure, Sweetheart, that You Want to Be Well?”: Health, Wellness and Radical Self-Possession”
  • “Assata is Welcome Here”
  • “Bad Feelings”
  • “Becoming Undone to Being Unbothered: Summoning Healing Energy Within Black Queer Critique and Praxis”
  • “Critical Muslim Studies and the Question of Self-Defense”
  • “Dialogue is a Dumpster Fire: New Militancies in Fascist Times”
  • “FolioX: Prepared Chinese Dulcimer and Improvisation”
  • “Improv and Your Classroom: A Pedagogy Workshop (Session 1)” and “(Session 2)”
  • “Improvising Being With, Being Away”
  • “Improvising Care: Food, Sovereignty, and Diaspora Under Constraint – An Experimental Laboratory/Participatory Workshop”
  • “Making a Way Getting Away: Black and Native Women in Archives of the Atlantic World”
  • “Necropolitics and Refusal”
  • “New Directions in the Trans Archives”
  • “Off the Cuff: Activism, Improvisation, and the Pursuit of Transformative Political Realities”
  • “PALESTINE IN MOVEMENT: IMPROVISATIONS ACROSS THE GLOBAL IMPERIAL BODY”
  • “Performing Change: The Art of Politics and Community”
  • “(Re)thinking Porn Studies in the Wake of Crisis”
  • “Reproduction as Pedagogy: Improvisation, Speculation, and the Contested Futures We Teach”
  • “Sounding Self: Ephemeral Black Worlding and the Queering of Collective Identity Construction”
  • “Transnational Dialogue on Prison and Jail Expansion I: Methods, Scale and Carceral Development”