CRS Graduate Student Conference 2026

April 3rd - 4th, 2026

Sprockets/Selvage/Shores

Sprockets, also known as film perforation, are the holes placed in the film stock during manufacturing for steadying the film during projections and moving it through the projector. They are not only functional but also hold edge codes, which are important cultural and archival information about the prints themselves. Selvage refers to the edge of woven cloth, which similarly contains critical information about its manufacture while stabilizing the woven fabric. Sprockets, along with selvage, represent the margins of cultural products and the hidden history and stories that are often neglected in cultural criticism and academia. Likewise, shores, on a geopolitical and environmental level, stabilize and define the coastline, attending to the slippage between land and sea and the contested space of the border. 

Sprockets/Selvage/Shores foregrounds what happens in the periphery to think through diverse topics like diasporic studies, decolonial and anti-colonial studies, orphan films, underrepresented communities, resistance and subversive readings, activism, etc. By attending to the margins, this conference strives to better understand and subvert the hegemonic power dynamics embedded in our social structure.

Sponsored by the Center for Research & Study at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, this graduate student conference is organized by the joint effort of students at the departments of Cinema Studies, Performance Studies, and Art and Public Policy. Together, we seek to consider the theme of the periphery as described by sprockets, selvage, and shores, where the space of the margins may imbricate a creative force. We are looking for papers/performances/projects from diverse fields and to foster a productive cross-pollination across and within academic disciplines, departments, and the wider world.

The conference sets out to ask such questions as: 

• What/who constitutes the center and the periphery? 

• What happens when sprockets/machines no longer function as expected? How might an overlooked “defect” produce rippling implications and ongoing change? 

• What kinds of interventions are produced in the margins?

• How might marginalized systems of knowledge, such as the body as an archive or counter-archives and community archives challenge institutional sites of knowledge?

• What might a world without margins, without borders, look like?

• What are the things we neglect in the periphery? What are the questions we are not asking in thinking about our disciplines?

We are interested in papers, performances, and projects drawing from a variety of fields and approaches, including but not limited to:

• Performance studies

• Cinema studies 

• Black studies

• Indigenous studies

• Transnational studies

• Archival studies and methodology

• Disability studies/Crip theory

• Cultural studies 

• Decolonial theory

• Dance and movement theory

• Queer, gender, and trans studies

• Borderlands/border zone theory

• Historiography on/of the margin

• New object-oriented materialism

• Eco-criticism 

• Sound studies

• New media studies

• American studies

• Art history 

• Craft and folk art traditions 

• Speculative methods

• Diaspora/migration studies

• Textile and fabric studies

• Minor transnationalism

We are excited to receive submissions that engage in any number of topics. The following list is intended as possible examples of where questions of the periphery may be applied:

• Archives/Counter-Archives

• Obsolescence/waste

• Experimental performance/ multimedia adaptation

• Ephemerality of media/performance

• Margin as intervention

• Materiality of film

• Edge and precarity

• Body as archive

• Selvage/salvage

• Media/performance in the Anthropocene

• Coasts/shores/borders

• Choreography and improvisation

• Decay/decomposition/dissolution/ extinction

• Film archiving and preservation

• Abolition theory

• (Sub)urbanism

To submit, please complete the following Google form (https://forms.gle/6u3g6PRDTxPFSahR6) before December 5th, 2025. The form will ask you to upload a pdf file containing a 250-300 word abstract (that explains the work’s relevance to the theme of Sprockets/Selvage/Shores). If you have any requirements for your presentation (ie. projector, microphone, etc), or if you intend to use props. Please include your name and contact details. You will also submit a 50-100 word biography. Please refer to this website for more information: https://tisch.nyu.edu/research-study/crs-graduate-student-conference1/cr...