In-Between Wor(l)ds: Liminality, Poetry and Performance

Extended Deadine: June 7th! 

Call for Papers – GNSD Graduate Conference, University of Minnesota
Nov. 6 - 7th, 2026 (in person)
Keynote by Adeena Karasick

“On est toujours au milieu.” — “We are always in the middle,” write Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Liminality, or ‘Dazwischensein’, names this condition of perpetual in-betweenness: neither point of origin nor final destination, but the space of passage where forms, identities, and meanings are continually made and unmade. To be “in the middle” is to inhabit thresholds between languages, between media, between belonging and estrangement, between the human and the technological. It is here, in these unstable intervals, that poetry, thought, and art unfold with their greatest intensity.

This vision of perpetual in-betweenness also resonates across a broad intellectual tradition: Brian Massumi and Gilles Deleuze on affect and the virtual; Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner on rites of passage; Homi K. Bhabha on the “third space” of cultural hybridity; Gloria Anzaldúa on borderlands and nepantla; Walter Benjamin on his distinction of “Schwelle” and “Grenze”; Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti on posthuman subjectivity; as well as many other contemporary theorists of lyric, voice, and form. To be liminal is to occupy a space that is neither fixed nor fully knowable. 

For this conference, we welcome academic and artistic work exploring the liminal, focusing on poetic language, form, and thinking: multilingual and translingual poetics, border poetics, experimental and visual poetry, sound poetry and performance, as well as poetry that troubles genre boundaries (poetry/essay, lyric theory, autofictional verse). At the same time, broader engagements across media and disciplines are encouraged, for example, Dadaism and avant-garde experimentation, transmediality, posthumanism, writings on immigration and diaspora, digital poetics, eco-poetry, gender studies and other cultural practices that oscillate in the human condition of “in-betweenness.”

The goal of this conference is to investigate both academic as well as artistic explorations of the liminal. As such, we invite proposals for either academic presentations or artistic works (ex. readings, performances, visual-poetic compositions, hybrid and digital projects) from graduate students. Submissions may address (but need not be limited to) the following guiding questions:

• In what ways do translation, code-switching, and multilingual poetics enact Dazwischensein formally and politically?

• How do poetic forms themselves become liminal—between page and performance, image and text, human voice and machine voice?

• How do migration, diaspora, queerness, and border experiences shape artistic expression and poetic theory?

• What new aesthetic, ethical, or communal possibilities arise when texts refuse fixed categories and choose the threshold instead?

• How does queer, trans, or nonbinary poetics articulate liminality as a lived, embodied, and linguistic condition?

• How do AI, algorithms, and machine voices participate in posthuman art, and what happens when “the human” becomes a threshold rather than a category?

To apply, please submit a 200 word abstract or project description along with a 150 bio using this form (https://z.umn.edu/GNSDgradconf) by the end of day, June 7th, 2026. Should you have any questions, feel free to contact us at gnsd-grad-con@umn.edu.