RADICAL KINSHIP

Keynote: Omise'eke Tinsley, University of Texas at Austin
Conference Date: October 16, 2015

Kinships that cross boundaries often entail radical decenterings of family, community, or subjectivity. What happens when Yellow Peril supports Black Power in Ferguson? When Maggie Simpson holds up a Je Suis Charlie sign? When, in a single frame, Kordale and Kaleb dismantle stale notions of Black masculinity, queerness, and fatherhood?

Can we undomesticate kinship?

The 2015 Tufts Graduate Humanities Conference invites paper submissions from across the humanities that address the topic of "Radical Kinship." Building upon contemporary scholarship—from Queer Theory to Indigenous Studies, from Afro-Futurism to Disability Studies—that investigates ways of being and belonging together across differences, "Radical Kinship" calls for a rethinking of both radicality and kin. In a world defined by violence on both the local and global scale, we need to reimagine traditional distinctions of nation, community, and family. This conference aims to explore the potential of radical kinship by considering its sociopolitical, aesthetic, and conceptual consequences.

We welcome papers from all disciplines and fields whose works engage in framing radical kinship. Please send your abstract of NO MORE THAN 300 WORDS, along with a short bio, to tuftsgradhumanitiesconference@gmail.com by May 7, 2015.

Some questions to consider:

•Does radicality engender a kinship for which we have neither terminology nor epistemology?

•In what ways do creative works rewrite or redefine families and/or social units?

•What are the limitations of relying on the idea of "family" to define kinship?

•How are aesthetic movements not only influenced by sociopolitical actions, but also an influence on such actions?

•Do new models of kinship offer a new paradigm, or do they risk simply reproducing older models in a new form?

•Are there historical or literary models that exceed traditional attempts at delineation, and thereby gesture to an idea of radical kinship?

•How might we conceive of a kinship capable of connecting spatially or temporally distant peoples?

•In what ways can we politicize kinship between aesthetic movements? What is the difference between kinship and appropriation?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Pan-Africanism
Queer Theory
Queer of Color Critique
Disability Studies
Science Fiction
Utopia/Dystopia
Anticolonial studies
Diaspora Studies
Intersectionality
Gender Studies
Indigenous Studies
Transnational Feminism
Marxism and Labor Studies