Cross-disciplinary conversations on sexualities, queerness and space

This half-day symposium will bring together postgraduates working in range of disciplines and fields to explore research centring sexualities, queerness and space. The scope of this event is deliberately wide so as to facilitate engagements with sexualities and queer research from a range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives.

The event seeks to create a supportive and productive environment for presenting research, and engaging with work by fellow postgraduates working on issues and topics relating to sexualities, queerness and space.

PROGRAMME

14.00: KEYNOTE: Dr Vikki Chalklin Making space for queer academic practice

As a queer artist, academic, and activist Vikki's research has always been fundamentally interdisciplinary: disrupting and disrespecting boundaries not only of theoretical paradigms but also of methods, materials, and milieus. Doing queer work inevitably involves the weaving together of disparate strands, wrestling with untidy, unruly objects and asking usually complex, sometimes uncomfortable, often unanswerable questions.

In this talk she will introduce the range of her interconnected, amorphous queer practice that spans different modes of academic and creative writing and performance to explore diverse ways of queering space or creating queer space. Rather than siphoning off 'proper' research from more creative or activist endeavours Vikki will present a holistic overview of these disparate activities as a deliberate and defiantly queer approach to knowledge production, and use it to pose questions around how we can navigate queer research in a way that creates and maintains the space for the questioning, disruption, and idiosyncrasy that lies at the heart of queer thinking.

Rather than a didactic paper presenting a formalised thesis, this talk will instead invite dialogue and discussion around our shared experiences, concerns, uncertainties and questions around queer(ing) academic practice.

14.50 - 15.10 - Break

15.10 - 16.00: SESSION ONE - Situating subjectivities and the limits of inclusion

Chair TBC

Grant Anderson Identity self-determination and collective identity narratives: potentials and pitfalls for gender non-conformity

Stamatina Katsiveli-Siachou The space and place of sexuality within linguistics: What are the issues?

Jess Sandelson Interrupting the cis gaze: on visual illusions about trans and non-binary lives

16.15 -17.15: SESSION TWO - Queer Performance & Representations


Chair: Vikki Chalklin


Ben Walters Doing things with fun: how good times with Duckie serve queer futurity


Beck Tadman Activating cis-white fragility; a case study of two Travis Alabanza performances


Anna Charczun Lesbian migrant writing: from Lesbian Nation to queer diaspora


Robert Mills Against Oeuvres, Towards Moments: Rethinking Radicalism in Early AIDS Cinema


Kirsty Clark Seeking a Queer Aesthetic in the Performance of Paganini's 24th Caprice on the Viola

16.15 -17.15: SESSION THREE - Queer Urbanisms

Chair: Jordan Rowe

Karlene Stubbs Queer Urban Development and Asia's Creative Class

Koen Anton Rutten Dutch urban planning interventions, nationhood, sexual liberation

Aditya Vinod When the city dictates: Share identity between people and the built form

Jorge Martin Producing a Space. Producing a Map. Producing Myself

Fernando Ferreira Another (In)Convenience: Tracing Same-Sex Desires

17.15 - 17.30: Break

17.30 - 18.15: SESSION FOUR - LGBTQ+ Heath and Wellbeing


Chair: Rosa Benato


Charlotte Wilcox 'Brighton's queer living room' : A descriptive phenomenological inquiry into radical informal therapeutic practices in a queer community at the Marlborough Pub and Theatre.


Sakura Byrne "Balancing Act: An Exploration into Mental Wellbeing, Bisexual Identity, and Monogamy"


Rebecca Swenson Places, spaces and trans, non-binary and genderqueer identities: An occupational science perspective.

17.30 - 18.15: DRINKS RECEPTION

The symposium is organised by the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and supported by the UCL Urban Laboratory and the Octagon Small Grants Fund at UCL's Institute for Advanced Studies.

Access information

• If you wish to attend and have specific needs please get in touch. Specific accessibility information will be shared shortly.
• Gender neutral bathrooms are available in the venue.

Further information

• RSVP on Eventbrite