April 24-25, 2021 | Zoom | Schedule

Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities around the world have long engaged in cultivating individual and collective pleasure, healing, and liberation, both as resilience mechanisms in the face of oppression and as celebrations in their own right. In recent times, with the ubiquity of traumatic occurrences such as the COVID-19 pandemic, state-sanctioned violence, and extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change, living under negligent systems has felt increasingly harrowing and inescapable.

Many entities working to enable social change tend to ground their efforts in damage-based frameworks that focus on the negative impacts of injustices against historically and currently oppressed peoples (Tuck, 2009). But these communities are so much more than their pain and traumas. They are actualizing better futures on their own terms with resources they already have, extrinsic and intrinsic to themselves.

To encourage expansiveness in navigating the complexities of these narratives, we are hosting a virtual conference that asks: How are people and communities reimagining and reclaiming pleasure and healing through creative and cultural embodiment? In what ways is this liberatory/ restorative/ resilience work, particularly during times of crisis?

Free and open to the public, this conference aims to bring together graduate students, early career scholars, community activists, educators, and creatives of all kinds. Sessions will be video/audio recorded in English, and live captioning will be provided.