27/01/2026
Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference Call for Proposal
RE:
Remembering, Rebuilding, and Rebecoming
Movements Backward, Forward, and Again
Cycles, Second Chances, and New Beginnings (I like this one best I think but I’m open)
Returning, Renewing, and Reimagining
“The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them.” – Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
The Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University is proud to hold its 31st Annual Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference (AGIC). We invite both academic and creative submissions (research papers, short films, workshops, visual arts/media, etc.) from all disciplines engaging with this year’s theme: “RE: Missing Perspectives”.
Every act of remembering is also a political act, often in response to our contemporary socio-political circumstances. How do we return to these lost or forgotten perspectives to reimagine a liveable future?
To prefix is to act: to re-turn, re-member, re-imagine, re-cover. The “re-” is never innocent; it is a site where repetition can reinscribe dominant structures or open fissures within them. Each gesture of “re-” disturbs linear temporality and loosens the hold of authorized meaning, drawing attention to the politics embedded in returning itself. To invoke “re-” is to acknowledge that what appears as repetition is always already transformative: an encounter with what persists, resists, or refuses disappearance.
What does it mean to revisit what was never granted the dignity of being remembered, or to reclaim that which was systematically unmade by colonial, patriarchal, racial, and extractive regimes? How do we differentiate between recovery as a practice of care and recovery as a reproduction of the very frameworks that produced the loss? Every act of recall is a political intervention—a decision to contest the myth of the neutral archive, to challenge the presumption that narrative closure is possible, and to insist that history remains unfinished, porous, and contested. To remember is to expose the infrastructures of forgetting, those deliberate mechanisms that render some lives legible and others disposable.
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