The Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice at Stonehill College invites proposals for papers and creative presentations for the 2026 student-faculty conference. The conference will be held April 17-18, 2026 for undergraduate students and April 16, 17, and 18, 2026 for graduate students and recent PhDs. The theme for this year’s conference is “Creativity and Resistance.”
How can creativity offer pathways to understanding our world and to making new worlds? What role do art, literature, music and other creative forms play in helping you continue to dream in moments of hopelessness and in fostering resistance? To engage with the present state of the United States and nations across the globe, especially at this time of white supremacy, ethnonational populism, and authoritarianism, we must center both articulations of power and practices of creativity. One reason is that creativity is vital to cultivating relationships among communities, relationships with the environment and non-human species, and relationships with forms of desire and pleasure that resist the dominance of prevailing power structures. Also, creative practices can reveal aspects of unjust power structures that we might struggle to articulate through other means. As such, we are interested in papers and projects that engage with the practices of creativity, in the widest sense possible, to understand the ways power, and challenges to it, take unfamiliar, unexpected, and desired forms.
We welcome proposals that are interdisciplinary and that expand our way of theorizing and producing literature, visual art, music, film, theater, and other creative expressions while addressing racism, racial justice, indigenous dispossession, settler coloniality, transphobia, heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. We invite submissions of academic papers as well as, creative writing, visual art, and short films. The conference will include traditional panel presentations as well a visual art exhibit and a poetry slam.
Here is a list of possible topics and themes you may consider engaging in your proposals:
- How do creativity and resistance manifest in everyday life as forms of survival, especially when progress toward social justice feels stalled or even abandoned?
- What does intersectionality tell us about creativity and resistance? How do categories of analysis intersect with creativity, resistance, desire, and joy?
- What are the practices of creativity and resistance—through life, celebration, joy, and pleasure—within Black, Indigenous, Asian American and Pacific Islander, Latinx and LGBTQ communities?
- What do creativity and resistance look like in digital spaces? How does creative work engage with or resist artificial intelligence and technology?
- How can we conceptualize indigenous sovereignty through pleasures, creativity, and intimacies? What are the important practices of creative world-making within indigenous communities and communities of color?
- What are the ways that health, race, creativity, and resistance intersect?
- How can we think about power and responses of environmental justice through creativity and resistance?
- In what ways do popular culture, literature, and the arts provide important moments of contact, intimacy, and imagination that challenges power?
Abstracts of 200 words or less are due by January 10, 2026. For creative works, in lieu of an abstract please provide a brief description of your creative project and discuss how it connects to the conference theme(s). Please submit to CRESUGconferenceStonehill@gmail.com.
You may also use this email for any questions. We will respond to all submissions by January 24, 2026.
The conference presentations accepted should be no more than 15 minutes.
The James E. Hayden Lecture will be given by Dr. Jose Jorge Mendoza, a Philosopher of race and Latinx communities at the University of Washington, on the evening of April 17.
