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It is intended to provide a space for cultural studies scholars to connect, collaborate and communicate in ways that will foster innovative new research in the field and promote cultural studies to a broader audience.

We are currently seeking individuals interested in three service positions within the Cultural Studies Association:Co-Ch...
10/08/2026

We are currently seeking individuals interested in three service positions within the Cultural Studies Association:

Co-Chair, Critical University Studies Working Group
Co-Chair, Globalization and Culture Working Group
Co-Chair, Music and Sound Studies Working Group

For more information on CSA working groups, please visit our website.

Eligibility requirements: Current member of the Cultural Studies Association. Preference for candidates who have been active in the organization for the past two years and who have presented at the CSA Conference at least once in the past two years within the working group or on a topic aligned with the working group’s focus.

Primary responsibilities: Working with senior co-chair in the Working Group to select conference papers, schedule panels, and serve as a point of contact between individuals presenting within the working group and the Conference Programming Committee

Term of Service: Three years, renewable.

Please send a brief statement of qualifications and interest to Michelle Fehsenfeld at: [email protected].

The Cultural Studies Association (CSA) invites proposals for participation in its twenty-fifth annual meeting, which wi...
10/02/2026

The Cultural Studies Association (CSA) invites proposals for participation in its twenty-fifth annual meeting, which will be held fully online. Proposals on all topics relevant to cultural studies will be considered, with priority given to those that engage this year’s theme, Thresholds.

In more ways than one, we exist at the threshold: the resurgence of fascist governance; the potential elimination of Black studies, Ethnic studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies from the University; the tipping point of runaway climate change; mounting violations of privacy via AI and other technology. Yet, scholars push back against presentist conceptions of the threshold. Black, Indigenous, and Q***r scholars, for example, have illustrated how their communities have long been impacted by colonial and environmental catastrophe. Our political rhetoric, our economic forecast, our climatological outlook, and our popular imagination calls attention incessantly to our “momentous moment”—perpetually on the brink, at the edge, at an inflection point. This rhetoric of impending catastrophe and permacrisis often serves to maintain the status quo, or obfuscate the actual sites of suffering and loci of power that perpetuate that physical, political, economic and environmental violence. Thus, scholars raise the question, who and what histories are left out by certain framings of the threshold? At the same time, this threshold does not only gesture to an impending doom, but possibilities for imagining otherwise: How might we detour away from the destinies prescribed by Western colonial regimes? How might we re-conceptualize our understanding of difference? The liminality of thresholds calls attention to the increasingly blurry boundaries between assumed oppositions: the human and the technological, the natural and the artificial, along with myriad taxonomies and categories of race, gender, s*x, s*xuality, ability, and identity. What new possibilities for subversive agency exist among those unruly bodies which exceed the limited categories placed upon them?

Read the entire CFP at www.cultural studies association.org

10/02/2026

Thresholds: Liminality, Performance, and Cultural Reconfiguration

Cultural Studies Association (CSA) 2027 Annual Conference
June 3-5, 2027
Fully Online
Deadline for Submissions: Friday, November 20, 2026
Registration

The Performance Working Group invites proposals from scholars and artists for individual papers, pre-constituted panels, and performance praxis sessions for the 2027 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) annual conference: Thresholds.

Since its emergence as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship, Performance Studies has been preoccupied with liminality—the interstitial, indeterminate, or betwixt and between—linking the anti-structural capacity of ritual performance with the affective relationality of communitas and the reconfiguration of cultural identities, structures, norms, and relationships. Emphasizing the role of performance, ritual, and play in social and cultural change, Victor Turner’s foundational

distinction between the liminal in ritual practice and the liminoid in play and creative performance traces shifts in the times and spaces of cultural experimentation and transformation in the transition from pre-industrial to industrial society. The transgressive and transformative politics of the liminal is widely cited and celebrated across the discipline, with scholars like María Lugones

arguing that the liminal offers unique potential as a coalitional space of “world-travelling” where those with marginalized identities elude the gaze and constraints of dominant groups in order to cultivate solidarity across difference.

Critiquing the valorization of the liminal in performance studies, Jon McKenzie warns against the uncritical adoption of a liminal norm that neglects how liminal performance is harnessed and exploited by hegemonic institutions that capture its creative excess in service of their own renewal. He extends Turner’s theory, theorizing the liminautic to account for the shift into post-industrial society, including the breakdown of distinctions between work and leisure time as well as the cyberspatiality of technological performance. On the threshold of potentially colossal cultural shifts—from climate crisis and authoritarian political interregnum to impending economic stagflation and promises of AGI—we ask what a performance framework reveals about such shifts and how performance might offer avenues for refusing or redirecting their likely outcomes.

We invite proposals that engage with performance as a creative approach and/or conceptual framework for navigating cultural, political, ecological, and disciplinary thresholds. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Liminal Spaces and Identities: Performances in/of Maroons, Borderlands, and Migration • Digital Thresholds: Virtual bodies, Mediated Spaces, and VR Performance • Liminal Performance as Cultural Engine of the Status Quo

• Corporeal Edges: Pain, Pleasure, and the Limits of the Performing Body • Temporal Interstices: Hauntologies, Historical Memory, and Theatrical Reenactment • Ecodramaturgy and Performances at the Cusp of Climate Crisis

• Disciplinary Thresholds and Scholarly Liminality: Research and/as Praxis

We welcome proposals for standard academic conference papers (15 minutes in duration) and for discussions and/or demonstrations of creative practices (workshops, artist talk-backs, performance lectures, presenting recent performance and/or exhibition work). Our working group invites work-in-progress from both artists and scholars and encourages participation inclusive of faculty, independent scholars, and arts practitioners as well as graduate and undergraduate students.

Graduate and undergraduate students are especially encouraged to indicate their interest in our Emerging Scholars and Artists Panel. This panel prioritizes presenters who are new to the conference circuit, offering an opportunity to test out the conference presentation experience and receive supportive feedback on work in progress. If you are interested in being considered for this panel, please indicate that interest in your submission.

Please indicate that your submission is intended for the Performance Working Group using the dropdown menu in the “Other Information and Files” section of the Easy Chair submission form.

Submission Deadline: November 20, 2026

Proposals for individual papers and praxis sessions (max 400 words) as well as pre-constituted panels (max 400 words + paper abstracts of max 150 words) must be submitted through the Easy Chair portal.

For more information on the 2027 CSA conference, including details on submission and registration, please visit: https://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/conference.html

For more information about CSA’s Performance Working Group, please visit: https://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/working-groups.html

09/27/2026

2027 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) Annual Conference: Thresholds
June 3-5, 2027
Fully Online
Deadline for Submissions: Friday, November 20, 2026

The Cultural Studies Association (CSA) invites proposals for participation in its twenty-fifth annual meeting, which will be held fully online. Proposals on all topics relevant to cultural studies will be considered, with priority given to those that engage this year's theme, Thresholds.

In more ways than one, we exist at the threshold: the resurgence of fascist governance; the potential elimination of Black studies, Ethnic studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies from the University; the tipping point of runaway climate change; mounting violations of privacy via AI and other technology. Yet, scholars push back against presentist conceptions of the threshold. Black, Indigenous, and Q***r scholars, for example, have illustrated how their communities have long been impacted by colonial and environmental catastrophe. Our political rhetoric, our economic forecast, our climatological outlook, and our popular imagination calls attention incessantly to our “momentous moment”--perpetually on the brink, at the edge, at an inflection point. This rhetoric of impending catastrophe and permacrisis often serves to maintain the status quo, or obfuscate the actual sites of suffering and loci of power that perpetuate that physical, political, economic and environmental violence. Thus, scholars raise the question, who and what histories are left out by certain framings of the threshold? At the same time, this threshold does not only gesture to an impending doom, but possibilities for imagining otherwise: How might we detour away from the destinies prescribed by Western colonial regimes? How might we re-conceptualize our understanding of difference? The liminality of thresholds calls attention to the increasingly blurry boundaries between assumed oppositions: the human and the technological, the natural and the artificial, along with myriad taxonomies and categories of race, gender, s*x, s*xuality, ability, and identity. What new possibilities for subversive agency exist among those unruly bodies which exceed the limited categories placed upon them?

Through this year’s theme, we invite submissions that explore thresholds in political, cultural, and discursive practices point toward thinking power relations, negotiating our understanding of the threshold, and/or meditating on resistant socialities which harken to the possibilities within liminality. All proposals should be submitted through the Easy Chair submission link.

POSSIBLE TOPICS INCLUDE:
Asian American Critique Beyond the Model Minority
Black Feminist Erotics and Q***r Intimacies
Black Fugitivity at the Threshold of Enclosure
Borders, Boundaries, and Crossings
Corporeal Edges: Pain, Pleasure, and Intimacy
Diaspora(s) on the Brink
Divides: Taxonomies of Digital Modernity
Gaza & Thresholds of Recognition/Solidarity
Indigenous Sovereignty & Anti-Colonial Solidarities
Inflections: Political Thresholds and the Activation of Anti-Fascist Rebellion
Liminal Spaces, Liminal Times
Marxist Materialism at the Threshold of this Historical Epoch
New Media and the Production of Catastrophe: Data, Surveillance, AI
Sonic Thresholds: Noise, Silence, Duration
Technopolitics at the Threshold of Fascism and War
Tipping Points: Climate Change & Environmental Catastrophe
Tripping on the Threshold: Theory as Limit Condition or Stumbling Block
Q***r Anti/Futurism at the Brink of the Nuclear Family
The University at the Threshold: Precarity, Institutional Crisis, and Cultural Studies
Popular Imaginaries at the Brink: Crisis, Catastrophe, and Other Futures

CONFERENCE FORMAT
This year the annual Cultural Studies Association Conference will be held fully online. Online conferences help a wider cohort of cultural studies scholars of all ranks, nationally and internationally, to present their work. To allow for both the benefits of an in-person conference and the expanded access of an online conference, the CSA plans to maintain an alternating, biennial structure of in-person conferences (on odd years) and online conferences (on even years).

SUBMISSION AND REGISTRATION
● Friday, October 2, 2026 until Friday, April 2, 2027: Early Bird Registration
● Friday, November 20, 2026: Final Deadline for Submissions
● Friday, January 8, 2027: Notifications sent out
● Friday, March 12, 2027 : Early Registration Ends, Regular Registration Rate Begins
● Friday, May 7, 2027: Last day to register to participate in the conference. If you do not register by this date and are not a current member, your name will be dropped from the program.

REGISTRATION: In order to participate in the conference and be listed in the program, all those accepted to participate must register before Friday, May 8, 2026. Remember: registration for the conference and membership in the CSA are combined transactions. Note that while we do not have overhead costs for an online conference, the registration fees collected for this year’s conference allow us to increase our support of graduate student travel for our 2027 in-person conference. Additionally, registration fees cover CSA’s one paid administrative position and provide needed support CSA’s peer-reviewed journal Lateral.

Make sure to create and/or log in to your Easy Chair account before you attempt to submit. All submissions must be made through CSA’s online EasyChair submission portal: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=csa2027. Program information--names, presentation titles, and institutional affiliations--will be based on initial conference submissions. Please avoid lengthy presentation and session titles, use normal capitalization and standard fonts, and include your name and affiliations as you would like them to appear on the conference program schedule.

INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERSHIPS Institutional members can use their included conference registrations for either 2 faculty and 1 student or 1 faculty and 2 students, plus 1 full page advertisement space in the program. Graduate students who wish to submit proposals are strongly encouraged to speak with their Department Chair or Program Director about institutional membership and where possible, make use of the complimentary individual memberships and reduced registration rates. For full benefits of institutional membership see: https://culturalstudiesassociation.org/about/membership/

SUBMISSION FORMATS:
All sessions are 90 minutes long. All conference formats are intended to encourage the presentation and discussion of projects at different stages of development and to foster intellectual exchange and collaboration. Please feel free to adapt the suggested formats or propose others in order to suit your session’s goals.

The CSA aims to provide multiple and diverse spaces for the cross-pollination of art, activism, pedagogy, design, and research by bringing together participants from a variety of positions inside and outside the university. While we welcome traditional academic papers and panels, we also encourage contributions that experiment with alternative formats and intervene in the traditional disciplinary formations and exclusionary conceptions and practices of the academic. We are particularly interested in proposals for sessions designed to document and advance existing forms of collective action or catalyze new collaborations. We encourage submissions from individuals working beyond the boundaries of the university: artists, activists, educators, independent scholars, professionals, and community organizers.

Further information regarding various session formats can be found below. If you have any questions, please address them to Michelle Fehsenfeld at: [email protected]

WORKING GROUP SESSIONS: Working groups are central to our organization, gathering members around shared topics to foster collaboration and support. Please consider submitting your work to one of CSA’s working groups to connect with colleagues whose interests align with yours. For more information see: https://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/working-groups.html

INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Individuals may submit a proposal to present a 15-20 minute paper. Selected papers will be combined into panels at the discretion of the Program Committee. Submissions must include an abstract of the paper (

SAVE THE DATE! 📣More info to come soon.
09/10/2026

SAVE THE DATE! 📣

More info to come soon.

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