CFP: Kinship Abolition Freedom, Abstracts due 1/15/2025
The International Association for Visual Culture conference Kinship.Abolition.Freedom will take place October 9-11, 2025 at Dartmouth College and via Zoom. We start from the premise that critically thinking abolition also calls on us to think, imagine and practice forms of relation, intimacy, community, and care beyond those of the crime, punishment, surveillance, and violation modes of the carceral state. In constellating kinship, abolition, and freedom we call for papers, interventions, performances, and other presentations that think and imagine abolition in critical constellation with kinship and freedom as a call to press confrontation with how current systems of crime and punishment may disrupt and yet also provide the urgent ground for alternative models and praxes of kinship, solidarity and connection.
How are sex, gender, love, relation, the families we build and the project of abolition necessary intimates? The long project of abolition seeks to create an equitable society, in which all people have access to the same freedoms, the same opportunities, and the same social support to form bonds of connection and kinship with others. The goal of abolition is to remove the barriers that lead to this kind of freedom. Institutions that are designed to separate, isolate, and disrupt these possibilities, including prisons, family detention centers, involuntary boarding schools and other systemic forms of racism, and class hierarchy, must be dismantled. Kinship as a concept allows us to think beyond the sex, gender and family structures of cisheteronormative patriarchy and white, settler colonial conceptions of being and belonging that drive irrational fears like xenophobia and anti-immigrant hate. In “Lose Your Kin,” Christina Sharpe urges us to “[r]end the fabric of the kinship narrative” that subtends white supremacy and the carceral nation state to imagine otherwise and remake the world. What may creatively rending and restitching alternative kinship formations look like? Kinship reimagined as an abolition praxis of relation allows us to rethink freedom at the rich and sensitive sites where we interface with, depend on, and are undone by each other.
The International Association for Visual Culture conference at Dartmouth College will take place both at the college and online on the occasion of the exhibition Visual Kinship curated by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Iyko Day, Thy Phu, and Alisa Swindell at the Hood Art Museum, Dartmouth College, September-December 2025. The conference is part of a larger multi-campus effort between Dartmouth College; University of California Santa Cruz, the University of Wisconsin Madison; and the University of Minnesota Duluth that is inspired by the University of California Santa Cruz Visualizing Abolition project and the University of Wisconsin Madison Center for Visual Culture’s 2024-25 series on abolition and visual culture that will lead up to our fall conference.
We invite proposals for provocative in-person and online engagements (20 min limit) that may take the form, for example, of papers, artist talks, practical demonstrations, readings, films, and performance presentations. Please submit a 250-word abstract by January 15, 2025 to GreetingsIAVC@gmail.com that describes the form of your contribution and addresses how you are approaching the constellation of kinship, abolition, and freedom.
We especially invite submissions that engage the work of visualization, dreaming and materializing imagination, that pursue the political in its relations to the imaginary and the reparative, that engage in forms of visual activism or artivism (from social practice to enactments of prefigurative justice), and/or that explore the aesthetic and affective as key registers for our work.
Kinship implies interdependency, coalition building, reparative acts; we invite papers that address formations of family, intercultural communities, crip, queer and trans kinship, as well as kinship with the non-human.
In addition to thinking through the histories of abolition movements, papers may examine ways that abolition is ongoing, unfinished, and transformative––a way to dream, to hope, and to act our way into freedom.
We also invite investigations of the term “freedom” itself, which can mean self-expression as well as collective practices of liberation, intellectual and conceptual openness, responsibility to community, social action, anti-statist imaginaries, mutual aid, etc.
