 |
| photo of Tanya DePass speaking at QGCon 2017 |
The Queerness and Games Conference is now accepting submissions for presentations at its fifth annual conference, which will be held on September 29-30, 2018 at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada! Proposals for conference talks and other sessions are due March 1st, 2018 (details and instructions below).I attended the first and second QGCons, back in 2012/2013 at UC Berkeley, and I had a lovely time.
QGCon is an annual event that brings together developers, academics, educators, and activists to explore the intersection of LGBTQ issues and video games. Proposals for talks, pre-constituted panels, workshops, roundtables, and post mortems are welcome. Speakers from all backgrounds are encouraged to submit. Because QGCon is a community-oriented event that seeks to foster dialogue across areas of expertise, we especially value sessions that engage a broad and diverse audience. Please note that, since QGCon attendees come from across academia, industry, and beyond, different speakers may bring different ideas about what constitutes a “talk” or a “panel.” QGCon values these differences and kindly requests that, as per the submission guidelines below, prospective speakers describe the approach they hope to take to their proposed session.
Though the focus of QGCon is LGBTQ issues, the conference takes an intersectional approach to queerness. Issues of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, neurodiversity, socioeconomic class, and other forms of identity, inclusion, and marginalization are central to our understanding of queerness and games. Given the exciting new location of the 2018 conference, the QGCon organizers are particularly eager to receive proposals that explore the international context of queerness and games, as well as proposals that address the French language or Canadian-American relations. Other topics that the organizers are interesting in seeing represented at QGCon 2018 include futurity in queer theory (such as Afrofuturism, alternative futures, or indigenous futures), and affect theory (including such “public feelings” as depression, anxiety, and optimism, as well as affective/emotional labor and other ways that emotion and feelings are political and part of power relationships).
For those who are new to the QGCon community and are interested in learning more about the types of conversations that take place at the event, the conference organizers encourage you to look at talk topics and recorded videos from past years’ conferences, which can be found on the QGCon website.
A note on travel: After four years in sunny California, QGCon is moving to Montréal for its 2018 conference, where we will be hosted by Concordia University. Accepted presenters traveling to the conference from outside Québec will be eligible for a limited number of travel grants, as well as other opportunities for reducing the cost of attending.
While QGCons are usually hosted by large academic institutions, please do not assume you have to be an academic to attend or participate. If you have something to say about games, play, identity, and politics, then I'm sure they'd love to have you.
Submissions close on March 1st, which means you have about a month and a half to submit your proposal. Hurry!
