Call for Papers: Performing Imaginary Futures: Utopian (and Dystopian) Performativity
Cultural Studies Association (CSA) 2025 Annual Conference
29-31 May 2025
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California
Imaginary Futures: Utopias, Dystopias & Protopias of Cultural Studies
The Performance Working Group of the Cultural Studies Association invites proposals for individual papers and pre-constituted panels for the 2025 Cultural Studies Association (CSA) Annual Conference.
Artistic, cultural, and everyday performances participate in the ambivalent temporal politics of utopian and dystopian imaginaries. Whether in the conservative nostalgia of “Make America Great Again” or the revolutionary visions of decolonial movements, futurity is inextricably tied to the cultural practices and material conditions of the past and present. The concept of utopian performativity captures how performance works with these elements of culture to construct new worlds. As José Esteban Muñoz suggests, “Utopian performativity is often fueled by the past. The past, or at least narratives of the past, enable utopian imaginings of another time and place that is not yet here but nonetheless functions as a doing for futurity, a conjuring of both future and past to critique presentness.” By contrast, Jill Dolan emphasizes the presentness of the utopian performative, describing it as occurring “now, in the interstices of present interactions, in glancing moments of possibly better ways to be together as human beings.” Acknowledging utopia as an ongoing process rather than a static state of cultural and political perfection, these approaches to utopian performativity invite reflection on the ways utopic visions of liberation and justice, as well as dystopic visions of oppression and despair, are rooted in our lived realities and cultural values. Moreover, unexpected (re)articulations of these cultural values—as, for instance, between queer utopian performance and ultranationalist politics (Altınay 2021)—encourage greater consideration of the complexity of the current conjuncture as well as the performative efficacy—or felicity—of these utopic visions.
We invite proposals that engage with the various ways in which performance intersects with utopian and dystopian cultural imaginaries. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Performing Minoritarian Futurities: Afrofuturist, Crip, Decolonial, Feminist, and Queer Utopias
Technological Utopianism and Dystopianism in Performance
Theories of Utopian Performativity and their Limitations
Experimental Performance and Prototopias
The Future of Performance, Creative Industries, and Cultural/Performance Studies
Performing Manifestos and Declarations
Dystopian Applications of Performance: Nationalism, Nostalgia, Propaganda
The Speculative Possibilities of Theater, Dance, Art, and other Performance Iterations
We welcome proposals for standard academic conference papers (15-20 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, graduate and undergraduate students, and arts practitioners of all kinds.
Submission Deadline: February 23, 2025. Please select “Performance” when prompted to submit to a Working Group on the Easy Chair portal.
Proposals for individual papers (max 500 words) and pre-constituted panels (max 500 words + paper abstracts of max 150 words) must be submitted through the Easy Chair portal: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=csa2025
For more information on the 2025 Cultural Studies conference, including details on submission and registration, please visit: https://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/conference-960395.html
For more information about CSA’s Performance Working Group, please visit: https://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/working-groups.html
Miya Shaffer