The Black Queer Sexuality Studies Collective Presents
Queer Urbanity: A Black Queer Sexuality Studies Graduate Student Conference
With Keynote Speaker Professor Shane Vogel, Indiana University
Location: Princeton University
Date: Saturday, October 19, 2013
Abstract Submission Deadline: August 31, 2013

This conference seeks to create a public forum for dialogue on innovative research across disciplines and fields that interrogates the intersections between blackness, queerness and the urban/metropolitan landscape. How have black studies’ and queer studies’ engagement with urban spaces elucidated or obscured black queer experiences and expressions? How have major political, economic, and spatial changes in cities and the surrounding metropolitan area affected the (in)visibility of black queer communities? This conference seeks to ask these and other questions engaging blackness, queerness, and urbanity. While we seek papers interested in the intersection of these disciplinary, methodological, and spatial categories, we also welcome papers that question the centrality of the urban in black queer experiences, expressions and epistemologies. Our theme, purposefully broad, aims to include a range of disciplines including but not limited to history, sociology, literary and cultural studies, black studies, queer studies, media studies, and art history. We especially seek scholarship from disciplines where a lacuna exists with regard to queer experiences and/or those of people of African descent.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• The role of the city in Africa and African diasporic communities in the Americas and elsewhere
• Blackness, queerness, and the city in artistic expressions  (literature, performing arts, etc.)
• The relationship between urban political, economic and spatial developments and black queer communities
• Cities as sites of collaboration or conflict between racial and sexual communities/ individuals
• The relationship between rural/ suburban/ urban spaces and black queer identities

Professor Shane Vogel of the Department of English and the Cultural Studies Program at Indiana University will deliver the keynote address for this one-day conference. The conference will feature 16 presentations of original scholarship. Submission and acceptance to this conference will be based on blind reviews of 250-300 word abstracts. Please submit your abstracts and CV to bqsgraduateconference@gmail.com by August 31, 2013. All other inquiries should be directed to Brittney Edmonds (bedmonds@princeton.edu) or Jennifer D. Jones (jdjones@princeton.edu).