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2nd Annual Symposium: Existing Otherwise - Open Call
Friday 24th July 2026
In-person (with hybrid options): Birkbeck, University of London (London, UK)
The Trans+ Virtual Centre of Excellence (TVCE), in collaboration with Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality Forum (BiGS), are proud to announce that we are co-producing this year’s symposium under the theme, Existing Otherwise. Together we invite trans+ artists, scholars, activists, and their allies (advocating through research across the arts, humanities, law, philosophy, medicine, and STEM) to explore existence itself as a radical method. At a time when trans+ lives are increasingly governed, scrutinised, and contested across legal, medical, and cultural domains, we turn toward generative possibilities: what does it mean to foreground ways of living, knowing, and relating that exceed, evolve, reframe, or refuse the normative structures through which legitimacy is policed and normativity enforced? How might queerness not only survive, but flourish, connect, and continually remake the world otherwise?
In naming these pressures, we also recognise that trans+ experiences are not singular. We explicitly invite attention to the uneven and intersectional conditions under which trans+ lives are lived; particularly for trans+ people from the Global Majority, and disabled trans+ communities, whose experiences of governance, exclusion, and resistance are shaped by overlapping structures of power. We welcome work that attends to these complexities with care, specificity, and accountability.
Extending our 2026 thematic of queer hope as a future-facing gesture, Existing Otherwise centres the already-present: the lived, embodied, fugitive, and relational practices through which trans+ people continue to create and transform the conditions of the present. Alongside this, we are interested in the intergenerational possibilities of trans+ spaces; how wisdom, learning, and celebration are fostered through engaging with and recognising trans+ elders, and how these dialogues across time might sustain more expansive, connected futures.
We invite contributions that engage with Existing Otherwise not only as a theme, but as a mode of doing; one that resists extraction, hierarchy, and institutional containment. We are particularly interested in practices that foreground care, reciprocity, and collective knowledge-making, and that model ways of being together otherwise
In naming these pressures, we also recognise that trans+ experiences are not singular. We explicitly invite attention to the uneven and intersectional conditions under which trans+ lives are lived; particularly for trans+ people from the Global Majority, and disabled trans+ communities, whose experiences of governance, exclusion, and resistance are shaped by overlapping structures of power. We welcome work that attends to these complexities with care, specificity, and accountability.
Extending our 2026 thematic of queer hope as a future-facing gesture, Existing Otherwise centres the already-present: the lived, embodied, fugitive, and relational practices through which trans+ people continue to create and transform the conditions of the present. Alongside this, we are interested in the intergenerational possibilities of trans+ spaces; how wisdom, learning, and celebration are fostered through engaging with and recognising trans+ elders, and how these dialogues across time might sustain more expansive, connected futures.
We invite contributions that engage with Existing Otherwise not only as a theme, but as a mode of doing; one that resists extraction, hierarchy, and institutional containment. We are particularly interested in practices that foreground care, reciprocity, and collective knowledge-making, and that model ways of being together otherwise
Formats
As established in the first TVCE symposium in 2026, we welcome methods of dissemination that de-centre traditional academic hierarchies or didactic communication and that encourage community dialogues, including (but are not limited to):
🌀 Unpanels (non-hierarchical, co-created dialogues)
🔊 Echo Papers (audience response replaces Q&A)
🌾 Fugitive Teach-ins (communal, anti-institutional learning)
🚶 Peripatetic Walks (movement-based or site-specific sessions)
👐 Haptic Lectures
✨ Rituals of Refusal
📚 Living Archives
…and other experimental, sensory, and transdisciplinary approaches
🔊 Echo Papers (audience response replaces Q&A)
🌾 Fugitive Teach-ins (communal, anti-institutional learning)
🚶 Peripatetic Walks (movement-based or site-specific sessions)
👐 Haptic Lectures
✨ Rituals of Refusal
📚 Living Archives
…and other experimental, sensory, and transdisciplinary approaches
These formats reflect TVCE’s commitment to non-hierarchical, caring, and embodied research spaces. We especially encourage interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary submissions across creative practice, critical theory, and community organising.
Examples of submission we are actively seeking:
- Hosting a wikithon to resist trans+ academic erasure in a time of intensifying pressure on DEI
- Facilitating a fugitive teach-in rooted in oral traditions, memory, and queer inheritance
- Creating a de-centred meditation to hold space for trans+ grief, presence, and futurity
- Offering a haptic lecture through textiles, gesture, or tactile making (e.g. queer quilting)
- Collaborating on an ephemeral manifesto: spoken, sung, or collectively inscribed
- Guiding a peripatetic walk exploring queer spatial politics and lived geographies
- Sharing an (acoustic ) sonic diary or digital intervention as a brief transmission
- Hosting a “kitchen-table” session centred on questions that unsettle institutional norms
- An outdoor teach-in or performance intervention that utilises the space and geography at Birkbeck
- Delivering a 1:1 paper shared in conversation rather than presentation
- Facilitating a workshop on the present and future of trans+ lives and rightsBanner making workshops for those marching with the TVCE at the Trans Pride London event on Saturday 25th July.
These are starting points: we welcome proposals that challenge, expand, or reimagine these formats altogether.
Film Submissions
Additionally, this year, we will have a two-hour screening of short films that speak to the theme of Existing Otherwise. We encourage submissions from local, national, and international trans+ and non-binary filmmakers as well as current Birkbeck students.
If you have a film of up to 20 minutes that you feel fits the theme, please send it over! If you want to introduce your film either in person or via video, please do let us know in your submission. You will need to submit a H.264 file of your film and/or video intro, any images for promotion and a short description of the work, up to two lines. Note that you may also submit for the proposal call if you submit a film!
Attendance Bursary
BiGS is generously providing a small bursary for attendees:
Application for a bursary should be indicated in the submission form and successful applicants will be facilitated by tickets booked directly with the Travel Agent appointed by Birkbeck, thus simplifying the reimbursement process.
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2 x 150 GBP Payment for self-employed / independent contributors such as artists and other practitioners presenting at the conference.
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4 x 50 GBP Travel bursaries for students, self-employed or independent contributors such as artists and other practitioners.
Application for a bursary should be indicated in the submission form and successful applicants will be facilitated by tickets booked directly with the Travel Agent appointed by Birkbeck, thus simplifying the reimbursement process.
Submit Your Application