CFP: GMF2025 TRANS∗Media

TRANSMedia

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: TRANS∗Media

Harvard University Department of Music
February 28–March 1, 2025

The 2025 Harvard Graduate Music Forum Conference invites proposals for individual papers or alternative-format presentations (lecture-recitals, performance demonstrations, or other scholarly and creative presentations) engaging with this year’s theme: "TRANS∗Media." We welcome submissions from graduate students, researchers, musicians, sound artists, and practitioners from diverse disciplines to join us in exploring the role of music and sound in relating trans∗ness to experiences of moving across, between, and beyond multiple media forms, technologies, and narratives. We are particularly interested in proposals that center the works, practices, experiences, and lives of transgender and transsexual individuals and communities. The conference will feature a keynote address by Dr. McKenzie Wark, author of Raving (2023), Reverse Cowgirl (2020) and A Hacker’s Manifesto (2006), who will join Dr. Kaleb Goldschmitt, Dr. Stephan Pennington, and Dean Julia Golden in a roundtable discussion on the conference’s theme. We will also host a video art screening and talkback with Dr. Nguyễn Tân Hoàng, author of A View From the Bottom (2014) and creator of video works such as Forever Bottom!, K.I.P., and look_im_azn, as well as a concert featuring the new music quartet, Yarn/Wire.

We address two principal questions: How does sound and/or music move across, between, and beyond media? And how does sound and/or music move media? 

The program committee welcomes proposals exploring any aspect of the dynamic interplay between media, movement, and music/sound, inspired by the expansive possibilities encompassed by “TRANS∗.” Possible topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:

  • Trans∗ listening, musicking, vocality 

  • Trans∗ technicity and technologies

  • Trans∗ media forms, connectivities, and histories

  • Trans∗ and transmedia storytelling, intermedia, and media mixture

  • Trans∗ identities, experiences, and epistemologies

  • Trans∗ of color critique

  • Trans∗ disability critique and trans∗/crip theory

  • Trans∗ radical critique (Marxism, anarchism, etc.)

  • Trans∗ as method, methodology, praxis 

  • Trans∗ theories in the classroom, campuses, communities

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to https://forms.gle/ykPVpwPbtKQ8VbSP8 by Sunday, January 5th, 2025 at 11:59PM. Please remove all personal identifying information from the text of the proposal. Submissions after this date may be considered if space allows. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute Q&A. Proposals for alternative-format presentations should include a list of technical requirements in the submission form. Notice of acceptance will be sent by mid-January. A limited number of travel bursaries will be offered to participants. For further details, please contact us at stephenai@g.harvard.edu.

Program Committee:
Shiva Ramkumar
Juan Patricio Saenz
Darcy Copeland