Calling all postgraduate researchers: join us for a training day of workshops that will interrogate recent developments in the field of sexuality studies and help you evaluate potential applications for your own research.

The day will focus on a range of contemporary approaches to queer sexualities and will have a particular focus on materiality. This includes, but is not limited to: 1) economic materialities including the intersections between sexuality, gender, race and class, and queerness and social reproduction; 2) corporeal materialities including the queer body, queer ecologies and relations to space/time/matter and the ‘natural’ world; 3) digital materialities, queer technologies and posthumanism.

The day’s workshops will be facilitated by leading academics and creative practitioners with expertise in materialist methodologies and theory, from Marxist-feminism to new materialism:

● Dr Broderick Chow (Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London), author of ‘Sculpting Masculinities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Physical Culture: The Practiced Life of Stanly Rothwell’ (The Drama Review, 2019)

● Dr Helen Palmer (Vienna University of Technology), author of Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)

● Dr Samuel Solomon (University of Sussex), author of Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism: Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2019)

● Dr Nat Raha (University of St Andrews), author of ‘Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism’ (South Atlantic Quarterly, 2017)

The day will comprise three consecutive workshops: 1) a reading group; 2) a set of lightning presentations; and 3) a round-table discussion. The reading group, facilitated by Dr Broderick Chow and Dr Nat Raha, will provide you the opportunity to engage in guided discussion of key critical and theoretical essays (which will have been distributed and read in advance) that establish different queer materialist paradigms. The lightning presentations will see facilitators Dr Helen Palmer and Dr Samuel Solomon each describe how an interest in queer materialities have shaped their own scholarship and creative practice. Participating students then in turn present short pre-recorded presentations of their own ongoing engagements with the event’s theme, which will be followed by feedback from the facilitators and from peers. The final panel discussion will see the four facilitators each pose and respond to

provocations relating to current intellectual and cultural investments in queer materialism, which will be followed by a Q&A.

This event is hosted by Kingston University London and is funded by the AHRC Doctoral training partnership Techne. However, it is open to postgraduate researchers from any UK or overseas institution. It will be of relevance to students situated in every discipline within the arts and humanities as well as those whose projects are explicitly transdisciplinary, and it will be suitable for students at all stages of their research.

If you would like more information, please email the organisers Dr Caoimhe Mader McGuinness (c.madermcguinness@kingston.ac.uk) and Dr Martin Dines (m.dines@kingston.ac.uk) by Monday 18 January 2021.

Martin Dines and Caoimhe Mader McGuinness

School of Arts, Culture and Communication

Kingston School of Art

T 020 8417 9000

Penrhyn Road

Kingston upon Thames KT1 2EE

kingston.ac.uk/ksa