The 11th Annual
March On: Leading the Way for a New Generation
November 2-4, 2018
Our Tenth Annual conference welcomed 222 individuals representing 39 different institutions of higher education, advocacy, faith, and healthcare. Thanks for making our Tenth Anniversary Event a resounding success, we couldn't do this without you!
The 2018 Call for Proposals is now open!
The Eleventh Annual Mid-Atlantic LGBTQA Conference Committee cordially invites undergraduates, graduates, faculty, staff, civic activists, and independent scholars to submit proposals for our upcoming conference theme, March On: Leading the Way for a New Generation.
Please visit our Call for Proposals page for more information and to submit your session idea!
2017 Keynote Address
(Re)Turns to Resistance
This summer we witnessed the streets fill with swastikas and confederate flags. It seemed, to the surprise of many, that shameful parts of our past were, under the current administration, emboldened to resurface. And yet, many others were less surprised—those whose lives are deemed less-than because of race, sexuality, religion, ability, and other marginalized identities, know far too well that hateful ideologies have been alive and well since the colonization of this nation. As queer people whose lives meet at the intersections of race, religion, ability, citizenship, and gender, our existence is always already a temporal result of the legacy of revolutionaries that came before us. We are the children of militant Stonewall rioters, of slave rebellion leaders, of indigenous land protectors, of concentration camp survivors. We are nothing if we are not fighters.
How might we utilize these truths—that neither temporality nor identity is static, that our history is no more past than our modalities are fixed—as liberatory paradigms for social change? How might we better organize with the acknowledgement that white nationalism, anti-gay and anti-trans hate crimes, anti-immigrant rhetorics, (etc) are not “back,” but rather that they have never gone away?
In this keynote, I will ask the audience to join me in thinking through how our past --rich with the narratives of resistance--might help guide and inform how we show up as social justice educators, researchers, activists, and organizers. In addition, I will ask us to consider what new-worldmaking and imagining we have done in our recent movements that could provide constructive remedies to past weaknesses.
A recording of the Keynote Address is now available.