[Candrama] IFTR 2027 - Feminist Research Working Group call for papers

[Kim Solga]

IFTR FEMINIST RESEARCH WORKING GROUP
IFTR World Congress 2027
28 June - 2 July, Nafplion, Greece

CALL FOR PAPERS

Dear feminist friends,

The theme for the 2027 IFTR World Congress is “Hybridity.” As always, we invite papers that connect with the theme, but ALSO papers – works in progress; new ideas; risky forays to be tried out in a safe space – that have do not immediately connect with the theme. (Our work is adjacent to hybridity, but not bound to it.)

THAT SAID, here’s our take on the conference theme for Greece.

The concept of hybridity invites us to think about contamination in a productive way, through theories and practices of amalgamation, of blending, of mixed cultures. It challenges ideas of ‘pure origin’ in the everyday lives we live, the ideals we follow and the practices that we cherish. Hybridity is political, but it is also structural. This is something our current political structures appear, at times, to forget.

Theatre has always been a hybrid form that incorporates performance, music, visual arts and artistic techniques of light and sound. For feminists engaged with theatre and performance studies, the idea of mixing and blending as an organizational concept can open up many avenues for critical thinking. Where do knowledge frameworks mix and blend? Where do foundational ideas from different disciplines find points of intersection? When and where might “hybridity” become an intellectual space for experimenting with how we think, how we work, and how we work together?

The feminist approach to hybridity as a mode of rethinking borders and boundaries in theatre and performance can be expansive and yet completely grounded. Hybridity offers insights that allow us to revisit how boundaries are drawn, how borders are formed, and through these explorations it becomes possible cross, transgress, and contest received truths and “common sense” and build new intersections.

We invite papers from the Global South and North that put feminist practices of hybridity into geographical, cultural, and sociopolitical perspectives. Some points of connection may include:


  1.  Revisiting the hybrids of old: postcolonial and feminist thought have used this figure before. Does it remain a valuable tool for unthinking the politics of identity?
  2.  Origin stories: if we bring a mix-and-stir lens to the things we believe about how our discipline began, what it believed and what led us to our critical positions today, what can we see that may have not been visible before?
  3.  Hybridity as theatrical practice: before and after The Internet Ate The World
  4.  Hybridity as knowledge system: exploring alternative cosmologies

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE.

The group gathered in Melbourne suggested we might do a bit of shared reading and devote one of our sessions in Greece to a discussion of that reading. This practice has precedent, the most recent of which is our pre-COVID investment in affect theory and the book Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times that emerged from it.

In a nod to the hybrid and its metaphysical power to help us reflect on how we know, learn, and come to believe the things that we hold fiercely true, we will be looking together at Tracy Davis’s introduction to The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research For Theatre and Performance Studies.

We are also very happy to invite papers that reflect on, with, or alongside any of the other chapters in that book, or on the practices they discuss and those practices’ implications for feminist performance work circa 2026.

***

To submit a paper to the Feminist Research Working Group, please follow the general conference submission timeline:

  *   1 October 2026: Abstract submissions open. Abstracts can be submitted to the IFTR conference platform which is accessed via the IFTR webpage<http://www.iftr.org/>
  *   2 November: Abstract submissions close. Please note this is really early, comparatively!
  *   21 December: notifications of acceptance sent.
  *   Please note that you must be a member of IFTR to submit an abstract. To join or renew your membership, visit the IFTR webpage<http://www.iftr.org/>.
Questions? Reach the FRWG convenors, Professor Kim Solga and Dr Mallarika Sinha Roy, at ksolga at uwo.ca<mailto:ksolga at uwo.ca>and mallarikasinharoy at yahoo.com<mailto:mallarikasinharoy at yahoo.com>.



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