[Ahs-grads] Fwd: Call for Papers and Artworks—Outer Limits Conference @ UCSD

[Iselda Salgado]

Please see attached call for papers.



---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Negus, Christine <chnegus at ucsd.edu>
Date: Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 12:28 PM
Subject: Call for Papers and Artworks—Outer Limits Conference @ UCSD
To: visartssymposiumucsd at gmail.com <visartssymposiumucsd at gmail.com>


Hello!

Attached is a call for papers and artworks for an upcoming
interdisciplinary graduate conference organized by students in UCSD’s PhD
Program in Art History and Media, Theory and Criticism, the PhD Program in
Art Practice, and the MFA Program.

We think this would be of interest to your students and we would greatly
appreciate if  you could  please circulate this with your MAs, MFAs, and/or
PhD students, as well as  any other parties who you think might be
interested in contributing!


Conference date: Friday, April 10, 2026
Extended submission deadline: January 31, 2026


You can find all the info below as well as attached as a .pdf. Please reach
out to us if you have questions.

All the best!



*Call for Papers and Artworks:*
*Outer Limits*

The liminal expands across a spatio-temporal divide, limning demarcations
between inside and outside, now and then, here and there, and us and them.
Reaching for it, we might bump up against, and sometime erode, boundaries
between the known and the unfamiliar. Yet, working through liminality
engages not only with phenomenological experience but with processes and
enactments. What might be necessary indeterminacies challenge ‘normative’
understandings or standard passages. Its affectual eventuations align with
the anxieties of our current moment: an inexorable state of wait, being
caught-in-between.

We are all a little on edge these days, and though we may feel trapped,
reflecting on liminal conditions might imagine queer and other non-standard
or resistant wayfinding in the project of conceptualizing future-bound
transformation or roundabout, even unstable, ways of unsettling the false
consciousness of the status quo. If edges delineate barriers, such limits
can also be productive and goad us into thinking, seeing, and pushing
*beyond*.  Maybe *Mean Girls *(2004) had it right: suggesting a radical
rethinking of liminality by announcing that “the limit does not exist.” Or,
to reframe, what are the stakes of questioning the very nature of *being
limited*? As Luce Irigaray suggested in *This Sex Which is Not One*: “Leave
definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.”

For the inaugural Symposium and Exhibition presented through UCSD’s Art and
Media History, Theory and Criticism department, we invite contributions
that expand between fields and disciplines to consider liminality
experientially, methodologically, and/or critically, and which present as
zones of both vulnerability and possibility. What might arise when we
center or trouble the interstitial in artistic practice? How does attention
to instability, the unstable, or the marginal, open new relationalities
across art and critical reflection, but also archives and institutions?
What are the methodological and aesthetic stakes of working in and on the
liminal, between disciplines, genres, or epistemologies? And what are the
ontological risks and affordances of liminal discourse?

Though this conference seeks to push the boundaries, or challenge *the
limits*, of the academic conference itself we offer these areas of thought
as a beginning point to extend from:


   - *Edging,* and its potentiality:

Satisfaction and fulfillment, delay and deferrals, or just being on the
verge…


   - *Limbo, *or lying in wait:

Caught in suspension, uncertainty, and anti-progress


   - *Straddling Margins,* and trans identifications:

Border crossings, being between, refusing to fit


   - *Bottoming,* and the downward turn:

bottom-up formations of power, bottoming out, or just being down


   - *Passing, *or its inverse of the neither/nor:

asexual erotics, reveal and conceal strategies, or countering binaries


   - *Capacitations,* or reaching the limit:

Blocks, barriers, moving through, and finalities


   - *Beyond Bounds,* and its afterlives:

Thresholds, holes, and delimiting


*Submissions*
This event is organized by graduate students in UCSD’s PhD Program in Art
and Media History, Theory and Criticism, the PhD Program in Art Practice,
and the MFA Program. Through such interdisciplinary exchange we seek to
provide space for those just breaking through, and we happily welcome
emergent scholars, practices, and practitioners (alongside more established
thinkers and makers) to share original research and creative work in this
experimental format.

*For presenters:* We invite abstracts that think with and beyond these
areas of interest (approximately 300 words), and also welcome experimental
lectures and nontraditional presentations, to be submitted alongside a
condensed CV (maximum 5-page PDF).

*For artists:* We welcome submissions of artworks in any medium for a group
show and screening accompanied by a project description (approximately 300
words) and 3-5 images of the work (as .jpgs), to be submitted similarly
alongside a condensed CV (maximum 5-page PDF).

We finally ask that all applicants include five keywords that situate the
work submitted.

Please send all materials to visartssymposiumucsd at gmail.com by January 31,
2026. Accepted participants will be notified by February 10, 2026.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about this symposium
or the submission process.
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