Graduate Students from the New York University (NYU) Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and NYU’s Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands (Center CIRCL) invite proposal submissions from students across the NYC and the tri-state area for our 2026 Student Conference, Imagining Otherwise: Worldmaking in Progress hosted at NYU on Thursday, May 07, 2026.

A Call to Imagine Otherwise- Proposals Due: Friday, April 3rd, 2026

Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), urges us to work towards living and ‘imagining otherwise’ as a vital and creative, everyday act of resistance to colonialism. Our one-day student conference, Imagining Otherwise: Worldmaking in Progress, takes up this call, building upon scholars who theorize and write into a future-oriented, radical imagination of other worlds and alternative formations of co-existence. The conference invites proposals from writers, thinkers, scholars, and learners whose work re-imagines and re-orients our relations and existence in the world.

We invite creative and collaborative works-in-progress from graduate students, advanced undergraduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in any field or discipline daring to ‘imagine otherwise’ by critically transforming our understanding of the world around us. These may be works such as course papers, theses, dissertation topics and any scholarly, creative or intellectual projects you are currently working on. Projects might attend to the following themes:

• Worldmaking, worldbuilding, speculative futures, and alternative modernities
• Abolition and confronting/dismantling systems of power and oppression
• Social transformation and theories of change
• Hope, resistance, and modes of existence
• Storytelling and creative modes of expression
• New methodologies and novel research approaches
• Planetarity, multi-species, and more-than-human research
• Liveable futures and global/planetary crisis

We will hold information sessions with our team if you have any questions or concerns about how to apply. We encourage students of any stage of their research and work to apply! If you’d like to attend the info sessions they will be taking place on the following dates and times via zoom:

• Thursday, March 26th, from 11am-12pm (https://nyu.zoom.us/j/93378920631)

This in-person conference is oriented towards works-in-progress, and is designed to be a space where we can share our work and engage in open dialogue together. We encourage proposals that invite collaboration and exchange between presenters and audience in developing scholarly dialogue. This could look like paper presentations, creative or artistic sharings, multimedia presentations, or other formats entirely.

As students, researchers, and educators, we understand that it can be difficult to find spaces to share and collaboratively develop our work. This conference is grounded in an ethic of care, respect and openness with that in mind. Selected presentations will be grouped into themed panels with roughly 10-15 minutes for presenting, followed by a moderated discussion and Q&A period.

More Information & Apply Here: 

• • Proposal submission here:
  • https://forms.gle/NavuGvKKoRqUAnFy8
  • Conference website:
  • https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/imaginingotherwise2026
  • Contact us:

• [email protected]

Best regards,
The Imagining Otherwise 2026 Graduate Student Organizing Committee.

Imagining Otherwise Student Conference 2026

 

NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS)

 

NYU Center CIRCL (Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands)