The English Student Association (ESA) is pleased to share the call for papers for this year’s conference What We Desire: Critical Perspectives on Beauty, Pleasure, and Value on Friday, May 1, 2026:

The ESA of the CUNY Graduate Center invites proposals from students across all departments and disciplines for a critical investigation into the question of desire through beauty, pleasure, and value. Among the questions this conference asks is, how is desire formed by the systems, memories, and material conditions through which value is produced, circulated, and lived? How does desire shape our understanding of value itself? We invite interdisciplinary, critical and/or creative approaches that examine the politics of desire and value.

Areas to explore might include, but are by no means limited to:

• Art, aesthetics, and authorship within capitalist structures
• The pedagogy of values and desires
• Biopolitics of pleasure and pain
• Beauty and ugliness in environmental or ecological contexts
• Speculations of value in time, memory, and inheritance
• The relationship between the sensuous and the critical
• (Re)claiming beauty, pleasure, desire

 

Submission Guidelines:

• Email abstracts to [email protected]by Friday, February 20, 2026.
• Abstract Length: 250 words for individual papers; 300-350 words for panels.
• All submissions should include a brief biography (50-100 words), contact information, and 5 keywords that categorize your research.
• Formats: Individual papers (10-15 minutes), panels, roundtables, or creative presentations.