Call for Papers

Conference Theme: Teaching and Researching in Vulnerable Times: Reflecting on Ten Years of DDGC

April, 22-24, 2027 (Remote)

The sixth biennial DDGC Conference will draw on our collective’s long tradition of coming together in community to take stock of the field and anticipate better structures for it in the future. It also celebrates a decade since the first DDGC Conference in 2017. As both a retrospective and an act of looking forward, this year’s DDGC Conference will include author talks with Christopher Stuart Taylor on his recent book Unmasking DEI: New Frameworks for Confronting Anti-Black Racism in the Black Atlantic (2026) and Jay Dolmage on his book Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (2017).

Unmasking DEI uncovers the approaches to current social justice and DEI work that fail to address anti-black racism by design and provides alternative frameworks for disrupting the underlying colonial structures of anti-black racism that persist in Canada. Academic Ableism uses disability studies and institutional critique to reveal how disability is constituted by higher education and to place disability at the center of its spaces, temporalities, and economies. By engaging Taylor’s and Dolmage’s work, we can critically examine the limits of contemporary inclusion efforts and rethink our teaching and research environments.

We will draw on insights from comrades working in Black studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, feminist studies, migration studies, and queer/trans studies, who have long theorized the role of interdependence, solidarity, and other formations for coalitional work aimed at reconceptualizing teaching (K-16). Our desire is to hear solutions, rather than rehashing problems we are all facing. We want this conference to feel productive and hopeful rather than rehashing the existing problems we know already. (For example, a paper on "There's no more freedom of speech on campus!" would be uninteresting as opposed to "This is how to teach banned books even if you are not allowed to.")

There will be a conference reading group that will meet once in February and once in March, leading up to the conference. These sessions will give folks an opportunity to read and discuss the keynotes’ books, Unmasking DEI and Academic Ableism. The dates for the discussion are TBD. But both texts will be available for open access and will be shared with all conference participants, as soon as we set up a registration link.

The conference theme is intended to be capacious enough to hold different types of projects. Participants may submit an abstract either for a presentation (~ 20 minutes) or a shorter work-in-progress (“Werkstatt”) presentation (~10 minutes).

Please send your proposals to ddgc2027@ddgccollective.org by November 30th, 2026.

Organizing Team

Suzuko Knott, Connecticut College

Priscilla Layne, University of Waterloo