Symposium Call
October 23, 5pm EST
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

Visions of Care and Collaboration
An online symposium organized in conjunction with the Toronto Queer Film Festival
DATE: March 22-24, 2024
Proposal deadline: October 23, 2023. Submit proposals here.
Everyone is welcome to apply. This is a paid opportunity for all involved.

The Toronto Queer Film Festival is seeking proposals for its annual Symposium around the theme of Visions of Care and Collaboration.

Visions of Care and Collaboration brings forward the hope of building a community full of love, respect, and growth. The current state of the world is crumbling with public health abandonment, dirty politics, and pushing bootstraps ideologies of individualism in service of capitalist accumulation and resource hoarding. Visions of Care and Collaboration imagines a world where taking care of each other becomes a revolutionary act: engaging in mutual aid, prioritizing community, and dismantling consumerism. We create space for conversations around needs, necessary changes, and how to develop relationships with each other and our environments. We want to see a world where we acknowledge each other’s struggles, but are there for each other with support and new ways of thinking.

In alignment with the guiding principles of TQFF, we ask that submissions to this symposium uphold the principles of decolonization and liberation for all, by prioritizing Indigenous sovereignty, Black liberation, anti-racism, accessibility, prison abolition, and a borderless world.

The TQFF Symposium invites cross-disciplinary practitioners, both within and outside of media and film arts, to explore topics relevant to the theme of Visions of Care and Collaboration. Creative engagement such as visuals, clips, performances, poetry reading, and other hybrid forms of presentations are highly encouraged. Some considerations include the following:

  • 2Spirit/Queer/Trans world-building;
  • Oral or written traditions;
  • Mythology, or folklore;
  • Disability Justice;
  • COVID, HIV and AIDS activism;
  • Indigenous and Afro-Futurism;
  • Queer resistance as demonstrated within cinematic genres of speculative fiction including horror, sci-fi, fantasy, etc;
  • Non-human kinship;
  • Non-heteronormative love, relationships, and family units;
  • Sex-worker led resistance and collective-care movements;
  • Indigenous language reclamation and land return across Turtle Island;

*A NOTE ABOUT ACADEMIC PAPER SUBMISSIONS:
To keep in line with the intentions of TQFF as an accessible and alternative creative venue, we are at this time discouraging the submission of traditional academic papers and presentations that utilize academic jargon. We recommend presentations that actively engage with what will primarily be a non-academic audience. For those who wish to present research, we require that you indicate the format and content of your presentation.

Everyone is welcome to apply. We highly suggest taking a look at previous programming from our previous years when considering your submission: TQFF Archive

Please submit the following information via our online form by October 23th, 2023.

  • Name
  • Affiliation (Institutional, collectives, ad-hoc groups, etc., if applicable)
  • Presentation format (i.e. paper, roundtable, workshop, creative)
  • Presentation title
  • 250-word abstract
  • The email address you can be contacted at
  • Accessibility needs

TQFF distinguishes itself from other festivals and arts organizations that serve the LGBTQ2S+ community by focusing on experimentally formal and social-justice focused film and video and by encouraging the submission— and prioritizing the programming—of work by and about Queer and Trans People of Color, Indigenous people, people with disabilities and the work of local, low-income, DIY, and/or emerging filmmakers.

The TQFF Symposium is generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council. You can read more about TQFF on our website.

Instagram: @torontoqueerfilmfestival
Facebook: Toronto Queer Film Festival

 

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