Call for Papers: The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, Identity

A 2-day interdisciplinary conference exploring research into the human hand in cultural contexts, embodied histories and representations of identity.

8 – 9 January 2026, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London

We invite abstracts for papers of 15-20 minutes, for presentation at our 2-day interdisciplinary conference, part of The Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, and Identity, Past and Present, supported by UKRI.

In recognition of the hand’s ability to reach across boundaries and make connections, we welcome presentations from multi- and interdisciplinary research fields, including Critical Studies, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and STEM. We encourage proposals from artists, makers and performers alongside more traditional academic research papers.

Potential research themes related to the hand include, but are not limited to:

Care: healing, medicine, surgery, philanthropy, justice, carceral systems, psychology, wellbeing.
Communication: gesture, performance, sign language, tactile communication, literary and visual representations.
Connection: life and death, remembrance, symbolic hands, supernatural hands.
Embodiment: touch, hapticity, identity, intimacy, selfhood, play.
Work: class, crafting, making, creative practice, labour, feminism, race and anti-racism, LBGTQ+ activism, skilled work under AI.

Please send abstracts up to 300 words, and biographies up to 100 words to victorianhand@fashion.arts.ac.uk.

Deadline: 22 September 2025

For more information, click here