Call for Papers – Precarity in Art History: Thinking with the Discipline’s Past, Present and Future

We invite contributions from scholars whose work deals with the difficulties of practising art or art history within precarious contemporary or historical contexts, broadly defined. By bringing together the past and future of art histories in precarious worlds, we may seek to understand how it might be part of the resistance struggle today and how models and histories from the past might help us navigate the present. In particular we invite papers that deliberate on the following provocations:

• How do we produce culture, memory and histories at a time of active erasure and unstable infrastructure?
• What models and histories from the past, produced after or within precarious circumstances, can help us navigate the present?
• In which ways has precarity been a generative condition for artists?
• What kinds of practices of solidarity can or should be formed in our field and what is our role as art historians at this time of crisis?
• What practical strategies can we generate for survival and resistance under these conditions?

Submission Information

The Early Careers Researchers Network/Doctorial Researchers Network (ECRN/DRN) Summer Symposium will take place on 1 July at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Papers will be fifteen minutes long with five minutes for questions. There is an honorarium available for speakers, which will be administered after the symposium. Travel expenses for speakers will also be reimbursed.

Please provide a two-hundred-word abstract and title, along with your name, email address and institutional affiliation via this Google form: https://forms.gle/4ffm8KYAap4HjjvD6. If you would like to offer a different type of contribution, please get in touch with us – we are open to diverse and novel formats.