Holly Stevenson, Essential 4, 2023
ASSEMBLIA: Gatherings, Hysterics and Rapture
The Centre for Feminist Research is pleased to announce that we are accepting submissions for our upcoming conference, ASSEMBLIA, taking place on October 22, 2026.
This is the inaugural conference in what we hope will become an annual event organized by graduate students and members of the CFR. It provides an interdisciplinary forum for emerging and independent artists and scholars by bringing together studio practice, criticism and theory, gender studies, and art history.
We welcome academic articles, poetry, short fiction, artworks, and essays.
Assemblia names the charged condition of coming together. Neither simply assembly nor assemblage, Assemblia suggests a collective state: a gathering that is bodily, emotional, political, and unstable.
It asks how we might think through moments when relation intensifies, when bodies become porous, when feeling becomes contagious, and when the individual is overtaken by the crowd, the ritual, the image, the scream, the beloved, or the unknown.
Taking Freud’s problematic notion of the “dark continent” as both provocation and critical point of departure, Assemblia begins where the feminized unknown was once cast as a territory to be solved. Rather than seeking mastery, Assemblia turns toward the charged terrain of what gathers, trembles, desires, refuses, and fears, asking how gathering might be understood not as fixed or passive, but as fluid, active, volatile, and alive.
This conference invites papers, performances, screenings, artworks, and experimental presentations that ask what it means to gather at the edge of coherence. It considers the moments when bodies are held together by forces they cannot fully name: terror, desire, grief, pleasure, faith, memory, or need.
To gather is not always to become whole. Sometimes it is to tremble together. Sometimes it comes undone.
We are interested in the ecstatic and unsettling dimensions of collectivity: the congregation, the coven, the protest, the sleepover, the séance, the fandom, the feast, the mob, the procession, the dance floor, the horror scene, the family table, the lover's embrace.
What forms of knowledge emerge when bodies assemble under pressure—or without it? What is released in moments of collective intensity?
Topics of Interest
We welcome proposals that engage, but are not limited to:
- rapture, ecstasy, possession, and devotion
- hysteria, panic, contagion, and collective feeling
- horror, haunting, monstrosity, and the crowd
- love, intimacy, longing, and attachment
- rituals, ceremonies, protests, and public assembly
- feminism, queer collectivity, and the “unruly” body
- affect, embodiment, and emotional excess
- fandom, spectacle, performance, and mass culture
- domestic gatherings, kinship, inheritance, and care
- ruins, thresholds, portals, and sites of transformation
- material, sonic, visual, or spatial forms of gathering
Conference Information
Date: October 22, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM–4:00 PM
Location: York University, Keele Campus
The conference is free and open to graduate students, independent scholars, artists, and interdisciplinary practitioners.
Submission Information:
Deadline for Submissions: July 30, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: August 30, 2026
Please make a submision below: