Sociology and Anthropology Graduate Student Association (SAGSA)

Transformative Study: Within and Beyond the University

Department of Sociology & Anthropology,
Concordia University, Montreal 
March 13–15, 2026

 

The Sociology and Anthropology Graduate Student Association [SAGSA] invites proposals for our 2026 conference, for which we seek to reflect upon, trouble, and redefine what it means to study both in and beyond the university today. 

It is broadly recognised that we are living through a moment of polycrisis—of political, economic, social, and ecological turbulence—against which university systems are by no means invulnerable. Standing on the shifting grounds of this moment, it has become imperative for researchers to reckon with the internal and external factors, both longstanding and new, that impede the accessibility of study and that interrupt our positions as scholars within our respective fields. 

We recognise that there never has been a golden age of the university, an entity established upon separations between those who produce knowledge and that which is studied. With that said, universities are containers of vital resources that can, if utilised correctly, serve emancipatory ends. If the university as a beacon of justice and all-inclusivity remains a utopic form, we take it as our task to enact its realisation, to renegotiate our positions as knowledge producers, and to redetermine the intended functions of our knowledge production. We are inspired by the “subversive intellectual” of The Undercommons, who Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe as being “in but not of” the institution in which their labour is embedded (2015, p. 26). The quest of the subversive intellectual is to set academic resources free from constraints, so that they may be shared with and for all those who seek them.

The core of our mission is to think together and mutually inflect our understandings of what study is and what its practice entails. Once again, we follow Moten and Harney, seeing study as a form of movement: a process that takes place “across bodies, across space, across things” and that becomes “a speculative practice, when the situated practice of a seminar room or squatted space moves out to encounter study in general” (2015, p. 118). Study, then, cannot be confined to one place, nor is it inherently of the lecture theatre or the academic library. Study includes how we learn from each other and how we take care of each other, in our relationships, in our workplaces, and in our organising spaces. It involves how we strategise together against those forces that limit our freedoms, and it accordingly requires that we expand our notions of belonging and community. 

Study endures through crisis, conflict, and emergent digital realities. Uncontainable, it breathes in the lifeworlds we inhabit and navigate. Ever dynamic, it is an interminable process of speculation and cultivation.

SAGSA invites work that explores how research, knowledge, and study are practiced both inside and outside of the university. We call for a plurality of voices from within and beyond the institution, to reflect upon and discuss how knowledge moves and how it is produced, and how we build practices of study and survival. Central to our focus are the ways in which knowledge circulates and/or is contained, how subjectivities are formed, how institutional dynamics manifest in embodied ways, and how futures are collectively reimagined.

We welcome proposals from across disciplinary lines and backgrounds, and we particularly encourage submissions from graduate students and early career academics in interdisciplinary fields, as well as from practicing artists, community organisers, and activists who ground their work in the broadly conceived question of study. Audiovisual, interactive, and performance-based presentations are welcomed to our conference. Papers might consider (but are in no way limited to) the following research streams and provocations:

Institutions, knowledge production, and power 

Within this stream, we invite work that calls us to consider the ways in which institutions hold power over knowledge production and circulation, and the resulting impacts: 

• How do institutions influence what is understood as valuable study and the methods utilised to produce it?
• What are the limits of knowledge production in the context of institutions that sustain colonial, oppressive systems?

Care and harm-reduction within institutions 

This stream focuses on study as a dynamic process existing in and through various spaces, with a specific focus on case studies of institutional crisis, harm, care, and reparation: 

• How do institutional practices of care shape paradoxical experiences of simultaneous support and harm?
• What possibilities for harm-reduction, repair, or refusal arise within—or in response to—these institutional contexts?

Study as movement 

This stream focuses on study as a collective practice within social movements and community contexts, beyond formal academic institutions:

• How does study practiced within social movements generate forms of knowledge that exceed or contest modes of production within the university?
• What roles do informal and collective study practices - such as community workshops, zines, and reading groups - play in sustaining movements over time?
• How is study as movement shaped by relations of belonging, care, and shared struggle within community spaces?

Speculative study and (im)possible futures 

This stream aims to focus on study as a speculative process that helps imagine and bring into being (im)possible futures:

• In what ways does speculative study shape collective futures? 
• How can political movements, grassroots organising, and activism be understood as forms of speculative study?
• How can literary and artistic practices of speculative study be used within spaces of collective struggle and within the university?

Guide for contributors

We welcome presentations in English and French. Presenters are encouraged to submit their latest research in a variety of mediums, including, but not limited to, photography, poetry, audio/visual presentations, and film. We welcome both virtual and in-person presentations. All conference spaces will be physically accessible.