Graduate Students from the New York University (NYU) Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and NYU's Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands (Center CIRCL) invite proposal submissions from students across the NYC and the tri-state area for our 2026 Student Conference, Imagining Otherwise: Worldmaking in Progress hosted at NYU on Thursday, May 07, 2026.

Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, urges us to work towards living and ‘imagining otherwise’ as a vital and creative, everyday act of resistance to colonialism (Sharpe, 2016). Our one-day student conference, Imagining Otherwise: Worldmaking in Progress, takes up this call, building upon the traditions of Black, Indigenous, and scholars who theorize and write into a future-oriented, radical imagination of other worlds and alternative formations of co-existence. The conference invites proposals from writers, thinkers, scholars, and learners whose work re-imagines and re-orients our relations and existence in the world. 

We invite creative and collaborative works-in-progress from graduate students, advanced undergraduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in any field or discipline daring to ‘imagine otherwise’ by critically transforming our understanding of the world around us.  We especially encourage applications from those whose work examines the potential for what ‘could be,’ and those offering innovative theories of change and new modes of being, becoming, and existence. Projects might attend to the following themes:

• Worldmaking, worldbuilding, speculative futures, and alternative modernities

• Abolition and confronting/dismantling systems of power and oppression

• Social transformation and theories of change

• Hope, resistance, and modes of existence 

• Storytelling and creative modes of expression

• New methodologies and novel research approaches

• Planetarity, multi-species, and more-than-human research 

• Liveable futures and global/planetary crisis