Queer & Trans Reflections: 8th Annual Queer Directions Symposium

Queer Directions is an annual symposium at The Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies addressing pressing issues in queer, trans, and sexuality studies, politics, and culture. This year’s theme is Queer & Trans Reflections with speakers Jasbir Puar, Roderick Ferguson, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Dora Silva Santana. Sexual Diversity Studies is experiencing its 25th anniversary, and we have dedicated the year to a series of reflections: where have we been, where are we now, and where we have yet to go? As a community, we continue to challenge ourselves to be better, and to do better, and we continue to hope and dream for more and otherwise. Our esteemed panelists will join us to raise similar questions, press on other ones, and bring their own work to bear on what it means to ask these questions now.

Reserve your ticket at queertransreflections.eventbrite.ca

Speaker Bios

Jasbir K. Puar is a Professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at University of British Columbia. She is the author of the award-winning books The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017) and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), re-issued as an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (2017). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly, mainstream venues such as Al-Jazeera and The Guardian.

Roderick Ferguson is the William Roberston Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and Professor of American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (2018). He is currently working on two monographs—The Arts of Black Studies and The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora.

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a poet, scholar, and author from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of four books: This Wound is a World (2017), winner of the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (2019), longlisted for Canada Reads 2020, and A History of My Brief Body (2020), finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

Dora Silva Santana is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled “Iconica: Transing Afro Diasporic Signs.” She has published articles such as “Mais Viva!: Reassembling Blackness, Transness and Feminism” and “Transitionings and Re-turnings: Experiments with the Poetics of Transatlantic Water” in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.