What the * is Going On: Rethinking Cultural Studies in Times of Crisis

Conference for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia 2026
December 7, Prefix Postgrad Day | December 8-10, Full Conference Program
University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, New South Wales

We are pleased to confirm a revised abstract submission deadline of JULY 10, 2026, and to announce our keynotes for 2026:

• Giang Nguyen-Thu | The University of Queensland
• Jordana Silverstein | The University of Melbourne
• Denise Tse-Shang Tang | Lingnan University
• Kirsten Thorpe | University of Technology Sydney

Call for papers:

We find ourselves in a historical moment marked by entangled crises. From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel, from an accelerating climate emergency to deepening anxieties about the integrity and sustainability of universities, world-historical events appear poised at the precipice of radically diverging possible futures. Geopolitical conflicts now also converge with a profound reorganisation of cultural production under platform capitalism: artificial intelligence has become an infrastructural force transforming how culture is created, circulated, and valued, while subscription-based streaming services have redefined the ways that cultural objects are owned, accessed, and discarded. Correspondingly, new forms of digital cultural life are proliferating at speed, from rapid fire vertical mini-dramas to cross-border livestream e-commerce to the arrival of the virtual boyfriend. These developments unfold alongside ongoing political transformations across the Asia-Pacific region, including the rise of feminist activisms across East Asia, mass progressive industrial action in Aotearoa, and the intensification of police powers, surveillance, and settler colonial violence in Australia after The Voice.

What the * is going on? What kinds of theoretical, methodological, and political interventions can Cultural Studies offer to understand such crises? What ways of knowing, communicating, and living might allow us to respond to these conditions collectively? What forms of power – algorithmic, racialised, colonial, ableist, and gendered – can become visible and legible through a Cultural Studies lens, and how might this shift, in turn, Cultural Studies’ relationships to other disciplinary formations? Further, how are Indigenous thinkers and communities changing the ways that culture, identity, place, and power are being understood during such periods of global upheaval?

CSAA 2026 invites you to join us in rethinking as an urgent intellectual and political task. It opens space for diverse contributions while foregrounding a reflexive inquiry into what cultural studies is, what it does, and what it might become under conditions of structural transformation and technological upheaval. Building on CSAA 2025’s focus on the “heat” of intensifying relations across cultures, media, environments, and governance, CSAA 2026 faces up to this moment in which such intensities have escalated, becoming entangled, uneven, and increasingly difficult to navigate.

To help spark some ideas, submissions for panels or presentations could include topics such as:

• First Nations futures: imagining and building Indigenous-led futures.
• Entangled crises: exploring how geopolitical conflict, climate breakdown, economic instability, and academic precarity intersect to form a condition of overlapping and continuous crisis.
• Cultural studies in crisis: interrogating the role, relevance, and future of cultural studies amid institutional restructuring, disciplinary shifts, and pressures on knowledge production. As part of this sub-theme, a panel will be dedicated to the legacy of Graeme Turner, a founding figure of Australian cultural studies and author of key works including What’s Become of Cultural Studies (2011) and Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good (2025).
• Platformed cultural production: examining how platforms, algorithms, and data infrastructures are reshaping how culture is created, circulated, and valued.
• Media, conflict, and information disorder: exploring how war, propaganda, disinformation, and outrage circulate through media systems and shape public culture.
• AI and machinic culture: data justice, analysing generative AI, automation, and human–machine relations in relation to authorship, creativity, and control.
• Cultural studies and creative practice: exploring how artistic and creative practices – screen, music, performance, literary and poetry, and visual arts (among others) – engage with, respond to, and reimagine conditions of crisis and trans formation.
• Intimacy and affective life: investigating transformations in relationships, gender politics, and emotional economies under platformisation and digital mediation.
• Labour, mobility, and survival: addressing precarious work, migration, and the reorganisation of labour under platform capitalism and global inequalities.
• Climate, infrastructure, and more-than-human worlds: considering climate crisis as a cultural and infrastructural condition involving human and non-human actors.
• Power and inequality: foregrounding racialised, gendered, ableist, colonial, and algorithmic power relations embedded in cultural and technological systems.
• Methods and interventions: rethinking methodologies, collaborative practices, and forms of knowledge production in response to rapidly changing conditions.
• Imagining otherwise: exploring speculative, creative, and collective approaches to living, thinking, and making culture beyond crisis.

These are just some provocations to ignite your own ideas with this year’s theme. As always, the CSAA annual conference is open to any hot topics in cultural studies. We’re looking forward to hearing your versions of what the * is going on!

Abstract deadline July 10, 2026.

Submission options:

Panel submission (min 3, max 4 presenters): CSAA 2026 (Panel Submission)

Individual submission: CSAA 2026 (individual submission)

Keynotes to be announced soon.

The CSAA conference will be held in dialogue with Digital Intimacies 12, taking place at the University of Sydney on 4-5 December. All CSAA participants are warmly invited to attend its sessions, with no registration fee required for Digital Intimacies. CSAA 2026 will also host a plenary session led by the Media Futures Hub at the University of New South Wales. Finally, the conference will give rise to a Special Issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies and a Special Issue of Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power.

Organising Committee: Dennis Bruining, Jessica Kean, Timothy Laurie, Tingting Liu, and Anna Cristina Pertierra.

For any questions, please contact: csaauts2026@gmail.com

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Longing to connect: Crossing generations and making impact

A/Prof. Denise Tse-Shang Tang

How does ethnographic research on older Chinese women with same-sex desire resonate with what is happening in our current world? What can Cultural Studies teach us about conducting research across different cultural contexts? How does an archive of queer women’s lives speak to survival and resilience, then and now? In her keynote, A/Prof. Tang explores the lives of older women with same-sex desire born between the 1930s and the 1960s in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. Through stories of love, intimacy, family obligations and personal respectability, Tang presents narrative accounts and analysis that complicate cultural notions of romance and desire at the intersections of gender roles, social class and history. These narratives do not remain in the past. They show how various forms of power move across time, place and culture to suppress, downplay and stigmatise gender, sexuality and desire. The talk also discusses Tang’s role as Co-Producer of the film All Shall Be Well, and how her research informed the making of the film. Through sharing research across generations, the keynote considers how scholarship can engage communities and make public impact.

Bio: Denise Tse-Shang Tang is Associate Professor and Department Head of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong and author of Everyday Erotics: Older Chinese Women and Same-Sex Desire (Duke University Press, 2026). Her research specializes on lesbian desires and transgender masculinities in an inter-Asian context. Prior to entering academia, Tang was HIV testing counsellor and treatment advocate for communities including Asian & Pacific Islander LGBTQI+, survivors of sexual violence, First Nations women, queer youth and incarcerated Asian youth.

‘The state needs to go’: Reflecting on what we can learn from family histories of statelessness

Dr Jordana Silverstein

We write, research and teach in this long moment of proliferating genocide and state violence, obliteration and devastation. It is also an ongoing moment of growing dissent and resistance, of cultures being formed to speak truth and to work to open up space for new critical formations. What can feel like the end of days can also, we must recognise, be the start of days. But in this we are already too late: there is much that can’t be undone, unlost, or repaired.

In this keynote, I want to sit with some interviews I have conducted with people living on Aboriginal land, in the Australian settler-colony, who are descendants of people who were stateless and migrated to Australia, becoming citizens here. In these interviews people have reflected upon the role that statelessness plays in the lives and connections they stitch together, crossing borders and communities. As one Palestinian interviewee in Naarm said to me, “I think the collective is far more important than the individual. I don’t really care to live in the world on my own.” These poignant reflections, gathered in this moment, will be examined for how they open up space for reconceptualising what the collective can be and, importantly, how we can (re)make it.

Bio: Dr Jordana Silverstein is an ARC Future Fellow based at the University of Melbourne. An award-winning historian, she is the author of Cruel Care: A History of Children At Our Borders (2023) and Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (2015), and the co-creator and host of the ‘Being Stateless’ podcast (2024). Jordana is a co-Convening Editor of Postcolonial Studies and sits on the boards of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH) and the Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS). Her Future Fellowship project, ‘Intergenerational Stories of Statelessness: An Oral History Project,’ examines histories and memories of statelessness in the Australian settler-colony, focusing on questions of belonging, family, emotions, and sexuality.

Making life platform ready: Grounding digital research in the mess of everyday life

Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu

Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu (UQ)’s keynote speech challenges a familiar myth of platform capitalism: that platforms expand because they are technologically and economically inevitable. Instead, she asks what kinds of broken worlds and everyday practices of care must already exist for platforms to appear useful. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, the talk explores how Vietnam’s post-pandemic boom in digital commerce emerged from a wider food safety crisis and the growing demands of women’s care labour. It will show how Vietnamese women became key infrastructuring subjects of this transformation, turning everyday practices of trust, provision, and domestic management into the conditions that allowed e-commerce to flourish. In doing so, her talk moves beyond platform-centric accounts to foreground the social reproduction and everyday crises that make platformisation possible.

Bio: Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu is a Senior Lecturer and a DECRA Research Fellow at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. She is affiliated with the Center for Digital Cultures and Societies, UQ. Dr Nguyen-Thu is currently working on her DECRA project “Too quick or too slow: Digital temporalities in networked Vietnam” (2024-2027). For this project, she explores the multiple, tangled, and contesting temporalities, or the lived experiences of time, on the ground of digital development in Vietnam. Dr Nguyen-Thu’s interest in the cultural politics of digital time-making stems from her lasting curiosity about the interplay between media and the rapid process of economic development in Vietnam after the Reform (Đổi Mới) in 1986. Her monograph, the first scholarly book about contemporary Vietnamese media in the English language, Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge 2019), explores how the advent of popular television reshapes the sense of national belonging in Vietnam.

Living Indigenous Archives on Country: Grounding Care and Relationality in Practice

Kirsten Thorpe

In 1989, Aboriginal scholar Henrietta Fourmile wrote that “the key to our historical and cultural resources and therefore to our cultural and historical identities is firmly clasped in a white hand” (Fourmile, 1989, p.7). Thirty-five years on, First Nations people continue to advocate for greater control over the records, data, and knowledge that concern us. As the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement demonstrates, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are advancing new models of stewardship and governance for data, information, and records. These community-controlled approaches challenge extractive knowledge practices and create pathways for Indigenous knowledges to support present and future aspirations, including climate justice, cultural continuity, and collective wellbeing. Libraries, archives, and museums, however, remain institutions whose colonial foundations continue to shape our national collective memory.

The contested nature of the archive is well established, prompting renewed attention on questions of power, sovereignty, and Indigenous self-determination in archival contexts. While archives often contain deeply personal and community-held information, they are also vital repositories of Indigenous Knowledges that can inform responses to some of the most pressing challenges of our time, including climate justice, environmental stewardship, and the pursuit of more equitable futures. Yet these records are not inherently meaningful; without community authority, interpretation, and ongoing engagement, they remain disconnected from the living knowledge systems they document. As recognised in the Indigenous Archives Collective’s Position Statement on the Right of Reply to Indigenous Knowledges and Information Held in Archives (Indigenous Archives Collective, 2021), Indigenous peoples have the right to challenge, contextualise, and respond to records about themselves and their communities, ensuring that archives remain accountable to the peoples whose lives, knowledges, and futures they represent. The Right of Reply, being the right to enhance, correct, update, critique, or withdraw Indigenous knowledge in collections, proposes a participatory model that repositions Indigenous peoples as active respondents to the record rather than its subjects, enabling ongoing relationships of accountability, care, and reciprocity between communities and archives.

This keynote presents a Living Indigenous Archives methodology (Thorpe, 2025) as a framework for engaging meaningfully and responsibly with archives. It discusses approaches of grounding care in practice, building reciprocal relationships, supporting counter-storytelling, and building archival environments that uphold Indigenous cultural authority and wellbeing. Drawing on In Living Memory as a case study, the paper explores how community engagement with government archives transformed records of surveillance into sites of connection, healing and remembrance, while restoring dignity to those represented in the archival record. While archival repair remains important, we cannot focus solely on responding to the harms of colonisation. This keynote calls on the sector to move beyond repair and invest in archival futures that centre Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, and uphold Indigenous authority over knowledge, memory, and storytelling.

References
Fourmile, H. (2020). Who owns the past? Aborigines as captives of the archives. In Terrible Hard Biscuits (pp. 16-27). Routledge.
Indigenous Archives Collective. (2021). The Indigenous Archives Collective position statement on the right of reply to Indigenous knowledges and information held in archives. Archives and Manuscripts, 49(3), 244-252.
Thorpe, K. (2025). Living Indigenous Archives. Taylor & Francis.

Bio: (Worimi, Port Stephens) is Professor at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney, where she leads the Indigenous Archives and Data Stewardship Hub, advocating for Indigenous rights in archives and data. Kirsten’s scholarship and advocacy in Indigenous archives and digital cultural heritage have influenced practice across Australia and internationally. Her work advances decolonising practices in the library and archive fields, and across the broader GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector. She advocates for the ‘right of reply’ to records, and for capacity building and support for the development of Living Indigenous Archives on Country. Her recent book, Living Indigenous Archives (Routledge, 2025), in the Routledge Studies in Archives series and brings together the theoretical and practical foundations of this agenda.