CALL FOR PAPER  Creative Bodies—Creative Minds

The fourth international, interdisciplinary conference in gender research University of Graz, 30-31 March 2026 Since its inception in 2018, the interdisciplinary conference in gender research Creative Bodies—Creative Minds has, in its three cycles, brought together scholars, practitioners, and activists to explore the relationship between gender and creativity in a variety of fields. They engaged with everyday and vernacular creativities, including material and intangible DIY forms, creative self-fashioning, coping strategies, and resourceful adaptations to social and political circumstances by communities, groups, and individuals. These encounters have treated creativity as a social and collective process that is power-dependent and deeply gendered.

The fourth conference aims to continue this line of inquiry by exploring more closely the relationship between creativity, vulnerability, and subversion. The last decade has seen an increasing focus on vulnerability in the humanities and social sciences, even what we could term a “vulnerability turn” in some disciplines, such as in cultural and gender studies. “Vulnerability” has also come to an increased usage in political rhetoric, policies, and everyday language. However, the concept of vulnerability has come under increasing academic, political and public scrutiny, highlighting its ambiguity, with both positive and negative connotations. Critical research has also discussed the (mis)uses of the concept in political debates and in concrete social policies, where it often deepens social marginalisation and vulnerability instead of reducing it. Gender studies and feminist scholars, in particular, have persuasively exposed the androcentric and paternalistic bias in the cultural understanding of vulnerability as a condition of passivity and lack of agency in need of remedy. Instead, they have emphasized the relational nature of vulnerability that makes it a universal dimension of human existence, bringing attention to its social and situational aspects. Exploring vulnerability in relation to resistance has been powerful in revealing the agentic potential of vulnerability to challenge oppression, inequality, and injustice, as witnessed, for example, in the mobilizations and democratic struggles of the last decade in Southeastern Europe. The fourth Creative Bodies—Creative Minds conference in 2026 invites interdisciplinary contributions that explore the entanglements between creativity, vulnerability, subversion and gender in different socio-cultural, political, economic and everyday settings.

Keynote speakers:

• Isla Cowan, Independent Playwright and Theatre Maker, Edinburgh
• Jennifer Ramme, Department of Sociology, University of Graz

The areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Everyday creativity, vulnerability, subversion and gender
• Creativity as a response to restrictive biopolitics and gender norms
• Intersectional approaches to creativity, vulnerability and subversion (race, ethnicity, age, class, gender, sexuality, ability)
• Collective creativities in contesting collective vulnerabilities
• Creativity, vulnerability and subversion in education, arts, and activism
• Material, temporal, situational, and relational aspects of creativity, vulnerability and subversion
• Creativity, vulnerability and subversion in the digital realm
• Creative subversion– subverting creativity imperatives
• Creative methodologies and creative research in social sciences and humanities
• Creative addresses of gendered vulnerabilities in medicine, science, and technology