2026 DC Queer Studies Symposium: Refuse/Remove/Remember: Archiving Beyond
2026 DC Queer Studies Symposium: Refuse/Remove/Remember: Archiving Beyond
Description
The 2026 DC Queer Studies Symposium is a three-day event entitled Refuse/Remove/Remember: Archiving Beyond. The symposium brings together scholars, artists, archivists, and community members to examine archives as sites of struggle, relation, erasure, and survival. Grounded in Indigenous, decolonizing, and queer engagements with archives, the event also draws on critical archival studies to ask how histories are preserved, contested, withheld, and remade across institutional and community contexts. We anticipate participation from archivists, librarians, artists, and scholars working across community archiving, digital sovereignty, zine cultures, and experimental archival practices.
The first day of the symposium will be held in person and will center hands-on workshops and performances. Programming will include floppy disk art, performances, a visit and interactive session with the DC Punk Archive featuring materials from their zine collections, and a postcard-writing workshop inspired by “postcards from the dead,” inviting participants to engage archival practice as a form of relational communication across time.
The second day will be fully virtual and will feature talks by Indigenous and queer librarians, archivists, and scholars reflecting on their work building, using, and transforming archives. A watch party option will be available for those who wish to gather in person and engage the virtual programming collectively.
The third day will take place in partnership with LACS and will center community gathering through a DJ dance party, extending the symposium’s focus on archives into embodied, collective forms of memory, expression, and presence.
Schedule
April 9
In-Person | Stamp Student Union, Charles Carroll Room
10:00 AM Doors Open & Welcome Breakfast
10:45 AM Opening Hoop Dance Performance & Opening Remarks
11:45 AM Queering the Archive: A Look Into the Images as Abstract Workshop
1:15 PM Floppy Disc Zine Making & DC Punk Archive Interview
1:50 PM Lunch
2:45 PM Postal Service for the Dead Workshop
4:45 PM Ice Cream Social
5:30 PM Day 1 Closing Remarks
April 10
Hybrid | Zoom
11:00 AM Opening remarks
11:30 AM “Remembering Endangered Intangible Cultural Heritages” with Eric Hung
11:50 AM “In a Different Light: Reclaiming non-binary Diné from the Archive” with Shepherd Tsosie
12:25 PM “Addressing the Information Needs of Indigenous Students at the University of Maryland College Park” with Marcus Ortiz
12:45 PM “Lifecycles: Records, Humans, Institutions, Movements” with Libby Coyner
1:20 PM Break
2:10 PM “CULTURE DAMS: the Right to be Forgotten and the Right to be (Re)membered in the Academy Archives” with Ia Kholan Bull
2:30 PM “'Context of Dead' to Community Care: Building a Grief Community Archive” with Janelle Ketcher
3:05 PM “Collaborative partnerships in creating culturally respectful, responsive, and appropriate access to archival histories of Indigenous communities” with Mowana Lomaomvaya
3:25 PM TBA
4:10 PM Closing Remarks, craft wrap-up
