2026 DC Queer Studies Symposium: Refuse/Remove/Remember: Archiving Beyond
2026 DC Queer Studies Symposium: Refuse/Remove/Remember: Archiving Beyond
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.
