CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Twelfth Emerging Scholars Symposium on Oral History, Digital Storytelling, and Creative Practice

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Theme: Trouble in Oral History and Storytelling 

Date: Friday, March 14, 2025 

The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University invites paper and research-creation submissions for our 12th Emerging Scholars Symposium on Oral History, Digital Storytelling, and Creative Practice. This one-day event offers emerging scholars the opportunity to present work at any stage, to listen to other research projects, to exchange ideas, and to connect with other researchers, creators, and community members.  

The title and central theme of this year’s bilingual symposium is “Vivre avec le trouble”: Trouble in Oral History and Storytelling. Civil rights activist John Lewis called for getting into “good trouble. Necessary trouble.”i For feminist scholar Donna J. Haraway, responding to “urgent times” by “staying with the trouble” — broadly translated into French as “vivre avec le trouble” — demands “learning to be truly present […] entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meaning.” To make trouble, for Haraway, is “to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters.”ii Meanwhile, “[i]n these troubling times,” physicist and philosopher Karen Barad observes “the urgency to trouble time, to shake it to its core, and to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality.”iii 

How might trouble and troublemaking (re)shape our fields? What oral history and storytelling-based tools, ideas, methods, philosophies, and miracles do we need to survive the current moment of polycrisis? How might oral history and storytelling engage in necessary troublemaking? How might they work in troubled times and work to trouble time? 

The symposium is an interdisciplinary gathering that welcomes submissions from the COHDS community and beyond, including recent graduates, students, artists, and other community stakeholders working in areas connecting to the theme(s) at hand. You are encouraged to send proposals responding to areas including: 

• Oral history and storytelling in troubled times
• Oral history and storytelling as mechanisms to trouble time(s)
• Troubling oral history and storytelling (disrupting and wrestling with methods, theories, and/or practices, for example)
• Troublemaking through oral history and storytelling
• Troublemaking as activism and/or as creative practice
• Troubles facing the fields of oral history and storytelling
• Troubles within oral history and storytelling methods and practices
• Potentializing trouble
• “Micro-troubles” and troubles of the everyday in oral history and storytelling
• Hope in/and troubled times 

How to apply 

To submit your presentation proposal, please email us at cohds.chorn.symposium@gmail.com with the subject line “2025 Emerging Scholars Symposium Proposal” along with the following documents: 

• Abstract with a short statement of how your research proposal engages the conference themes (approximately 300 words)
• Your CV
• A brief bio (about 70 words)
• Technical specifications for your presentation, including any technology you might require 

We welcome papers in English and French, as well as proposals for non-verbal and multilingual creative projects and performances. While your proposal may present finished works, we warmly invite works-in-progress. 

Please note that while this year’s symposium audience will be hybrid, presenters are asked to attend in person.  

Presentations at the symposium are generally 15 minutes. If your research-creation proposal is of a different length, we may still be able to accommodate it outside of the framework of our panel discussions. Please indicate the duration of your presentation in your proposal if it differs from 15 minutes.  

We are committed to accommodating participants’ access needs and will contact presenters closer to the event date about any accessibility needs. 

Please reach out to the organizing committee with any questions at cohds.chorn.symposium@gmail.com.  

Lastly, we get how overwhelming it can be to submit a proposal, especially for the first time. We’re here to help! Please email our team to discuss ways we can support you in your proposal process.  

The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2025. 

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