The Graduate Visual Culture Association (GVCA) at Queen’s University is requesting submissions for Threads, the Context & Meaning XXVI graduate research conference. This year, we are seeking 15-minute presentations that approach webweaving as both a practice and a conceptual framework. We welcome presentations that reflect on visual art, cultural heritage, performance, embodied practices, and material culture from any historical period or geographic area and broadly engage with the expanded themes described in the call below.

This year’s conference will occur from Friday, February 26th to Saturday, February 27th, 2027. We are pleased to announce that our keynote speaker is Dr. Kristin Moriah, Canada Research Chair in Black Feminist Technologies and Artistic Praxis at Queen’s University.

You may submit your abstracts through the link to our website. The submission deadline is Friday, November 20th, 2026. If you have any questions or require additional information, please get in touch with the conference organizers at contextandmeaningqueensu.ca.

CALL FOR PAPERS:
Webweaving is a digital practice that is popular in blogging spaces, in which users curate fragments from visual art, poetry, music, film, and photography, spinning threads between otherwise disparate media. Like the Arachne myth, this process likens weaving to the architecture of a spider’s web, recontextualizing and repurposing found materials to visualize the hyperlinked networks that entangle us, and to imagine alternatives to existing cultural codes. This year’s Context & Meaning conference extends the metaphor of the web by approaching webweaving as both a practice and a conceptual framework. We invite scholars to shape new pathways across art-historical research, knowledge creation, and methodologies. How does art history intertwine with other disciplines? Where do visual and material culture intersect with broader social, political, and cultural networks? How do cultural products traverse the material and immaterial worlds? Why and how does art accrue layers of meaning over time? How might weaving, both practically and metaphorically, serve as a mode of interdisciplinary inquiry? What roles might the digital world play in art and art historical research?

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
Archival Decolonization
Architectures of the Web
Art Networks
Autotheory
Cyberfeminism
Collage as Praxis
Crafting Knowledge
Digital Art Conservation
Embodied Knowledges
Expanded Art History
Glitch Feminism
Hypertextuality
Internet Art Practices
Multisensorial Methodologies
New Materialism
Speculative and Critical Fabulation
Object Biographies
(Web)sites of Creation
Webweaving
Weaving as Worldmaking

SUBMISSION
- Title of Presentation
- Short Biography (max. 150 words)
- Abstract (max. 300 words)

Please complete the form linked below or upload a PDF document with your title, biography and abstract to be considered for Context and Meaning XXVI. The form will close on November 20, 2026, at 11:59 P.M.:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSecz_kl583y8JOX1mxLo5BkeAFd1AQqTRiamO-nqvxxaFAdLA/viewform

CONTACT:
contextandmeaningqueensu.ca.