ABOUT QSI

Queer Summer Institute in Research Creation: Transiting the Queer Uncommons (QSI) ran from May 2 to 26 2022, Inspired by radical new poetic methods of digital, intermedial and live storytelling, transgressive visual techniques emerging from new media platforms, and new activisms engaging with theories of homonationalism, the translocal, and a global queer (un) commons.

Supported by a SSHRC Connection grant, QSI featured 2 graduate courses at York’s School of Art, Media, Performance, and Design, co-presented as a field school by the Hemispheric Encounters Network, a SSHRC Partnership and Canadian Foundation for Innovation Grant that brings together scholars, artists, activists, and community organizations from across the Americas to explore hemispheric performance as an artistic practice for addressing social and environmental justice. The courses were:

THST 6350: Performing the Queer (Un)commons

Students engage debates and creative practice in queer worldmaking through a focus on the ways intermedial performance crosses borders - both geographic and the borders of creative practice - to imagine the world queerly. How does the transnational circulation of queer cultural production resist western imperialism and trouble colonial notions of borders, and how do translocal interconnections and exchanges between localities create queer community? Taught by Mary Bunch,

FILM 5020: Global Queer Cinemas Confront the Pink Line

Critically engaging with Mark Gevisser, investigation of new pink lines in the global LGBTQ landscape, which variously exploit, divide, but also sometimes empower queer/trans citizens, this research-creation course explores a new generation of digital queer voices and their specific interventions on our queer screens. Moving beyond the cynical ubiquity of homonormalized LGBTQ stories on Netflix and youtube, this course seeks to explore those voices that push back against globalizing market forces and pink commodity paradigms. Taught by John Greyson.

The QSI culminated in Pink Lines, a hybrid live/zoom cabaret, at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre,

Hemispheric Encounters Field School

Hemi Encounters and VISTA (a collaborative program on vision research funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund), supported students from partner universities across Canada and Latin America participated in the QSI courses, bringing  knowledge from different contexts to the  dynamic cohort of artist-scholars.

Hemi Encounters supported a range of field school/QSI events exploring intersections of transborder performance and activist digital production – including a panel on transnational methodologies, a workshop by Professor Vanessa Andreotti, an artist-scholar networking event, and performance by Colombian performance artist Nadia Granados – as well the creation of the QSI archival website. (https://hemisphericencounters.ca/)