The conference theme—Edge Play—addresses the experience of our locations. We encourage the exploration of edge ecologies, edge effects, and different forms of limits in contemporary art and culture — horizons, boundaries, cliffs and coasts, sidewalks and ledges, pain and pleasure thresholds. We might be on the edge of disaster, or the edge of glory, or both. We are cruising dystopias, and doing so from Los Angeles, the dream factory, in a California that figures the future and the end of worlds—a region that is itself already the site of genocidal and ecological disaster. For this conference, we are interested in pushing back against the edge lords, reclaiming the knife’s edge, the limit, the border and the frame. We are curious about edges as formal devices, artists who play their edge and work between spaces. We are chasing the edge, making the cut, getting lost in the exurbs.

In our language we intentionally conjure imaginaries of and about L.A., but this call is not limited to its amorphous boundaries. Rather, we take its sense of place, its residence at and on the edge of apocalyptic sprawl, as that which directs us toward the extremities of bounded spaces, whether on the verge, circumference, or periphery. 

We invite proposals from scholars, artists, writers, curators, activists and other practitioners whose work addresses and expands upon the study, collection, exhibition, teaching, and writing of art and culture. We invite proposals with alternative, experimental writing practices and modes of presentation that break form with the typical conference paper, panel, or roundtable, as well as with the constraints and possibilities of the conference’s hybrid format. We wish to explore what Hunter S. Thompson and others describe as “edge work,” while approaching that work through a spirit of play. Panels and papers that consider a range of disciplines and methods, and that speak across (non)traditional institutional or intellectual divides are especially encouraged. Given the conference’s theme, we welcome submissions that rethink and revisit the stakes, limits, pleasures, and discomfort of exchange, encounter, and engagement. 

Panels and papers are encouraged to engage our theme, but participants are welcome to submit other proposals which contribute to our broader project of exploring the arts of the present. Participants may address the following topics, but are welcome to explore others as well:

• Edge ecologies
• Edge effects 
• Edgework theory
• Edge cities
• Chasing the edge
• Postcards from the edge
• Edge of glory
• Edge Coast
• (Edging the) Pacific Rim
• Cruising dystopias
• Jeremiads and cosmic visions
• Cutting through and across sunshine and noir
• Breathing/breath  
• Edged weaponry
• Playing the line
• Living on the periphery
• Becoming porous: borderlands 
• Boundaries without walls
• Genders on the verge of a nervous breakdown