No Nations: Punks Without Borders

A Community-Building Conference hosted by PSN US and PSN Canada

November 13 – Online

In the spirit of enabling access, this single-day Punk Scholars Network conference will be held online. It is aimed especially at emerging scholars across the Americas, including Latin America, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. The conference will be conducted in English.

Stories from the Underground

In addition to panel presentations of prepared papers, we will also have conversational roundtables where presenters need not produce a polished presentation but can instead share emerging projects and invite feedback on research plans. Such conversations need not address the conference theme but are certainly welcome to do so.

Punks without Borders

What are the borders of punk? How does punk cross borders, whether they are literal or conceptual? How does punk think about the nation and the globe especially at a time of environmental collapse? Where do the borders of punk begin and end? What does gatekeeping do and how are such impulses symptomatic of larger social practices or an effect of sedimented historical practices. How have literal borders shaped DIY practices? What are the politics of the border throughout the global history of punk? How does punk experience the borders between the material and the digital? What does it mean to police or not police a border?

Additionally, papers might address:

• Geography, community, and sound
• Nationalism, anti-nationalism
• DIY practices
• Migration
• Temporal borders and before-and-after moments
• Indigeneity, decolonization, settler colonialism
• Space and sound
• Death-dealing and border patrol
• Earthlings and anthropocentrism
• Punk frontiers, borderlands, and emerging futures
• The border as a graphic device in punk visual culture, design, graphic novels
• Pedagogical practices that redraw the borders of punk culture
• Ethnography, storytelling, and archival research

The theme is meant to be open-ended to allow for a capacious conversation about the topic and to showcase a wide range of research exploring punk. We welcome papers involving a range of methodological approaches, from ethnographies to research creation and from digital humanities to archival close reading along with everything else in between.

As ever, the PSN invites proposals from undergraduate and graduate students, independent scholars, artists, university researchers, and members of the punk community outside of academia.

For this event, we particular encourage new and emerging scholars to apply and self-identify as such.

Submission Details

1. Proposals should be 200-350 words.

2. Please also include a presentation title, affiliation information (if any), career stage, pronouns, and a brief professional bio (50-100 words).

3. Please self-select either a prepared paper presentation (15-18 minutes) or a discussion of research plans (8-10 minutes).