Call for Participants - Identity and Culture

Note - calls for participation in Nine Worlds 2016 are closed. This page does not represent the convention's current status, but has been preserved for reference.

Nine Worlds holds intersectionality as integral to all of our content sections. We are taking a ‘nothing about us without us’ attitude to content throughout Nine Worlds: if a session is talking about women in Star Wars, the panel will have women on it, regardless of which section it is being run by.

The Identity and Culture section is specifically focused on talking in deeper ways about our geeky interests and our experiences of fannish spaces as people with one or more marginalised identity; which may include race, sexuality, class, age trans status, disability, neurodiversity, marginalised genders, size, religious belief, nationality and immigrant status.

We’re bringing together some of the content you may have expected from the previous LGBTQAI+, Race & Culture and Geek Feminism tracks, while expanding beyond the scope of previous years. Identity and Culture will include the show stopping Bifrost Cabaret which we will be seeking both an organiser and performers for.

What are we looking for?

We need you to help make Identity and Culture as good as it can possibly be. Your experience of and enthusiasm for geeky pursuits and fannish spaces, coupled with our own has always been what Nine Worlds is about. If you have a session you would like to see happen, we have a very limited number of sessions left to fill. Please contact us at identity-culture@nineworlds.co.uk and suggest your idea. No experience of public speaking or presenting is necessary, nor is previous attendance of Nine Worlds. You don’t have to frame your ideas academically, just drop us a couple of lines (preferably between 100-300 words, but we can work with less if necessary) about what you’d like to run, what format you’d like to run it in (panel, workshop, talk?) and we’ll talk to you about trying to fit it onto the program. Sessions last around an hour, with some time for set up and packing up on either side.

We’re looking for people who would like to develop sessions that go beyond the typical ‘Diversity in Sci-Fi’ panel and take discussions deeper – while the majority of sessions will be open to all attendees, they should be aimed primarily at people who experience a topic (for example, a panel session looking at queer women in Orange is the New Black, will almost certainly have queer women in the audience as well as on the panel).
We’re looking for session proposals relating to any fandom across any type of media, as well as sessions about experiences of fandom/geek spaces as a person from a marginalised identity group. Some sessions can be 18+, but we would like to limit these, as restricting access for people with small children, or teenagers who want to explore identity and culture topics is something we’d like to do as little as possible.

We are also looking for people who are interested in being part of panels or moderators for roundtables and panels on a variety of topics relating to identities and cultures - if you would like to do this, please get in touch at identity-culture@nineworlds.co.uk and let us know your areas of interest.

Access

A small number of free day passes are available for content creators who wouldn't otherwise be able to access Nine Worlds – these are limited, and priority will go to marginalised people whose voices aren't often prioritised in geek spaces. If you already hold a ticket for Nine Worlds, it would be really helpful to let us know when you contact us so we know who will definitely be attending.

If you have any access needs that may affect your experience leading a session, please let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them.

Please note: we will not be accepting any content that excludes or denigrates trans women (this is largely a reference to Trans Exclusionary 'Radical Feminism' and applies across all of our content), or any content that denigrates sex workers of any gender.

As mentioned above, we are taking a ‘nothing about us without us’ approach to content – therefore we would not accept session proposals on an identity topic from people who don’t identify into the label in question.

A note on participation

We know that not everyone from a marginalised background necessarily wants to spend all of our time talking about that marginalised identity; sometimes we just want to talk about Star Wars or Steven Universe without being viewed as a spokesperson for everyone from our gender, race, ability and/or sexuality. We promise that if you don’t explicitly pitch content to Identity and Culture or express an interest in working with us we won’t seek you out to be in our sessions just because you are a person with a marginalised identity – i.e. if you are a woman and propose a talk on Star Trek: TNG, it won’t get sent to Identity and Culture just because you are a woman.