This Tuesday night, we're excited to talk with some organizers of this year's Local Queer Students of Color Conference, taking place on April 18 & 19.
"Historically, QSOCC has been a theory-focused conference. This year, we decided to do something a little different and break away from the traditional academic conference framework.
We recognized the heightened levels of exhaustion that can come with spending a weekend dedicated to theorizing one’s identities, right to live and take up space; we also know and believe that theory is useful as it can help us make sense of lived experiences and put a name to how we feel and move through the world. It is particularly these truths that inspired us to take the conference in a bit of a different direction this year.
Queering Art, is working with the intention of bringing our communities along with us as we examine how, collectively, queer and trans communities of color – marginalized by varying additional intersecting identities – experience and interact with art."
Among us will be several student organizers of the conference, along with:
Tessara Dudley is the Queeries Program Coordinator in the PSU Queer Resource Center, a freelance writer, and a poet. A fat, Black, queer, disabled femme, Tessara is committed to speaking truth and boosting the voices of marginalized communities.
Samantha Taylor is the Queer Students of Color Coordinator at Portland State University's Queer Resource Center, where she is also a full time student. Samantha is a Black queer scholar, writer, artist, organizer, and agitator.
We also look forward to hearing from one of QSOCC's keynote speakers, Fabian Romero.
Later in the hour, we'll talk with Jason Bray and Michaela McCormick of Queer Dharma.
"Queer Dharma is a group for LGBTQ practitioners to study and practice meditation and Dharma and to discuss personal experiences. The group serves to send a message to new-comers that they are welcome in our tradition and to explore (perhaps in ways that may be unintentionally overlooked or excluded in our regular programming) how we as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans and gender queer individuals can incorporate the teachings in our everyday lives and in our various social circles."
- KBOO