Call for Papers /// Community Spatialities, Activism and Politics of Memory, 14–15 August 2026, MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises, Montréal, Canada

Community Spatialities, Activism and Politics of Memory: Historicizing and Spatializing HIV/AIDS and the Struggle of Marginalized Groups

14–15 August 2026

MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises, Montréal, Canada

Organized by Olivier Vallerand and Anthony Raynal, Université de Montréal

in partnership with the Archives gaies du Québec

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is a structuring event of late modernity, at the intersection of public health policies, regimes of media visibility, and the reconfiguration of sexual subjectivities. It produced an “epidemic of meaning” (Treichler, 1987), a discursive field saturated with competing interpretations, metaphors, and hegemonic narratives. Yet, today, the epidemic maintains an ambivalent relationship with memory: simultaneously present and threatened with erasure, institutionalized but politically neutralized (Castiglia and Reed, 2011). Far from being a mere object of medical history, HIV/AIDS has constituted a major theoretical laboratory for queer studies. Douglas Crimp (2002), Leo Bersani (2009), and Simon Watney (1987) have articulated a critique of representation, an analysis of regimes of respectability, and a denunciation of the moralizing mechanisms framing homosexual sexuality. The epidemic has thus contributed to reformulating the relationships between sexuality, visibility and power, by revealing the biopolitical logics (Foucault, 1972) governing the differential management of lives.

This symposium shifts these debates toward a deeper reflection on the spatial dimensions of the epidemic and its memories. While biopolitics regulates bodies, it is always embedded in concrete spatialities: hospitals, hospices, communal housing, but also bars, saunas, parks, streets, and private apartments. In this sense, space is not simply a framework, but an active agent of subjectivation and resistance (Bérubé 2003 [1984]; Urbach 1993; Ricco 1994, 2002; Betsky 1997; Tattelman 1997; Kotsioris 2020). In this sense, and particularly in the case of an epidemic crisis, urban space can be considered a social product, traversed by power relations and struggles for appropriation (Soja, 2010). Queer geographies have shown how sexual minorities have invested in and resignified urban fragments, transforming them into territories of sociability, desire, and solidarity. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has profoundly reconfigured these spatialities: some places have become spaces for care or mobilization, others sites of mourning, and still others have disappeared under the combined effect of mass mortality and gentrification (Schulman, 2012).

In Montreal as elsewhere, the transformations of the urban fabric and the institutionalization of sites commemorating the epidemic raise questions about the tension between community memory and heritage preservation. How can we conceive of the institutional recognition of these places without erasing their conflictual dimension? How can we prevent the museification of struggles from contributing to their depoliticization? Ann Cvetkovich’s work (2003) on “archives of feelings” invites us to consider oral history and community archives as spaces where trauma, intimacy, and collective memory intersect. Queer archives, far from being simple documentary repositories, constitute a political practice, an act of survival in the face of erasure. The Archives gaies du Québec, like other community initiatives, participate in this production of a counter-history that challenges traditional epistemological hierarchies (Marshall, Murphy, and Tortorici, 2014). However, the increased visibility given to the struggles of LGBTQ communities sometimes tends to make invisible the experience of the epidemic lived by other marginalized groups.

This symposium aims to examine the material, epistemological, and curatorial conditions of this transmission, inviting, among other things, dialogue with the struggles of marginalized groups in contexts other than the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Discussing the memories and histories of HIV/AIDS involves navigating tensions between sensationalism and discretion, between personal narrative and structural analysis, between institutionalization and radicalism. How can we stage the experience of mourning without perpetuating the compassionate frameworks that have historically shaped media representations of the epidemic? How can we make visible the intersectional dimensions—racial, gendered, migratory, class-based—often marginalized in dominant narratives? Finally, at a time when conservative and nationalist offensives are challenging the rights of marginalized groups, including LGBTQIA+ people and migrants, and when recent health crises (notably COVID-19) are reactivating epidemic imaginaries, revisiting the spatialities of HIV/AIDS allows us to open up a broader reflection on the political management of crises, the unequal distribution of vulnerability and contemporary forms of spatial justice.

This bilingual symposium (French and English), organized in conjunction with an exhibition on the work of ACT UP Montreal presented by the Archives gaies du Québec at the MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises, concludes a series of exhibitions dedicated to the links between the HIV/AIDS crisis, queer spatialities, and community memory. In line with the MEM's mission and our objectives of reflecting on the duty of remembrance, the symposium will be open to the general public. In this context, we invite proposals for presentations addressing both historical and contemporary analysis of the spatialization of struggles related to HIV/AIDS and other marginalized groups, as well as the archiving and exhibition of these struggles, particularly around the following themes:

·         Social production of space and queer geographies

·         Activist appropriations of urban space

·         Gentrification, erasure, and heritage

·         Critical cartographies of vanished places

·         Community archives and minority epistemologies

·         Community archives as practices of resistance

·         Oral history, affect, and intergenerational transmission

·         Ethical and political stakes of digitization

·         Critical museology and the performativity of exhibition

·         Exhibiting intimacy and trauma

·         Aesthetics of testimony and the politics of the gaze

·         Collaboration between institutions and communities

·         Intersectionality and differential memories

·         Invisibilization of racialized queer people

·         Gender, sex work, drug addiction, and memory hierarchies

Submission guidelines

We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations in French or English. Proposals (maximum 300 words) accompanied by a short biographical note (100 words) must be submitted before April 17, 2026 to anthony.raynal@umontreal.ca and olivier.vallerand@umontreal.ca.

Partial travel expenses will be reimbursed.

This symposium is organized with the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle and the MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises.

Ce symposium est organisé grâce au soutien financier du Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada, du Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle et du MEM – Centre des mémoires montréalaises.

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