Introduction
Honoring the essential role of humanities in higher education, UC Merced’s 2026 Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Conference (IH CON) foregrounds the critical necessity of resistance and resilience during a time marked by political turbulence, systemic violence, and social fragmentation. Building on the importance of collective power, this year’s theme, “Waves of Resistance: Collective Power in Changing Times,” highlights community-centered scholarship through the interconnectedness of shared struggles, creativity, and transformations. Participants are invited to engage and reflect on the practice of solidarity across disciplines, identities, and social movements as a means of fostering innovative forms of knowledge production, healing, and hope. The conference aims to cultivate spaces of critical dialogue and collective action that challenge systems of oppression while envisioning equitable and sustainable approaches to their scholarly work. IH CON seeks to sustain and reinforce the humanities as a vital site for imagining and enacting social change and solidarity.
IH CON serves as a space to collectively build, reflect, and reckon with the ongoing and historical forms of oppression that shape our communities and institutions. This call for proposals should read as an invitation for critical inquiries that reimagine systems of power, including but not limited to:
- Decolonial thought,
- Queer and trans belonging,
- Immigrant and refugee narratives, and
- Feminist and Indigenous epistemologies.
In encouraging scholars, artists, and community members alike to engage in meaningful dialogue and scholarly work, there is hope in disrupting dominant narratives and generating liberatory visions for our collective futures. Through paper-presenting panels, posters, screenings and performances, and collaborative workshops, IH CON seeks to nurture solidarity in an environment where knowledge creation is not simply a scholarly pursuit but rather an act of resistance, restoration, and transformation. In centering intellectual growth and communal care, IH CON envisions itself as a living practice of collective empowerment and radical hope.
Panels, workshops, and special focus presentations will be 50-minutes sessions; posters will be displayed all day. For more information, please find details in the submission section. The deadline to submit proposals is Sunday, January 11, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. PST. No exceptions unless otherwise stated.
Overview
University of California, Merced, is hosting our 11th Annual Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Conference on April 24-25, 2026. This conference is open to students, staff, faculty, and community of the UC, CSU, and CCC systems with the intent to bring together a large community of students to share and present their research, showcasing student's work in various forms of presentation.
The Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Group (IHGG) is an innovative, humanistic program that applies analytical and theoretical approaches to the study of societies and cultures in relation to power and difference through social practices and cultural expressions across time and space. Areas of focus include Anthropology, Art History, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), Ethnomusicology, History, Linguistics, Literature, and Writing Studies. For a comprehensive list of our School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, please visit https://ssha.ucmerced.edu/.
For any questions or inquiries you may have, please contact the committee at IHGradConference@ucmerced.edu.