TUNI Luottamuksellinen - Confidential (3Y) Hi all, I wanted to make you aware of the upcoming deadline to submit a paper to the European Geographies of Sexualities Conference, which will be held at the end of August in Maribor, Slovenia. Deadline: 16 March! Theme: Discussing from Queer Peripheries: (Un)Desiring the Centre If you research LGBTQ+ spaces, places or located communities, this may be of interest to you. The deadline for organised panels has passed, but if colleagues wanted to propose a Nordic specific panel, consider reaching out to the organisers (I am not an organiser, just an enthusiastic participant). Call for Papers is below and the conference website is here: EGS Conference 2026<https://sites.google.com/view/egsconference2026/home> Best wishes, Joe "Critical human geography, queer geography, and other related social sciences and humanities have been experiencing a peripheral turn. However, a plethora of social relations, including those related to sexuality and gender, are still discussed from global metropolitan (queer) centres. Processes such as the gentrification of queer neighbourhoods, queer artistic production, memorialisation, cruising, and queer mobilities are often associated with Toronto, New York, Copenhagen, and other big cities, despite the fact that most of us live, work, love, consume, and produce in ordinary and small cities, towns, and villages. These are queer, too. Increasingly, queer peripheries are finding their way into edited collections, special issues, and independent journal articles. However, they are still mainly taught and discussed from metropolitan centres, risking the fetishisation of the periphery as a text that can be safely consumed from the centre, maintaining a cognitive, emotional, and sensory distance from the material spaces of the peripheries. Conferences are one such occasion where we can get closer to the materialities of the places that host them. Conferences are spaces of temporary disciplinary centre-making. New papers are discussed, new special issues planned, new contracts formed, and friendships and relationships made. At the conference in Maribor, we ask what happens when we not only empiricise and theorise, but also discuss and academically do queer periphery from the periphery itself. Are we, by organising this conference in a city (or town?) with fewer than 100,000 people and no official gay or lesbian bar, placing it at the centre of queer geographies? We invite contributions on, from, and about metropolitan centres and peripheries, as well as broader geographies of sexualities, to think broadly about what happens when academic work (which does not have to be about the periphery) is placed in the materiality of the queer periphery. What kind of potential does the text gain in the spatio-temporalities of the conference?" Submit here: EGS Conference 2026 - Submissions<https://sites.google.com/view/egsconference2026/submissions&… Joe Jukes (they/them) Postdoctoral Research Fellow Project: Picture Me: presenting queer visual history @joejukes.bsky.social<https://bsky.app/profile/joejukes.bsky.social> Read more about my research here.<https://researchportal.tuni.fi/en/persons/joseph-jukes/#:~:text=I%20joined%20Tampere%20University%20in,research%20into%20gender%20and%20sexuality.> [cid:40e1cfd4-07e5-4c7d-bfcd-f108d88e4d11] [cid:b9577e8f-95da-467b-90b9-b2e1b9d13e03] Recent publications: Jukes, J. (2025) LGBTQ+ friendship and spatial commitments: Queer socialities in the making of a new rural. In Bain, AL., Podmore, JA. and Arun-Pina, C. (Eds.) Queer Geographies: Key Debates and Contending Perspectives. Access here<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398152089_LGBTQ_friendship…. Garcia Lopez, M., Brownhill, S., Gaggiotti, M. and Jukes, J. (2025) The Process (2023): Non-Professional Film Performance and Representing Embodied Trauma through Documentary. Open Screens, 7(3): pp. 1–17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/os.18695