Call for Proposals
Critical Edge(s)
Rethinking Centrality: Exploring Borders, Margins & Peripheries
Third Meeting of International Researchers
15-16 June 2026 – Amphi MR002 -Université Paris 8
The International Researchers’ Day, an annual event aimed at fostering exchange, integration, and collaboration among international researchers from Paris 8 and the ERUA alliance, invites you to submit proposals. Created in 2023, this interdisciplinary event provides a space for scientific dialogue and networking with the wider ERUA research community. Participants will also discover support services for their academic careers, including the ERUA Research Support Network, which will present various national and European research funding opportunities for early-career researchers.
Following our European Alliance’s collective reflection, the theme of this new edition is Critical Edge(s), inviting participants to consider borders, margins, peripheries as sites of institutional construction, subjectivization, political experience, and inventive capacity. The notion of edge(s) designates a type of ‘non space’, an interstitial space for social, geographical, cultural, and intellectual margins, where contact with exteriority, alterity, and the material realities of peripheries collide to produce new perspectives. Thinking on and from the edge(s) means inhabiting a space that is both vulnerable and generative: a place where crises often manifest first, yet where creative practices, critical thought, and new forms of collective organization continually emerge.
In that spirit, we welcome proposals related to one or more of the following themes:
1 – Edge(s) and Borders: an exploration of the geographical and symbolic dimensions of borders, focusing on migration and exile, and the role of boundary universities in defending academic freedom.
2 – Edge(s) and Democracy: an opportunity to consider the margins as spaces for the formation of political and subjective identities, and for democratic resistance, or to consider the roles of borders in fostering authoritarianism and the erosion of social and civil rights.
3 – Edge(s) & Critical Thinking: in a context shaped by attacks on academic freedom and disciplines considered ‘marginal’ (such as Critical Theory, Gender Studies, and the Humanities in general), this axis will examine the precarious, and yet fundamental position of critical thinking within academia.
4 – Edge(s) and Creative/Experimental Innovation: the Edge(s) invite(s) creative and experimental practices shaped by proximity to geographical, social, cultural or technological borders.
Call for proposals:
- Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract of approximately 300 words and a brief biography to the following address: juan-pablo.yanez@univ-paris8.fr & iffet-piraye.yuce@univ-paris8.fr
- The deadline for submitting proposals is April 1, 2026, at midnight CET and the selection results will be communicated to authors on April 14, 2026
- If you are an ERUA researcher and would like to attend, please contact your local ERUA mobility agent at your university and the Paris 8 ERUA referent for this event: iffet-piraye.yuce@univ-paris8.fr and juan-pablo.yanez@univ-paris8.fr
- Hybrid event, with in-person attendance prioritized for selected presenters.
