PLENARY SESSIONS

Confirmed plenary sessions:

• Keynote: Rania Jawad
  Chair, Department of English Language, Birzeit University, Palestine
• Keynote: Sophie Lewis
  Author of Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen and Girlbosses Against Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family
• Roundtable: Queer Lives in Motion
  LGBTIQ+ Activism, Exile, and Solidarity Across Borders
• Film screening: TITE Film Festival:Righting Wrongs
  Unfairness, Mistreatment and Catharsis in New Trans Cinema

Keynote

SOPHIE LEWIS

Sophie Lewis is an independent feminist scholar living in Philadelphia, who hails originally from the UK, France, and Germany. Before becoming a full-time freelance writer, Dr. Lewis studied literature, politics, and the environmental humanities, earning her four degrees at the universities of Oxford, Manchester, and the New School for Social Research in New York.

Today, she is a recognized theorist of care communization and queer utopias whose work has been translated into many languages. Her essays appear everywhere from the London Review of Books to n+1, and anyone is welcome to enroll in her short philosophy courses, taught online at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Sophie is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019), Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022), Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Girlbosses and Policewomen Against Liberation (2025), and the essay collection Femmephilia (Haymarket, June 2026). Her next book, The Liberation of Children, is forthcoming from Penguin (2027).

You can follow or support Sophie’s writing at: patreon.com/reproutopia or lasophielle.org

Plenary Roundtable

QUEER LIVES IN MOTION: LGBTIQ+ Activism, Exile, and Solidarity Across Borders

This plenary roundtable brings together LGBTIQ+ activists from different regions who are currently living in various EU countries as a result of migration, displacement, or exile. Drawing on diverse lived experiences, the discussion will examine the specific challenges that queer activists face when navigating forced or chosen mobility, including legal insecurity, social isolation, loss of political space, and the reconfiguration of activism in new contexts.

Beyond focusing on activism alone, the roundtable will reflect on broader forms of queer solidarity that emerge in exile, including care, community-building, cultural work, and informal networks of mutual support. It will explore how experiences of migration reshape political engagement, identities, and relationships, and how solidarity can extend beyond formal advocacy structures to sustain lives and movements over time.

As a plenary session, the roundtable aims to centre voices that are often marginalised in policy, academic, and institutional debates, offering critical reflections on exile not only as a condition of vulnerability, but also as a space of agency, resilience, and collective imagination.

Moderator: Evgeny Shtorn
Speakers: To be announced

Film screening

RIGHTING WRONGS: Unfairness, Mistreatment and Catharsis in New Trans Cinema

TITE (Trans Image/Trans Experience) Film Festival, Ireland’s festival of trans and non-binary cinema, brings a wide variety of cutting edge Irish and international trans film to the heart of Dublin. TITE’s festival programme celebrates trans creativity, energy, and life, while also making space for thorny and uncomfortable films which speak to the hardships and complexities of trans life.

Reflecting on the conference theme Thinking Gender Justice, this screening curated by TITE director James Hudson collects five films from the TITE 2025 and 2026 festival programmes, centering trans people who feel they’ve been ignored, wronged or harmed, and the complicated ways they choose to escape or transform their traumas.

This screening will be followed by a panel discussion with filmmakers Liadán Roche and Hiram Harrington, moderated by TITE Film Festival director James Hudson.

Booking is free but required due to venue capacity. Book your ticket here