Call for Papers

Since prehistoric humans used pigments to stencil their hands on cave walls, hands have been a metonym for humanity. The imagery and symbolism of hands are a constant in visual and material culture. Hands appear in countless linguistic etymologies. Across history, the hand has variously been used to idolise heroes, typify Otherness, and connect the material world with the supernatural. In the present, we store data behind fingerprint security, and communicate through touch screens, typing and swiping to initiate connection. In an era of deceptive artificial intelligence, hands remain challenging for AI to recreate, gesturing to human talent and authenticity.

We invite abstracts for papers of 15-20 minutes, for presentation at our 2-day interdisciplinary conference, part of The Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, and Identity, Past and Present, supported by UKRI.

In recognition of the hand’s ability to reach across boundaries and make connections, we welcome presentations from multi- and interdisciplinary research fields, including Critical Studies, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and STEM. We encourage proposals from artists, makers and performers alongside more traditional academic research papers.

Potential research themes related to the hand include, but are not limited to:

Care: healing, medicine, surgery, philanthropy, justice, carceral systems, psychology, wellbeing.

Communication: gesture, performance, sign language, tactile communication, literary and visual representations.

Connection: life and death, remembrance, symbolic hands, supernatural hands.

Embodiment: touch, hapticity, identity, intimacy, selfhood, play.

Work: class, crafting, making, creative practice, labour, feminism, race and anti-racism, LBGTQ+ activism, skilled work under AI.

Please send abstracts up to 300 words, and biographies up to 100 words to victorianhand@fashion.arts.ac.uk.

Deadline:  22 September 2025