 Speculative Choreographies:
Bodies, Economies, and Movement in a World in Flux
California State University, Long Beach
October 23-25, 2026
Submissions closed Monday, February 16, 2026
Presenter notifications are expected to be sent out in April
Read the full submission guidelines and call for papers for more information.
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This conference explores how dance speculates—how it reflects, resists, and reimagines—the forces that shape our contemporary world. These forces include migration and memory as well as media, markets, and the social choreography of bodies across borders, platforms, and stages. The conference site rests on what was originally the Tongva village of Puvungna, meaning "gathering place," a site featured in the Tongva/Gabrieleno/Acjachemen peoples' creation stories and stories of emergence. With its indigenous populations, diverse diasporic communities, deep histories of resistance, and global entertainment industries, Los Angeles and the conference location offer fertile ground for rethinking how dance is entangled with questions of value, visibility, and survival.
In this post-truth moment, and in a region forged by spectacle, migration, media, labor, and ecological extremes, the 2026 DSA conference asks: How do bodies move through—with and against—systems of control, extraction, discipline, and erasure? What possibilities emerge when we imagine movement as an affirmative form of world-making?
Conference Co-Chairs: Colleen Dunagan (California State University, Long Beach), Arushi Singh (Chapman University), and Ariel Osterweis (California Institute of the Arts)
Sponsorship, Exhibits & Advertising
DSA offers a wide range of opportunities to build brand awareness, sell goods & services, and demonstrate your support for the field of dance studies. Our 2026 conference has drawn submissions from over 500 scholars and practitioners, representing a cross-section of the field of dance studies ranging from department chairs and other leaders to independent artists and current/prospective students.
Your support ensures that we can keep registration costs affordable, pay speakers equitably, and make the conference accessible.
Lodging for Speculative Choreographies
The official hotel for DSA's 2026 conference is located only 5 miles from the beach in a pleasant, suburban neighborhood with great convenience to Long Beach Airport and major freeways. Join us for the Opening Member Breakfast hosted at the hotel on Friday, October 23.
Long Beach Marriott
4700 Airport Plaza Drive Long Beach
California, USA, 90815
169.00 USD per night (rate available through September 29, 2026)
Conference Co-Chairs
Colleen T. Dunagan is Professor and Chair in the Department of Dance at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in dance studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside. Her monograph, Consuming Dance: Choreography and Advertising (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines dance in advertising and its production of affect and its role in advertising’s modelling of subjectivity. Dunagan’s current research examines dance in relationship to Susanne K. Langer’s aesthetic theory and aesthetic capitalism, as well as the role of dancerly embodiment in horror films. Her research on dance in media appears in several publications, including Dance in U.S. Popular Culture (2024), Dance Research Journal, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (2014), Movies Moves and Music (2016), and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (2015). Her creative work encompasses dancemaking on both stage and screen.
Arushi Singh is a dance scholar, writer, educator, and performer from New Delhi, now based in Los Angeles. Her award-winning research intervenes in global conversations on performance, institutional theory, and political economy by centering the choreographic practices and cultural infrastructures of contemporary South Asia.
Her work contributes original theoretical frameworks that reposition dance as a critical methodology for understanding governance, labor, and world-making. Her recent article in Didaskalia advances the concept of infrastructural intermediality, reframing contemporary Indian dance as a site where aesthetic production is inseparable from the economic logics, spatial architectures, and curatorial protocols shaping the region’s visual-arts infrastructures. By theorizing choreography as a mode of navigating—and strategically reconfiguring—these institutional terrains, she demonstrates how artists mobilize movement as both critique and proposition, generating new forms of kinesthetic, political, and intermedial thought.
Her other writing appears in South Asian Dance Intersections, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, Dance Chronicle, Race & Yoga, and Tilt Pause Shift: Dance Ecologies in India, with forthcoming essays in The Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive. Across these publications, she brings together archival research, ethnography, institutional analysis, and movement studies to expand understandings of how performance circulates within shifting global and regional economies.
At Chapman University, Singh teaches courses in dance history and theory that bridge embodied practice with critical inquiry. As Editor-in-Chief of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, she fosters editorial and curatorial practices that are porous, collaborative, and attuned to the evolving transdisciplinary and transcultural discourses shaping the field. She holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA.
 Ariel Osterweis (she/they) is a scholar-practitioner of dance and performance. Osterweis has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley and is on faculty at CalArts, teaching courses in Performance Studies and Critical Dance Studies. Their book, Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity, is published with Oxford University Press (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory Series, 2024), and current book projects include Prophylactic Aesthetics: Latex, Spandex, and Sexual Anxieties Performed (University of Michigan Press, Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series), Disavowing Virtuosity, Performing Aspiration: Dance and Performance Interviews (Routledge), and Prince Moves (Oxford). Osterweis has danced and performed professionally with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Mia Michaels R.A.W., Heidi Latsky, and Julie Tolentino. They were also a dramaturg for John Jasperse, Narcissister, and a.k. payne, and directed evening-length performances, Jérôme Bel and Talent Show at REDCAT. Upcoming projects include a performance lab called BODY SHOP and a collaboration with John Jasperse and Julie Mehretu. Osterweis is a queer, mixed-race, Korean-American parent of two teens and a tween.
Speculative Choreographies logo and design by Kat Ispache |
