BRN Conference 2025: Bookselling as Resistance

Conference in Münster, Germany, combined with the annual meeting of the Bookselling Research Network (BRN).

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We are still accepting abstracts for the Bookselling as Resistance conference to be held at the University of Münster. The deadline for submission has been extended to September 29, 2024. 

We’ve had some questions about the early deadline; as indicated below, we are applying for funding and need an indication of participation to complete the application. We anticipate that there will be another call later, but we are grateful to delegates who are able to submit something for consideration now.

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Call for Papers

Abstracts are requested by September 15, 2024 (see below for how to submit)

Book historical work has been increasingly highlighting books – their publication, distribution and reception – in intersectional activist contexts, shining light on interconnections between community-building, politics and the book. In our conference, scheduled for September 2025 in Münster, Germany, we plan to hone in on bookselling as a practice and consider the ways in which resistance can be interpreted vis-à-vis bookselling and bookstores. 

As Kimberley Kinder has shown, bookstores – and booksellers – play a central role in social activism and for “activist placemaking” (Kinder 2021). In the wake of the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, independent bookstores received heightened media attention for offering readers and community members spaces to exchange ideas and organize, with the stores “taking on roles ranging from meeting place to political war room” (Bosman 2017). Adjacently, feminist bookstores experienced a resurgence after the 2016 US election (Kirch 2018). Doyle Highland has considered “how the material space of bookstores shapes social engagement […] and cultural values” (2023), and recent work by Dhingra (2024) and Srinivasan (forthcoming, 2025) puts pressure on these concepts from an Indian perspective. Internationally, independent bookselling per se has come to be understood as a mode of resistance against Amazon’s market dominance and destructive human and ecological (Caine 2021).  

Beyond these examples, our conference invites delegates to explore the theme of bookselling – past and present – as resistance. We encourage papers that take transcultural, transnational and intersectional approaches. 20-minute papers could engage with issues such as:

• Informal spaces of bookselling and alternative routes of circulation
• Bookstores as community/gathering space
• Mail-order book clubs or book subscription boxes
• Books on the bookshelf and activist organizational practice; curation; banned book displays
• Alternative bookstore business models (independent, volunteer-run, traveling, etc.) 
• Serving specific communities: bookselling for specific groups, communities, lifestyles; locations of bookselling
• Bookselling of pirated copies and resistance to copyright/market norms
• Booksellers, censorship, and legal battles

This is not an exhaustive list, and we welcome proposals for papers that engage the theme in creative ways.

We plan to apply for funding through the German Research Foundation, which would enable us to pay for delegates’ travel to Münster and accommodation during the conference. For this reason, abstracts are requested by September 15, 2024. Notification of preliminary acceptance and inclusion in the funding bid will be made by September 30, 2024. Please submit 400-word abstracts and short bios via the Indico platform: https://indico.uni-muenster.de/e/brn_2025. 

Works Cited and Bibliography

Bosman, Julie. “Bookstores Stoke Trump Resistance With Action, Not Just Words.” The New York Times, February 15, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/bookstores-stoke-trump-resistance-with-action-not-just-words.html.

Caine, Danny. How to Protect Bookstores and Why: The Present and Future of Bookselling. Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2023.

Caine, Danny. How to Resist Amazon & Why: The Fight for Local Economies, Data Privacy, Fair Labor, Independent Bookstores, and a People-Powered Future. Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2021.

Farrell, Greg.On the Books: A Graphic Tale of Working Woes at NYC’s Strand Bookstore. Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2014.

Garber, Jeremy. “Bookselling in the 21st Century: There Will Always Be Bookstores.” Literary Hub, November 9, 2016. https://lithub.com/bookselling-in-the-21st-century-there-will-always-be-bookstores/.

Hogan, Kristen. The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Kinder, Kimberley. The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Kirch, Claire. “Trump Presidency Reinvigorates Feminist Bookstores.” Publishers Weekly, March 09, 2018. Accessed July 24, 2024. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/76289-trump-presidency-reinvigorates-feminist-bookstores.html.

Noorda, Rachel, Corinna Norrick-Rühl, and Elizabeth Le Roux. “Exploring Transnational Dimensions of Activism in Contemporary Book Culture: Introduction.” Mémoires Du Livre 13, no. 2 (June 14, 2023): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.7202/1100559ar.

Thomas, June. A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture. London: Virago, 2024.