Test Kitchen is an informal, interdisciplinary public forum for SFU graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty to share their work with others. To encourage the discussion of ideas-in-progress, Test Kitchen’s atmosphere is intentionally relaxed. Selected participants will gather at the Gibson Art Museum, rather than in a classroom or formal conference setting. Presenters will share the floor with colleagues from different disciplines, so conversation can rove across research areas, encouraging synergies between varied fields of inquiry. Each season, Test Kitchen’s sessions will be framed by an open-ended prompt offered by the Gibson’s curatorial team. Participants are selected from an Open Call for Proposals. Selected presentations should be maximum 15 minutes in length, but any format is encouraged. Test Kitchen begins January 2026 on select Wednesdays at midday in the Gibson’s Arya and Hamid Esghi Forum. Brown bag lunch is encouraged. The program is free and open to the public.
Test Kitchen 1: Edges
What, and where, are the edges in your research?
Proposals are invited from all disciplines and may consider questions of thresholds, borders or demarcations (whether temporal, material, conceptual, spatial, ideological, ecological, biological, psycho-social, geographical, or geo-political), or liminality. They may address inquiries into collectivity, transition, symbiosis, resistance, and more.
Submit your 200 word proposal online by November 14, 2025. Selected participants will be notified by November 30, 2025.