The 30th Annual Work in Progress Conference
Thursday 19 November - Friday 20 November 2026
Atrium, UQ Brisbane City
2026 Organising Committee: Matthew Bapty, Oluwapelumi Oginni, Oliver Gough
Please email any enquiries to the committee scawip2026@gmail.com
Every generation inherits a world. Every generation leaves one behind. Worlds are written into being through stories and histories, through creation, critique and expression. They emerge through acts of remembering and imagining, through representation and interpretation, and through the relationships between people, places, technologies, cultures, and environments. Worlds are inherited, negotiated, contested, and reimagined. They are formed as much through everyday practices of meaning-making as through moments of disruption, discovery, and invention
For thirty years, the Work in Progress Conference has been a place where emerging researchers have gathered to share the worlds they are making: worlds of knowledge, critique, creativity, possibility, and change. As we celebrate the conference’s 30th anniversary, we invite researchers to consider the many ways they inherit, construct, challenge, and transform worlds. We particularly call for reflection on questions including the following:
What worlds does your research project reveal? Which worlds does it question? What assumptions does it unsettle? What futures does it imagine? And how might your scholarship, creative practice, and critical inquiry help navigate a time marked by diverse transformation, environmental uncertainty, shifting identities, evolving media landscapes and changing ways of knowing?
Conference Organising Team
Oluwapelumi (Pelumi) Oginni is a PhD candidate in Media and Communication at UQ’s School of Communication and Arts. Her research examines news media coverage of conflict in Africa, with a focus on conflict communication and peace journalism. Beyond her doctoral research, Pelumi’s work spans media and journalism innovation, artificial intelligence, including AI literacy, AI governance and the implications of emerging technologies for journalism. She also teaches journalism and communication within the school and has presented her research at national and international conferences.
Oliver Gough is a PhD candidate and playwright based at The University of Queensland. Oliver's PhD explores a new wave of contemporary Australian eco-performance, and previous research into theatre, ecology and absurdism has been published by Australasian Drama Studies and ABC Religion and Ethics. Oliver's plays have been independently produced, and is currently under commission by Playlab Theatre.
Matt Bapty is a PhD candidate at The University of Queensland, researching the genesis and development of Queer drama in Australia throughout the twentieth century. He is also a writer and producer with the Meanjin/Brisbane collective Flaming Carnations, and has had work performed at La Boite, QPAC, Brisbane Fringe and Anywhere Festival. He has been published in Australasian Drama Studies, Performance Paradigm, Jacaranda and by Playlab.
Now Open
We welcome research that questions established assumptions, revisits overlooked histories, explores contemporary realities, experiments with new forms of knowledge and communication while imagining worlds yet to come. This theme invites engagement with the processes through which worlds come into being and the forces that shape them.
After thirty years of research in progress, the conversation continues. What worlds are you making?
We invite abstracts in both academic and creative formats across all areas of interdisciplinary Communication and Arts research. Paper presentations should not exceed 15 minutes duration. Please send a 250-word abstract, accompanied by a short bio, to scawip2026@gmail.com by 5pm, Friday 2 October 2026.
We also invite submissions for the Dr John McCulloch Memorial Prize - $1000 prize for the most outstanding paper delivered by a UQ School of Communication and Arts HDR student.
Established in 2011 and maintained by an annual gift from Mr Gary Portley in memory of Dr John McCulloch OAM (1938-2010). John was a senior parliamentary research officer at the State Parliamentary Library (1984-1995) with a special interest in the advancement of gender equity. John had a long connection to The University of Queensland: roles included activity as a student, as a tutor, and as an elected Sub-Dean of the Arts Faculty. This prize was formalized by Senate in 2015.
Eligibility
Students who:
- are undertaking a higher degree by research program in the School of Communication and Arts, UQ;
- have submitted their paper per the below guidelines by the closing time/date of Thursday 29 October 2026, by 5pm.
- have then had their abstract accepted by the 2025 WiP committee to present at the conference, and;
- have not previously been awarded the Prize.
Basis for award
Most outstanding applicant based on:
- A written and fully referenced paper of no more than 2,000 words (excluding bibliography).
- The paper must be presented at the conference for the student to be eligible for the Prize.
- Quality of scholarship and written expression and relevance to the annual conference theme.
Nature of prize
$1000
Submission guidelines
Entry is free. The closing time and date is 5pm, 29 October 2026 and your 2000-word paper per the above guidelines should be emailed to: scawip2026@gmail.com
The draft speaker schedule will be sent out in October, after the CFP closes. Registration will open closer to the date, including payment of conference fees.
Enquiries can be directed to the 2026 WiP Committee: scawip2026@gmail.com
We look forward to receiving your submission!
Register now
Enquiries can be directed to the 2026 WiP Committee: scawip2026@gmail.com
The Trouble with Warnings and the Worlds They Make
“All a poet can do today is warn,” wrote Wilfred Owen. But what can a warning actually do? Warnings ask us to imagine dangers that have not yet materialised and act to prevent futures that may never arrive. They depend on the worlds in which they are made and received: the present in which the future is not yet settled, of shared languages, assumptions about risk, and understandings of harm. What happens when those conditions change, or when a warning reaches an audience its maker could never have imagined?
Beginning with my research into nuclear semiotics and the trouble of communicating the dangers of nuclear waste across deep time, this keynote explores warnings as acts of world-making. Moving between literary representations of danger and the systems through which societies anticipate and manage risk, I consider how warnings—from the Atomic Priesthood to cli-fi, trigger warnings to Okjökull—construct possible futures and attempt (and fail) to shape the conditions of their own reception.
Reflecting on thirty years of the Work in Progress conference, I ask what it means to make creative and scholarly work in times of uncertainty. How do we act with care and responsibility when we cannot determine what our work will become? And what does it mean to inherit intellectual and creative histories while making work that speaks towards futures we cannot yet imagine?
Shastra Deo
Shastra Deo is an award-winning writer, researcher, and researcher developer. Her debut poetry collection, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her second collection, The Exclusion Zone (UQP 2023), formed part of her Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing at The University of Queensland, which received a Dean’s Award for Outstanding HDR Thesis. Her creative practice research explores the relationship between language, temporality, and survival, with particular interests in ecological crisis and the poetics of warning.
Shastra's creative and scholarly work has been featured in Poetry Foundation, Australian Book Review, and Continuum, among others. She co-edited Best of Australian Poems 2024 with Kate Lilley, bringing together a snapshot of exceptional Australian poetry, and co-edited the TEXT Journal special issue “Digital Realism” with A/Prof David Thomas Henry Wright and Dr Chris Arnold, examining how digital technologies, literature, and games are reshaping contemporary writing and reading. In 2025, ABC Radio National's Future Tense described her as a “nuclear semiotics expert” in a feature on communicating the dangers of nuclear waste across deep time.
Shastra works at Queensland University of Technology leading industry engagement initiatives that connect higher degree research candidates with industry, government, and community organisations.