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Sub-theme 60: Resistance Through Play: Decolonial and Queer Disruptions of Organizational Rules

Convenors:
Elo L.K. Reiss
University of St. Gallen & WU Vienna, Switzerland & Austria
Ebru Calin
University of Liverpool Management School, UK
Chris Steyaert
University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

This sub-theme aims to surface play as a site of decolonial critique, queer resilience, and transformative possibility in the study of organizing. Our sub-theme begins from a refusal to treat play as something to be managed, optimized, or commodified (Steyaert, 2018), and instead foregrounds play as a site of decolonial revolt and queer disruption, where bodies, desires, and communities invent ways of organizing otherwise. For decolonial and queer scholars, play can be found in radical modes of resistance, creativity, and world-making. From decolonial perspectives, play can challenge the colonial capture of time, space, and subjectivity, recovering playful practices as modes of healing, refusal, and world-making beyond capitalist and Eurocentric logics. From queer perspectives, play can subvert heteronormativity, bend rules, create resilience, and provoke transgression. We invite contributions that explore how play operates at the intersections of colonial legacies, queer agency, and organizational life.

We specifically invite work that foregrounds practices of everyday decolonialities and queering. This includes small, subtle, and relational practices through which people unsettle dominant organizational norms in daily life. Drawing on scholars like Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh (2018), and Françoise Vergès (2020, 2022), everyday decoloniality highlights how refusals, interruptions, humor, ritual, mutual care, and embodied forms of relationality can destabilize managerial logics that rely on hierarchy, competition, and extractive time regimes. Grounded in queer everyday lived realities, queering comprises queer ways of thinking and doing through unboundedness, spillage, fluidity, multiplicity, and processes of contingent, nonlinear becoming, as well as the relations of power and regulation that seek their stability or closure (March, 2021). Understanding play as an everyday decolonial and queer method thus allows us to make visible the minor, often unrecognized gestures through which people carve out spaces of autonomy, solidarity, and world-making inside and beyond organizations (Janssens & Steyaert, 2025).

The question of “who gets to play” cannot be separated from racialized, classed, gendered, sexualized, and geopolitical histories of organization. Western, heteronormative organizational life has long privileged bodies that are white, middle-class, able-bodied, cis, and institutionally legible. Scholars of decolonial feminism, including María Lugones (2010) and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí (1997), show that colonial modernity made certain bodies appear naturally fitted for rule-following, leadership, and competitive play, while others were positioned as disorderly or incompatible with the “rules of the game.” By situating play within these embodied politics, we can ask: whose play is celebrated, whose is pathologized, and whose is erased? This opens a crucial analytical space for considering how queerness, disability, Indigeneity, and racialized embodiment reconfigure organizational expectations of comportment, productivity, and professionalism.

Within this, we also see the importance of what might be understood as the “queer art” of decolonizing play, meaning forms of play that problematize normative understandings of “success,” disrupt organizational discipline, and invite alternative ways of relating, imagining, and being together. Queer decolonial play, in this sense, aligns with our effort to unsettle the emotional, temporal, and relational order inherited from colonial-capitalist logics, opening possibilities for forms of belonging and world-making that exceed institutional rule-following. Historically, Benjamin Shepard (2010, 2011) has shown how queer performance and play were crucial during the AIDS era for how social movements could resist political neglect and denial. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of challenging the colonial and capitalist fixation on winning, ranking, measuring, and competitive individuation. As Jack Halberstam (2011) argues in “The queer art of failure,” alternative forms of being together open space for creativity beyond success/failure binaries. Likewise, Indigenous scholars such as Kim TallBear (2015; see TallBear & Willey, 2019) show that relationality, reciprocity, and collective flourishing resist the game logics of accumulation and domination. In this spirit, we welcome contributions that rethink play not as a competition to be won but as a collective practice of relation and survival, one that unsettles the very idea of organizational “rules” as fixed, universal, heteronormative, or Western by default.

Our sub-theme thus welcomes work that asks:

  • How do decolonial and queer-feminist imaginaries reinstate play as an epistemic tool against hegemonic orderings?

  • How do heteronormative and colonial histories, including settler colonialism and empire, shape who is permitted to play, what counts as play, and how play is policed or commodified in organizations?

  • How can reinvigorations of queer-feminist and decolonial approaches to organization explore the possibilities and constraints of queer and decolonial lives?

  • How do Indigenous, racialized, and queer communities use play to subvert norms, transgress institutional boundaries, and generate alternative modes of belonging?

  • How can decolonial and queer ways of playing intertwine from intersectional perspectives, especially those that are imbued with queer-feminist and anti-imperialist sensitivities?

  • How do queer-feminist and decolonial ways of knowing extend heteronormative and Western perspectives (e.g., indigenous knowledge, trans and two-spirited realities)?

  • How does play allow us to rethink practices of decolonial and queer collective liberation (e.g., land sovereignty, abolition, alternative forms of reproduction/family-making, collective housing/economies/decision-making)?

  • How can activist and art-based work on queer and decolonial play invite and inspire practices and interventions for transforming management and organization research and education?

Empirical, theoretical, methodological, and artistic engagements are all encouraged, whether in sites of work, social relations, educational institutions, social movements, digital worlds, public culture, everyday life, or other forms of organizing. With a broad variety of contributions that highlight play from diverse decolonial and queer perspectives, we seek to amplify the generative force and potential of play to fracture organizational common sense. To facilitate wide-ranging discussions at the crossroads of decolonial queer play and organizing, we especially encourage activist and artistic formats. Please state in your submission your preferred method of presentation should your contribution be accepted for presentation.


References
  • Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press.
  • Janssens, M., & Steyaert, C. (2025). On practicing diversity: Organizational worldmaking through exploration, experimentation and engagement. Bristol University Press.
  • Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759.
  • March, L. (2021). Queer and trans* geographies of liminality: A literature review. Progress in Human Geography, 45(3), 455–471.
  • Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press.
  • Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of Western gender discourses. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Shepard, B. (2010). Queer political performance and protest. Routledge.
  • Shepard, B. (2011). Play, creativity, and social movements: If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution. Routledge.
  • Steyaert, C. (2018). Queer. In T. Beyes & J. Metelmann (Eds.), The creativity complex: A companion to contemporary culture (pp. 212–216). Transcript.
  • TallBear, K. (2015). An Indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), 230–235.
  • TallBear, K., & Willey, A. (2019). Critical relationality: Queer, Indigenous, and multispecies belonging beyond settler sex & nature. Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 10(1), 5–15.
  • Vergès, F. (2020). The wombs of women: Race, capital, feminism. Duke University Press.
  • Vergès, F. (2022). A feminist theory of violence: A decolonial perspective. Pluto Press.


Elo L.K. Reiss is a trans non-binary, queer-feminist postdoctoral researcher at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland and WU Vienna, Austria. Elo’s research revolves around questions of how social inequalities unfold in working lives and organizational settings. In their most recent projects, Elo investigates phenomena related to feminist organizing, queer activism, embodied vulnerability, and collective forms of resistance. Their work has been published o.a. in 'Organization', 'Human Resource Management Review', 'Culture and Organization', and 'Gender, Work & Organization'. Elo serves on the Editorial Board of the 'Feminism and Organization' journal and is co-chair of the Queer Feminist Research Network alongside their colleagues Ebru Calin and Chris Steyaert. Elo also co-leads the EGOS Feminist Network during the term 2025-2028.
Ebru Calin is a Muslim queer doctoral researcher in Management and Organisation Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School. Her research examines organisational behaviour and intersectional organisational inequalities through a decolonial, queer, and feminist lens, with particular attention to how queer forms of belonging, embodiment, and marginality are produced within organisational settings. Drawing on new feminist materialism, Ebru’s current work explores how memory, embodiment, and queer maternal bodywork shape experiences of organisational life. She employs creative and reflexive methodologies, including artefact creation, poetry, and autoethnographic practice, to interrogate how organisational norms are materially and affectively negotiated, disrupted and transformed. Ebru has co-authored book chapters on queer research methodologies and queer employee voices, contributing to critical methodological debates within organisation studies. She serves on the Editorial Board of the "Journal of Management Studies" and is the co-chair of the Queer Feminist Research Network alongside her colleagues Elo Reiss and Chris Steyaert.
Chris Steyaert is professor of organizational psychology at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. Chris’ current interests concern creativity, multiplicity (diversity) and reflexivity in teams, organizations, and cities, drawing upon queer-feminist, processual and practice-based theoretical approaches. His empirical work on diversity, inclusion and queer becoming is situated in the creative industries and referring to artists such as Derek Jarman, Michael Cunningham, and Marguerite Yourcenar. He has published o.a. in the 'Academy of Management Review', 'Journal of Management Studies', 'Gender, Work & Organization', 'Organization' and 'Organization Studies'. Chris enjoys co-chairing the Queer Feminist Research Network together with Elo Reiss and Ebru Calin.