Filtering by: Free Conference
Liberatory Practices for Worlds in Crisis
Mar
22
to Mar 23

Liberatory Practices for Worlds in Crisis

This conference invites graduate student scholars, activists, and practitioners to examine what it means and has meant to survive in a world in crisis. What do we mean by crisis? How do historical experiences of crisis inform our understanding of present crises? What is the meaning and purpose of “liberatory practices” in the historical and contemporary world? How do Indigenous, feminist, queer, trans, disability or other lenses offer alternative understandings of crisis? What world is possible after a crisis? By exploring these and more questions, we hope to consider how new methods of study and care practices in our scholarship might allow us to imagine different worlds, develop resilience in a crisis-laden world, become “undisciplined” academically, and/or form more caring and collaborative communities. 

View Event →

Liberating Temporality and Spatiality
Mar
4
to Mar 5

Liberating Temporality and Spatiality

Time and space, while often seen as linear and confined concepts, can be stretched, altered, and reconfigured. We move through time and space in fits & bursts; some ways of moving and being are deemed normative or “good” and brought to the forefront, while others might be marginalized and cast aside. Here, we instead cast aside normative ideas of time and and space to focus on how liberating the concepts of temporality and spatiality can help us imagine and create new futures, communities, and ways of being. This conference seeks to look at liberatory conceptions of spatiality and temporality, particularly in the contexts of racial justice, abolition, disability rights, queer/trans ecologies, human development, death studies and practices, embodiment, community building, and more.

View Event →
Radical Love across Difference
Apr
9
to Apr 11

Radical Love across Difference

By using a praxis of love to highlight the struggles toward liberation, we approach what hooks suggests is a culture of refusing systems of domination. The importance of expressing, maintaining, and transforming radical love, especially across differences, is more pressing than ever. This conference seeks to explore the role radical love plays in health crises, climate change, racial justice, migration, economic justice and further social justice movements through community and belonging, pedagogy and literacy, creative expression and storytelling, virtual life and presence, and further fields

View Event →
Interrogating Self-Care: Bodies, Personhood, & Movements in Tumultuous Times
Mar
29
to Mar 30

Interrogating Self-Care: Bodies, Personhood, & Movements in Tumultuous Times

In her 1988 book A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” The concept of self-care, which arose through the activist practices specifically of marginalized groups, has been increasingly adopted and discussed by health care settings, non-profit organizations, commercial and marketing enterprises, and psychological approaches.

View Event →
The Personal is Still Political: Challenging Marginalization Through Theory Analysis & Praxis
Mar
31
to Apr 1

The Personal is Still Political: Challenging Marginalization Through Theory Analysis & Praxis

GCWS Student Conference 2017

In the late 1960s, the statement “the personal is political” emerged as a central rallying cry for feminist activists. While salient before, it has become all the more urgent in light of the 2016 United States election results. Given this, our conference seeks to investigate how this slogan has been, can be, or is now being mobilized as a concept for resistance by marginalized groups theoretically, analytically, and practically.

View Event →
Clash Zones: Identities in (R)evolution
Apr
5
to Apr 6

Clash Zones: Identities in (R)evolution

The Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies and graduate students from our nine member institutions present biannual interdisciplinary conference entitled:

Clash Zones: Identities in (R)evolution

This interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender studies will investigate how frictions produced in these “clash zones” impact individual and communal bodies and alter the identity categories by which we define those bodies. We invite presentations from any discipline or period to explore how contentious cultural spaces shape gender and sexuality, both historically and today.

Categories of interest may include, but are not limited to:

  •  Labor borders: separate spheres, class divisions, wealth/pay equality

  • Political borders: uprisings, warfare, revolutions, protest

  • Environmental borders: lands of ecological concern, the natural world

  • National borders: citizenship, immigration, diaspora, post/colonialism

  • Urban borders: socioeconomic divisions, cultural spaces, public vs. private

  • Community borders: online/virtual, alternative, and imagines communities; subcultures

  • Body borders: transgender; intersex, queer bodies; reproductive technologies


View Event →
Apr
4
to Apr 5

Who's Laughing? The Politics of Humor

GCWS Student Conference 2008

Jokes, satire, parody, and comedic performance can be powerful tools for challenging the status quo or for conforming to it. They have the potential to transform discourse, yet it is in these forms that our most troubling and violently disfiguring assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexual orientation can find their longest life. "Humor" can both enable and disable speech; it is available to some and prohibited for others.

View Event →
Mar
23
to Mar 24

Beyond Revolution or Behind It? The Politics and Practice of Contemporary Feminism across Academic and Activist Communities

GCWS Student Conference 2007

Theories of race, multiculturalism, Marxism, postcolonialism, and feminism ground work in Women's and Gender Studies – we will consider what realities these theories address (or ignore), what praxis they strengthen (or fail to), what communities they reach, and which they may leave behind. Is the grassroots and activist sentiment inspiring these concepts trumped by the theoretical vocabulary used to describe them? Do the pressures of academies and institutions limit the execution of diverse expressions of feminism in the classroom and on the ground? 

View Event →
Mar
30
to Mar 31

Shifting Gender Identities in the face of War, Globalization, and Natural Disaster

GCWS Student Conference 2006

What does this mean in an age we have come to call 'globalized,' in which the flow of information, labor, goods, and bodies takes place with unprecedented speed and in ever-shifting patterns? And in the context of women's, gender, and queer studies, what does it mean for women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender persons, and anyone else who stands outside or astride the boundaries of conventional gender/sexual norms?

View Event →