1. Engage Gender and Women’s Studies and/or Adjacent Fields and Community Networks

Proposals should situate their work within existing scholarship, community dialogue, or activism and practice, showing how their work:

• Engages gender and women’s studies and/or adjacent fields and community networks, such as African American, Indigenous, Latinx, queer, disability, and trans studies as well as feminist and gender-focused scholarship across the humanities, social sciences, art, education, and health sciences
• Fills a theoretical or practical gap
• Reframes or advances ongoing scholarly debates or public interventions
• Reflects diverse and intersectional approaches
  

The strongest proposals demonstrate how the work—whether rooted in research, teaching, student leadership, creative practice, activism, professional experience, or community engagement—contributes to evolving conversations in gender and women’s studies and expands how feminist knowledge is created and shared.

2. Present Original and Compelling Work for a Broad Audience

Strong proposals clearly communicate:

• An original question, argument, or interpretive intervention, whether grounded in gender and women’s studies and related fields or in practices such as feminist inquiry, social justice, activism, pedagogy, artistry, innovation, and transnationalism
• A compelling rationale for why the topic matters, including how the work contributes to broader conversations in gender and women’s studies or public understandings of politics, power, and oppression
• A clear connection to the conference theme and threads
• A clear sense of the intervention the work makes in the field, such as advancing gender debates and introducing new sources, methodologies, practices, and activisms

The strongest proposals fall within the conference theme and threads and make clear both what new knowledge the project produces and how it expands the ways gender scholars and practitioners research, interpret, expand, or share work with wider audiences.

3. Panels and Workshops Should Engage Networks Across Departments, Communities, Practices and/or Career Stages

Panel and workshop proposals often bring together a specific network while addressing how this network is a strategic choice for the panel’s scholarship, organization, scope, or argumentative goals. Strong proposal abstracts will do one of the following:

• Reflect the uniqueness of an institutional grouping. These institutional groupings might include students and scholars from across departments within a single institution or across institutions
• Reflect the uniqueness of a particular career stage, or reflect a variety of perspectives across career stages. These career stages might include undergraduate students, graduate students, early-career scholars, and senior researchers
• Reflect the uniqueness of a particular feminist praxis, or reflect a variety of praxes across practitioner contexts. These practitioner contexts might include teaching, community engagement, artistry, technology, and activism

4. Demonstrate Clarity of Expression

All proposals should have clean, clear, edited writing that:

• uses accessible language explaining the work’s contribution without relying on jargon or terminology specific to a narrow field or area 
• foregrounds and highlights the main argument as a prominent expression and is not hidden, indirect, or undeveloped within the proposal
• considers grammar, coherency, and flow throughout
• adheres to word count