2027 Threads
Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Resistance
Libraries, archives, and museums are fighting growing threats to information access. From increased book bans and censorship to politically motivated funding cuts and removal of exhibits, these institutions face ongoing existential crises. When trust is at an all-time low, librarians, archivists, and curators are teaching the skills necessary for information and media literacy, critical thinking, gender equity, and civic engagement. They are reckoning with AI, cyberattacks, resource restrictions, and increasing surveillance. This thread examines how libraries and other cultural spaces are meeting this moment with intersectional feminist principles of courage, creativity, and collectivity. We invite proposals exploring knowledge production in underserved communities, as well as methods for its ethical preservation and sharing across boundaries through feminist, queer, and trans approaches and critical, crip, and anti-colonial frameworks. Presentations may explore innovative ways to provide vital resources to rural, poor, disabled, incarcerated, and other marginalized communities.
Teaching Feminist Knowledge
As classrooms and academic programs navigate heightened public, legislative, institutional, and political scrutiny, feminist teaching and knowledge production have become increasingly contested. This thread invites renewed attention to what GWSS and related interdisciplinary fields teach, how they teach it, and whose experiences and knowledge are represented. We invite presenters to share pedagogical choices and strategies, curricular creation and framing, program defense and management, and student experiences and engagement. With critical reflection on the information we teach and learn, and on the methods, places, and spaces we use to convey knowledge, we welcome presentations by instructors, students, and community members in educational information-sharing to examine the politics of pedagogy. We especially welcome panels and workshops offering queer, trans, crip, and other perspectives on pedagogical and curricular choices, methods, and futures for sustaining feminist teaching and learning.
Community Knowledge and Career Pathways
The boundaries of GWSS extend beyond the classroom, preparing students to build, protect, share, and transform knowledge in communities, institutions, and workplaces. This thread explores how community organizations and GWSS-focused career pathways advance equitable forms of knowledge production while highlighting the distinctive perspectives and skills GWSS graduates bring to this work. We invite proposals examining initiatives in libraries, archives, museums, schools, nonprofit organizations, government, healthcare, advocacy, and other community settings that protect intellectual freedom, preserve historical memory, and expand access to knowledge. Proposals that highlight partnerships among universities, community organizations, cultural institutions, schools, and public agencies are especially encouraged. Relatedly, we welcome proposals exploring how the GWSS classroom provides mentorship, experiential learning, internships, and other collaborative models that prepare students to carry feminist, queer, and trans approaches to knowledge production beyond the academy and into various career pathways.
Feminist Perspectives on Science
Women and other marginalized people have played active roles in scientific exploration and discovery – although at times they’ve been uncredited, cut out of the research process, or subjected to unethical experiments. We invite proposals that examine this complex history and the ways it impacts scientific knowledge production today. Proposals may grapple with questions of how truth is determined and whose experiences and research methods are seen as legitimate. We also encourage presentations that explore queer, trans, and feminist perspectives on modern science and technology, such as inequalities in healthcare, challenges to the sex/gender binary, and whether it is possible to engage ethically with AI. Proposals in this thread may also address other topics at the intersection of science and feminism, such as natural disasters and climate change, environmental racism, digital accessibility, library and information science, and the gender gap in STEM fields.
UNESCO Initiative: Producing and Protecting Knowledge Across Borders in Troubled Times
Honoring the 10th anniversary of the UW–Madison UNESCO Chair on Gender, Wellbeing and a Culture of Peace, this thread examines the production and democratization of knowledge as vital to human rights, gender equity, and the realization of peace. Amid political violence and repression, struggles over gender justice become acute. Women’s institutions are destroyed, intergenerational knowledge transmission is disrupted, and histories are suppressed. Yet, across the globe, communities continue to utilize women’s expertise to protect information, preserve cultural heritage, and build peace. Drawing on UNESCO’s framework of crisis response, capacity building, and knowledge exchange, this thread asks: How do women mobilize under conditions of political violence? How can transnational feminist networks support equality without reproducing imperial, colonial, or extractive relationships? We encourage proposals from elders, community knowledge keepers, memory workers, and others on topics such as research methodologies and praxes beyond Western institutions, digital sovereignty, oral traditions, translation, and community-governed knowledge networks.