2025 Threads & Themes

-Hosted by UW Madison’s Disability Cultural Center and Co-sponsored by Go Big Read

Too often, we flatten disability to signify dysfunctional embodiment or the “wrong” way to be embodied/in a body. Critical disability studies, alongside feminist theory and disability culture, reimagine disabled embodiment as a rich texture of life, “an art, an ingenious way to live,” as the late artist Neil Marcus wrote. This thread seeks proposals demonstrating the ingenuity of disabled embodiment in scholarly, artistic, and activist projects, focusing on calls to action. Topics may include disabled organizing and bed life; chronic pain, illness, and fatigue; Mad praxis; lessons from disabled people and communities in the ongoing pandemic; crip wisdom; care work; alternatives to the medical-industrial complex and carceral care; and more.

Fat studies is an area of scholarly inquiry that deals with body shape and size as one of the many variations in human embodiment, a dimension of difference that informs experiences of privilege and oppression. It considers how body shape and size impact and interact with other aspects of identity like race, gender, (dis)ability, sexuality, socioeconomic circumstance, and more. Fat liberation, the praxis piece of fat studies, imagines a future free of oppression based on body size and the tyranny of healthism, which makes “health” a moral obligation. This thread seeks proposals that take an intersectional and interdisciplinary critical view of both popular and academic ideas about the body while centering fat people’s lived experiences. Topics may include weight stigma and body shame; healthcare for fat people, including but not limited to the “obesity epidemic,” eating disorder prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, and conflations of body size with health status; fat positivity and body neutrality; fat representations in pop culture, media, and fanworks; diet culture and the wellness industrial complex; and fat activism.

Digital spaces are commonly understood as immaterial and bodiless. However, feminists have long resisted the idea that a divide exists between virtual and real, conceptual and material; rather, they are interconnected. Engagement, access, creation, and consumption of digital content directly relate to our embodied selves–our intersectional identities, feelings, and experiences. Online connections can promote intersectional and global collaborations but can also encourage self-policing and performative action. Our digital technologies use materials violently extracted from the earth and can magnify opportunities for hate speech, misinformation, and other forms of violence. This thread grapples with these complications, the various possibilities, and the unintended impacts of feminist digital engagement. Proposals that engage with cultural theory, digital media studies, global integrations, and science and technology are encouraged. In this definition, media can include social media, television, film, music, and fanworks.

Feminist scholarship positions the body – especially the gendered, racialized, and queer body – as a site of state surveillance and control. In the current sociopolitical landscape of the US, local, state, and federal legislation dictates acceptable bodies and embodiment based on socially constructed ideals rooted in white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism. This thread seeks thoughtful proposals exploring the apparatus of control enacted upon the body and how feminist embodiment resists this control. Topics may include access to healthcare, including gender-affirming care, trans children and youth, reproductive justice and abortion, access to diverse stories and resisting censorship, return to “normal” in the ongoing pandemic, sex work, work leave policies, and more.

Transnational feminist action continues to be an essential element of our collective liberation. As we contend with genocide, famine, war, and the threat of far-right extremism, feminists from across the globe are fiercely questioning how our bodies are marked and (mis)understood, how we embody resistance and resilience, and how we suffer and heal from the ravages of ongoing gendered violence. From Turtle Island to Sudan, Palestine to Congo, and everywhere in between, local groups are creating global coalitions to end apartheid, dismantle oppressive structures, protect migrants and displaced peoples, and heal the planet. This thread centers transnational feminist activism across movements and communities. Topics may include decolonization efforts, peacebuilding, ecofeminism, immigration and borders, BDS movements, student organizational action, Indigenous sovereignty, LandBack, food justice, and more.

Inspired by the scholarship of bell hooks, this thread focuses on pedagogical practices that explicitly link theory to action and center student engagement, well-being, and empowerment. Because hooks draws from the lived experiences of multiply marginalized groups, her model of engaged and transgressive pedagogies opens the door to understanding the feminist classroom as an embodied community immersed in material and corporeal realities. We encourage proposals that address pedagogies of resistance and hope as feminist scholars face ongoing challenges to curriculum and content in the form of book bans, anti-critical race theory bills, attacks on queer and trans youth, and legislation aimed at the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion and WGSS. Presentations that highlight Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and High Impact Practices in STEM are particularly welcome, including anti-racist, decolonial, accessible, and queer practices in curriculum, pedagogy, and administration.