Keynotes & Plenaries

“Silence” and “Absence” as Imprints in Women’s Stories of Migration and Human Trafficking

4W-STREETS
Thursday, April 13, 2023, 10:00 am CDT

Session Moderator: Jean Geran
Panelists: Dr. Araceli Alonso & Esperanza Jorge Barbuzano

 

Through the concepts of “silence” and “absence,” this 4W-STREETS plenary presents a comparative analysis of women’s experiences of trafficking as they travel two migratory routes: from West Africa to southern Europe, and from Central America to the United States. Imposed silence and absence take specific forms in each woman’s journey and story, in each woman’s body, expressing damage, expulsion, exploitation and/or disappearance, but also strength, resilience, and hope. Methodologically, we have developed a patchwork pedagogy that seeks to dialogically connect territories and people to create a choral narrative and a broad social dialogue.

***CART and ASL included.

Weathering: Slow Arts of Trans Endurance

Dr. Hil Malatino
Thursday, April 13, 2023, 6:00 pm CDT

Co-Sponsored by UW-Madison’s Center for Research on Women and Gender

In a moment of profound and widespread transantagonism articulated within both liberal-centrist and alt-right political formations, how do trans subjects cultivate arts of endurance? This talk develops a concept of weathering, thinking with the work of contemporary trans writers of fiction (Callum Angus and Torrey Peters), visual artists (Nicki Green and Jes Fan), and queer and trans theorists (Eric Stanley, Cam Awkward-Rich, and Eve Sedgwick). In an historical moment that seems to demand continuous reactive defense, how are trans subjects building capacities to slow down, bear with, and endure? How do practices of collective care support the cultivation of such capacities amidst an urgent now? How are artists figuring the slow and mostly unspectacular art of long-haul trans survival?

***CART and ASL included.

Cite Black Women: Race, Gender, Justice and Citational Politics in the Feminist Classroom

Cite Black Women
Friday, April 14, 2023, 11:00 am CDT
Panelists: Jenn M. Jackson, Erica Lorraine Williams, Imani A. Wadud, Michaela Machicote, Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, Daisy Guzman, Ozichi Okorom

 

In November 2017, Christen A. Smith created Cite Black Women as a campaign to push people to engage in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women’s transnational intellectual production. It started out with t-shirts with the simple phrase “Cite Black Women.” The idea was to motivate everyone, but particularly academics, to critically reflect on their everyday practices of citation and start to consciously question how they can incorporate black women into the CORE of their work. From there, the movement grew, expanding to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and establishing the hashtags #CiteBlackWomen and #CiteBlackWomenSunday. Now we are growing even more, including a new podcast, blog and this website. As Black women, we are often overlooked, sidelined and undervalued. Although we are intellectually prolific, we are rarely the ones that make up the canon. Recognizing this, Cite Black Women engages with social media, aesthetic representation (our t-shirts) and public dialogue to push people to critically rethink the politics of race, gender and knowledge production.

The history of racism and sexism in the traditional fields outside of women and gender studies is well known. Although we have made strides to distance ourselves from our colonialist roots, we are still discussing the resistance and intellectual contributions of Black women to fields that are primarily dominated and authored by white men. More pointedly, despite the diversity of our discipline, people of color generally, and women of color particularly, continue to reshape and shift the field’s trajectory. Therefore, as we move forward, the work of Black women is vital to the diversity of our bibliographies and syllabi. Although Black women have been practicing, theorizing, and revolutionizing how women contribute to the field since Zora Neale Hurston’s groundbreaking early 20th-century research. We have been largely left out of conceptualizations of what constitutes serious canonical theories. Inspired by the Cite Black Women movement, this roundtable critically examines the struggle of citational policies in our classrooms and the urgent need for instructors to reconfigure the policies of ‘conceptual collaboration’ to include Black women.

View Cite Black Women’s CV Here

***CART and ASL included.

 

Hopeful Art and Artful Hope

Artists’ Roundtable
Friday, April 14, 2023, 3:30 pm CDT

Panelists: Kierston Ghaznavi, Kristy Lisle, Mara Ahmed, T.L. Luke, Michaela Oteri, Gabrielle Javier-Cerulli, Yvette Pino, Della Wells

This panel features artists whose work embraces hope, mindfulness, and creative engagement as central themes. Their work operates from the assumption that the act of producing and engaging with art is inherently hopeful and rooted in larger frameworks of social justice. Panelists will speak to their individual and collective projects and share their own perspectives on how art connects to the central conference theme of sustaining hope and feminist engagement, as well as their perspectives on disability. You can see the work of all panelists as part of the conference’s virtual artist exhibition.

***This session opens with a recognition of the 2023 WGSC Student Award Nominees.

***CART and ASL included.

Click here to see the work of all of these artists in our 2023 Virtual Artist Exhibition!

Tender Gender Restorative Yoga: A Praxis of Feminist, Queer, and Decolonial Somatics

Dr. Chloe Diamond-Lenow
Saturday, April 15, 2023, 9:00 am CDT

 

Restorative yoga holds radical potentials for a feminist, queer, trans, and decolonial practice for self and community healing that forefronts a tender approach to the embodied, the affective, and the sensorial. Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde famously wrote, “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore, I can be free.” This session draws on feminist of color frameworks to theorize and enact feminist somatic praxis through restorative yoga as a way to resist the colonial formations of neoliberal heteropatriarchy that often negate the body and its knowledges. In this session, Dr. Diamond-Lenow guides participants in an accessible 45-minute restorative yoga and mindfulness practice. The session will open and close with brief remarks from Dr. Diamond-Lenow, with time for community check-in and discussion. Together, we make space for collective vulnerability—for our hearts, roots, shadows, and dreams—to center our own somatic and affective experiences as sites of hope, resistance, unknowing, and re-knowing in our work to build more liberatory, just, and tender feminist futures.

***CART included.  ASL upon request.

Equitable Breast Cancer Prevention and Treatment

African American Health Network and The Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness
Saturday, April 15, 2023, 10:15 am CDT
Panelists: Dr. Eva Vivian & Christine Russell

     

The African American Health Network was initially established to provide African American health professionals with a community to engage with, share information, and provide support for each other.  Today the network has four core functions: research, advocacy, leadership, and education.  The network acts as an agent for the African American community in interfacing with the broader community in general and the health community in particular, especially as it relates to African American health problems. The network seeks to decrease the health disparities that ravish the African American community by providing practical, yet powerful information tools that will inspire, equip, and energize African Americans to improve the overall health and wellness of themselves and their families.

***CART included.  ASL upon request.

Black Erotic Sovereignty: an Intersectional Outlook on Sex Work, Decrim, and Communal Liberation

Black Erotic Sovereignty 
Saturday, April 15, 2023, 2:30 pm CDT
Panelists: Nicole Nawaz, Cruel Valentine, Shakti Bliss, Goddess KoCo Meow

Investigating the dynamics of bodily autonomy, power, and equity often in conversations about reparations, folks don’t consider or include sex labor. The key to Black erotic sovereignty is a healthy erotic landscape governed by and for the liberation of Black folk. As sex workers, entertainers, policy advocates, and creatives. Panelists explore the intersections of their work, its political nature, and paradigm shifts necessary to strengthen the erotic intelligence of the collective.

***CART and ASL included.