Resistance and Reimagination:
Gender, Change, and the Arts
Threads:
- Feminist Pedagogy and the Evolution of Feminist Thought: This thread invites workshops, panels, art projects, performances, and individual papers that explore the transformative possibilities of the Gender and Women’s Studies classroom, particularly anti-racist, decolonizing, and queer(ing) practices in curriculum, pedagogy, and administration. Presentations that highlight Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and High Impact Practices (HIPs) focused on access, diversity, equity, and inclusion are also particularly welcome, as well as best practices for supporting gender-informed evidenced-based practice, rigorous scholarship, and activist spaces on campus. Feminist pedagogy intersects with the long genealogy of feminist methodologies, theories, and activism. Accordingly, we also encourage papers that consider the history of feminist and transfeminist thought.
- Women & Wellbeing in Wisconsin & the World: Making Local-to-Global Connections: This thread invites proposals from the varied programs of the 4W Initiative. We encourage presentations from 4W faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduate interns, and community partners. Presentations should emphasize feminist principles and perspectives that reflect the lived experiences of women. This should be contextualized as a first step in intersectional efforts to make positive change through evidenced-based praxis. Proposals may range from health to education to agriculture to income generation to literature and the arts. A strong participatory and action-oriented component is encouraged. All should reflect a multidimensional concept of wellbeing that includes basic needs, self-expression, a growth orientation, and affirming interdependence across differences.
- Gender, Migration, Identity, and Freedom: This thread considers the global dimensions of gender, migration, identity, and freedom – both in terms of mobility and basic needs – as well as full expression of identity and culture. We encourage proposals that consider a range of identities across the life course and gender spectrum. In addition to presentations about international borders and challenges, we encourage proposals that explore the human experience at borders and during migrations into and within the U.S., and the struggles of queer and people of color at the U.S border. We also welcome papers, panels, art projects, and performances that highlight transformative spaces of justice, reparations, and decolonization against structures of institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression.
- Interrupting Ableism: Perspectives in Disability Studies: This thread welcomes topics relating to disability studies and justice with a particular focus on feminist, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary frameworks. We welcome proposals that consider topics of inclusion, care, (in)visibility, and justice within academia, grassroots movements, and artistic communities and projects. Panels, performances, and papers should address those situated at the margins of multiple identities, and the contributions of feminist-of-color disability studies, a theoretical framework that incorporates critical race theory and makes visible the unacknowledged whiteness of disability studies and activism.
- Queer(ing) Praxis, Expressions, and Activism: This thread, facilitated by the Gender and Women’s Studies graduate students at UW-Madison, seeks to explore decolonial queer resistance, through the lenses of queer of color critique and care within queer communities (care work). It will focus on examining the lived, aspired, and imagined experiences of queerness, trans folks in community, as ways of resistance to structures and systems of oppression. We see community as a sense of belonging that transcends the self and the individual, incorporating notions of micro- and macro-community to explore the imaginings of a queer world (a world more livable). We also welcome any types of proposals related to this thread that are not specific to community. We invite papers, workshops, performances, and panels from all community members, scholars, and students, but place a particular emphasis on student and community-led art and scholarship. This thread represents a portion of the graduate student symposium woven throughout the conference.
- Our Bodies, Ourselves: Beyond #MeToo: This thread will reflect the transformative power and possibilities for social change ushered in by the #MeToo movement. It also seeks to acknowledge and explore national and transnational efforts to move from awareness of sexual violence and harassment to legislative, cultural, and institutional action in multiple locations—campuses, workplaces, and community spaces. We particularly encourage panels, papers, art projects, and performances focused on radical sites of queer and feminist resistance and decolonial resistance enacted by queer and trans bodies, disabled bodies, classed bodies, and bodies of color. We also welcome reflections on the historical antecedents, complexities, complicities, and transformative possibilities of the #MeToo movement.
- Gender and Environmental Justice: The intersection of the arts and climate change offers many opportunities for art, poetry, writing, design, and other areas of creative expression to support movements for climate justice. This thread invites proposals that rely on an intersectional and gendered lens to examine climate change as a human rights issue. We encourage projects and creative works which consider both the gendered implications of climate change, and the role women, POC, migrants, and other marginalized groups play as agents of change in areas of policy development, grassroots mobilization, and sustainable development. We welcome presentations which also explore how experiential knowledge, anxiety, compassion, energy, and resilience fuel movements for environmental change.