2027 WGSC Spring Conference

Access to information is inseparable from struggles for justice, autonomy, and collective liberation. Librarians, archivists, and information workers are often on the front lines of protecting knowledge, but they are not alone. Teachers, historians, journalists, students, and community organizers also play vital roles in supporting free expression, historical memory, and intellectual discovery. Our freedom of information is under attack, and the field of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies (GWSS) is resisting alongside libraries, community organizations, and other collectives.

This year’s Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium conference will address questions about who can create, access, and control information and how we organize, share, and preserve knowledge. The conference committee invites feminist, queer, and trans examinations of local and global power structures that shape knowledge and of the collective possibilities for protecting and transforming the freedom to know. We especially welcome work that considers how librarians, archivists, activists, students, and cultural workers are resisting threats to knowledge. We also encourage submissions that examine how GWSS faculty, departments, programs, and centers are challenging inequitable systems of knowledge production and expanding access to historically marginalized voices and ways of knowing.

Presentations might address questions such as:

• Who gets to create, interpret, and access information? 
• What is truth, and who has the power to define it? 
• Who gets to tell their stories? What practices best support the most vulnerable among us in telling their stories? 
• How can information be equitably shared and used within racial-capitalist societies?
• How can knowledge be preserved and protected for future generations? 
• What can scholars, faculty, school teachers, and librarians do to work together to affect change?
• How does the field of GWSS challenge inequitable systems of knowledge production and expand access to information? 

This year’s conference theme was inspired in part by the upcoming 50th anniversary of the UW Office of the Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian, a staple of GWSS- and LGBTQ+-focused scholarship, librarianship, and feminist action in Wisconsin and beyond. We are also recognizing the 10th anniversary of the UNESCO Co-Chair on Gender, Wellbeing and a Culture of Peace at UW–Madison, which promotes women’s international wellbeing through education, sustainable development, and knowledge exchange. We invite you to celebrate with us by sharing your stories from both inside and outside of libraries and archives across local and global networks. From academics to activists, classrooms to communities, students to seniors, please join us in exploring our varied roles in honoring and protecting information, knowledge, and the freedom to learn wherever and whoever we are.