Rooted in Justice: Fifty Years of Feminist Scholarship & Community Engagement

media release: Co-Convened by UW System Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium and UW System Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian

2026 WGSC Spring Conference: April 9-10, 2026, Memorial Union, 800 Langdon Street

Call for Proposals is now Open! Proposals due by: November 9, 2025 11:59PM CST. Join us as we honor the 50-year anniversary of the WGSC Conference!

In commemoration of 50 years of statewide gender and women’s studies conferences, this year’s theme celebrates the deep roots of feminist scholarship in the academy while highlighting how scholars, students, and activists are developing new models of teaching, research, technological innovation, and community engagement to navigate ongoing political, institutional, and cultural pressures. At every turn, the challenges facing higher education threaten to unsettle the field’s hard-won successes. Gender and women’s studies is grounded in activism, intellectual courage, critical reflexivity, and a commitment to transforming higher education. From its earliest days, the field—fought for by students, community organizers, and visionary faculty—has carved out space to challenge power, center marginalized voices, and reimagine the boundaries of feminist knowledge production. This work has always occurred in tandem with other disciplines, community partners, and collaborators in varying institutional spaces.

Yet, the field has also had to reckon with its own exclusions—racial, gendered, ableist, ageist, and beyond. While there have been moments of transformative inclusion and coalition-building, these efforts have not always been complete or sustained. U.S. feminism has also been shaped by settler-colonialist legacies and imperial frameworks, often operating in tension with international feminisms and understandings of gender. The work of dismantling entrenched hierarchies within gender and women’s studies itself remains ongoing, demanding continued vigilance, humility, and accountability from practitioners and institutions alike.

Today, gender and women’s studies continues to demonstrate resilience, adapting to new conditions while remaining rooted in its founding principles of intersectionality, equity, and collective liberation. This year’s theme honors the legacies of the field’s founders while celebrating the creativity, persistence, and innovation that keep gender and women’s studies vibrant and vital. We invite participants—including those engaged in adjacent work within community spaces, allied academic disciplines, and related fields—to reflect on both the past and the future of the field, considering its historical impact, current struggles, and emerging possibilities.

Threads and Themes for 2026:

Founding Feminisms: Reflecting on the Roots of the Field

At this time, many gender and women’s studies programs, centers, and departments are celebrating milestone anniversaries and exploring their rich histories across Wisconsin and the world. This thread explores, honors, and critiques historical narratives and analyses of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies programs, as well as adjacent fields and community-based work. We especially encourage presentations that document the founding of programs, the work of early leaders and faculty, and the activist and intellectual traditions that shaped their development. We invite presenters to grapple with racial tensions, gender policing, ableism, and other exclusionary elements the field has sought to overcome, including U.S.-centric impulses rooted in settler colonialism, imperialism, and the marginalization of transnational and Global South feminist perspectives. In addition, presentations in this thread can excavate our shared intellectual genealogies as women’s, gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ studies scholars, ultimately exploring intersections across the historical transformations of feminist inquiry and social justice work.

Defending the Discipline: Feminist Struggles in the Academy

As attempts to dismantle gender and women’s studies and related fields in higher education increase, scholars, students, activists, and those engaged in adjacent work are resisting this marginalization while advocating for the preservation of critical student centers and academic spaces. For this thread, we invite presenters to share strategies for defending programs under threat and making the field’s transformative impact visible to administrators, policymakers, and the public, including through online activist communities, social media, and other digital platforms. This thread also holds space for reflecting on losses, particularly with the merging of programs into new units and the elimination of gender equity, multicultural, and pride centers. We welcome proposals that highlight unique approaches to program advocacy, curricular innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration that ultimately strengthen the field’s institutional standing. This thread highlights how gender and women’s studies programs and centers—as well as related and overlapping initiatives—continue to advocate for their survival amid budget cuts and political challenges.

Digital Praxis: Feminist Teaching and Critical Engagement

Instructors and students are engaging digital tools to both expand and complicate feminist pedagogy and activism. These tools can accelerate learning by reshaping how students think, research, and engage, but can undercut reflection, analysis, and critical questioning. These technologies broaden the global reach of feminist learning and enable new forms of transnational collaboration, even as their environmental toll disproportionately affects communities of color. This thread explores how we leverage the benefits of digital tools for feminist organizing and knowledge-sharing while remaining attentive to the ways algorithmic bias, surveillance, online harassment, and digital exclusion can undermine our goals. Presentations will explore how we integrate emerging technologies—such as AI-assisted writing, hybrid and asynchronous learning, gamification, digital humanities projects, and other interactive platforms—to foster collaboration, creativity, and access. Presenters will address how digital tools can deepen critical engagement, amplify marginalized voices, and reimagine feminist pedagogy while also grappling with ethical concerns and strategies for teaching students to navigate technology through a critical feminist lens.

From Classroom to Community: Feminist Engagement in Practice

Gender and women’s studies has its roots in grassroots feminist activism and community organizing. This thread invites proposals that explore what it means to be a feminist working in and with communities today and into the future. We encourage stories that bridge classroom learning with local and virtual feminist action, whether through student-led initiatives, internships in community organizations, alumni engaged in advocacy work, or digital spaces fostering collective global empowerment. Recognizing their essential role in shaping transformative feminist knowledge and action, we welcome the work of community partners, artists, and others who engage with feminist praxis and mentor students. Proposals may also examine the tensions that arise when activist work intersects with academic institutions, including challenges around maintaining diverse viewpoints and resisting institutional co-optation. We welcome reflections on past and present efforts to translate theory into practice, as well as innovative ideas for revitalizing the field’s political roots across education, science, government, technology, the arts, and beyond—locally, nationally, and globally.

Future Feminisms: New Voices and New Visions

Gender and women’s studies has always aspired to be an intersectional discipline, engaging critically with race, ability, and other axes of identity to address complex systems of power and oppression. While this narrative has taken time to emerge fully, the field now embraces critical conversations that include queer and sexuality studies, trans and gender diverse studies, and decolonial and Indigenous feminisms with global perspectives. This thread seeks proposals regarding these and other emerging branches of gender and women’s studies. We especially welcome voices and perspectives historically marginalized within academia. Bring us your cutting-edge research, your hot topics, your guesses, hopes, and dreams for what new areas will develop. Consider how new technologies, cuts in federal funding, and changes to higher education will impact gender and women’s studies and related disciplines. This thread invites presenters to imagine the field’s evolution in the coming years and to explore what new possibilities might emerge from its transformative potential.