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Sustaining Hope: Feminisms, Freedom, and the Future
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media release: Co-Convened by UW System Women’s and Gender Studies Consortium and UW System Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian
Join us for the Spring 2023 Women's and Gender Studies Consortium Conference. This free and fully virtual conference takes place Thursday, April 13 - Saturday, April 15, 2023. Free registration is open now!
Theme: This year’s theme invites participants to occupy spaces of hope alongside uncertainty as we shift our collective gaze towards an unknowable and improvable future. Drawing on the foundational work of feminist abolitionist Mariame Kaba and other proponents of radical hope, we investigate how grief and sadness hold the seeds to our own survival and freedom. We position hope as intersectional concept grounded in solutions we have yet to fully understand and map out. We invite proposals which foreground an intersectional-feminist lens to map out inclusive societal structures, equitable institutional frameworks, cross-movement solidarities, and collective approaches to social change. We ask scholars, students, activists, artists, civil society leaders, and all members of the community to reflect on strategies for harnessing joy and hope in tandem with anger, frustration, and rage. How do we support a society that offers improved conditions for all, particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color? How do we retain hope and remain joyful in the face of ongoing inequities, injustice, and the pandemic? What does it mean to chart a future that is difficult to discern? How do we slowly and systematically develop new solutions to systemic change? What does it mean to utilize hope as a strategy for change?
We will investigate these topics with the following threads and themes:
- Abolition Feminisms
- Climate Justice and Ecofeminisms
- Critical Approaches to Trans Care and Trans Justice
- Disability Justice and the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Post-Roe Reproductive Justice
- Refusing the Colonial State in (and out) of the Feminist Classroom
The Office of the Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian has created bibliographies for each conference thread. These include articles and books for further engagement and classroom discussions.
Bibliographies:
Abolition Feminisms Bibliography
Climate Justice and Ecofeminism Bibliography
Critical Approaches to Trans Care and Trans Justice Bibliography
Disability Justice and the COVID-19 Pandemic Bibliography
Post-Roe Reproductive Justice Bibliography
Refusing the Colonial State in (and out) of the Feminist Classroom
Keynotes and Featured Presentations (find the schedule here):
“Silence” and “Absence” as Imprints in Women’s Stories of Migration and Human Trafficking, Thursday, April 13, 2023, 10:00 am CDT
Panelists: Dr. Araceli Alonso & Esperanza Jorge Barbuzano
Collective Narrative Artwork, Grad Students University of Coahuila, Mexico
Through the concepts of “silence” and “absence,” this 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. 4W-STREETS
Weathering: Slow Arts of Trans Endurance, Thursday, April 13, 2023, 6:00 pm CDT
Dr. Hil Malatino is Joyce L. and Douglas S. Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy at Penn State. He is the author of Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (Minnesota 2022), Trans Care (Minnesota 2020), and Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (Nebraska 2019). His essays have appeared in Hypatia, TSQ, Signs, and other journals and edited volumes. You can contact him at HMalatino@psu.edu.
Cite Black Women: Race, Gender, Justice and Citational Politics in the Feminist Classroom, Friday, April 14, 2023, 11:00 am CDT
Panelists: Christen A. Smith, Jenn M. Jackson, Erica Lorraine Williams, Imani A. Wadud, Michaela Machicote, Whitney N. Laster Pirtle, Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Zakiya Carr Johnson, Alysia Mann Carey, 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.
Hopeful Art and Artful Hope Artists Round Table, Friday, April 14, 2023, 3:00 pm CDT
Panel: Participants TBD
Tender Gender Restorative Yoga: A Praxis of Feminist, Queer, and Decolonial Somatics, 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.
Equitable Breast Cancer Prevention and Treatment, Saturday, April 15, 2023, 10:15 am CDT
Panelists: Gale Johnson, Dr. Eva Vivian, Lilada Gee
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.
Black Erotic Sovereignty: an Intersectional Outlook on Sex Work, Decrim, and Communal Liberation
Saturday, April 15, 2023, 1:30 pm CDT
Panelists: Nicole Nawaz, Cruel Valentine, Shakti Bliss, Goddess KoCo Meow
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