CFP: Women’s and Gender Studies et Recherches Feministes (Deadline: December 1, 2013)

CALL FOR PAPERS/APPEL À COMMUNICATIONS
WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES ET RECHERCHES FÉMINISTES

DATE: May 25-27, 2014
(Coordinators Meeting May 24, 2014)
LOCATION: Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario

WGSRF is now seeking proposals, in either French or English, for its annual conference, held in conjunction with the Congress of the CFHSS/FCSH. Submissions for panels, roundtables, workshops, papers, and other presentation formats can be made by groups or individuals, and as joint sessions with other associations. The conference committee encourages you to make use of your networks to organize panels (with moderators) for submission. Please identify the specific theme to which you are submitting your proposal.

The overall theme for this year’s Congress, “Borders without Boundaries,” clearly connects to a number of issues and topics recognizable to WGSRF. We invite abstracts that address the following specialized themes that challenge and problematize “borders” and “boundaries” in numerous ways, in addition to submissions that address topics outside of these themes.

Theme 1: “Borders without Boundaries”? How do feminist and other critical inter/disciplinary approaches, languages, and bodies of scholarship take up the themes of, and complex and multiple relationships between, borders and boundaries? How do they explore borders and boundaries as material, as affective, as stable, as fluid, as rigid, as porous, as repressive, as productive? Where are borders and boundaries located, maintained, and challenged—in space/place, across time, through and on bodies? How do individuals and communities create, defy, live within/without borders and boundaries of all kinds? What are the consequences of troubling the multiple meanings attached to borders and boundaries? And how do other connecting words—such as with, and, through, in, of—complicate and extend understandings of borders and boundaries?
Participants may explore these and related questions through any number of possible topics and approaches, including: space and virtuality; the urban and the rural; home and community; the private and the public; the local, the national, the transnational; nation (building) and citizenship(s); migrations and movements; terror, fear, anxiety; pain and pleasure; work and play; the body; representation; war…. We are interested in proposals: that consider topics through intersectional categories and analyses; that engage scholarly, pedagogical, activist, and cultural productions; and that investigate, interpret, intervene in, and illuminate the complexities that emerge when borders and boundaries are at stake.

Theme 2: “Women’s and Gender Studies: Borders with/out Boundaries”? This theme welcomes proposals that take the field of Women’s and Gender Studies as their site of inquiry and work to further conversations about the field, its pedagogies, practices, and curricula, its institutional force, and its status as a social, academic, political, imaginary, textual, virtual, affective, creative community. How does WGS negotiate borders (and/with/without/in/through) boundaries in its relationship with the university more generally—with other intellectual fields and organizations of knowledges, with the institution and its current pressures/restructurings/funding crises, with a larger climate increasingly suspicious of liberal arts education? How do we continue to energize the field’s various epistemological commitments (to gendering, queering, indigenizing, decolonizing, inter/transnationalizing, and globalizing) in the face of these multiple and contradictory pressures?

Theme 3: Open Call: We also welcome proposals outside of the above two themes that explore Women’s and Gender Studies knowledge work in all its diverse articulations.

HOW TO SUBMIT:
We encourage presentations in a variety of formats, including panels, workshops, roundtables, papers, poster sessions, film and video screenings, performance art pieces, exhibits, and cultural events. If you are proposing a non-traditional presentation, please include a brief write up on any necessary audiovisual, technical, logistical, or room size and location considerations.

The Conference Proposal Form (Word document) can be found on the WGSRF website – www.wgsrf.com – under the ‘annual conference’ tab at the top. All submissions must include a clear, concise and well-argued 250 – 300-word abstract for individual papers and panel topics. Panel submissions must also include short (100 – 150 word) abstracts of the individual papers, and all submissions should indicate the theme for which the proposal is to be considered.

While welcoming individual paper proposals, WGSRF encourages submissions of panel proposals (with a maximum of 3 presenters), to ensure thematic consistency across papers in a given session. Cohesiveness will be a primary criterion in the panel selection process.

Round table presentations may have up to 5 members and workshops may have as few as 2 or as many as 4 facilitators. Proposals for performances and art installations will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, for feasibility.

All sessions are typically scheduled to be 75 minutes in length; if you are proposing a workshop or non-traditional format, please indicate your expected time and other needs. All proposals will be anonymously reviewed.

**Individual presenters and all members of panels/roundtables must be current members of WGSRF to submit an abstract. For more information, see the membership tab at www.wgsrf.com.

Send proposals, by email only, in Word or RTF, to: WGSRF.Conference.2014@gmail.com.
Deadline: December 1, 2013. No late proposals will be accepted.