CFP: The Lady Doth Protest... Mapping Feminist Movements, Moments and Mobilisations

Biennial FWSA Conference, 21-23 June, 2013
University of Nottingham

Keynote Speakers

Professor Nadje Al-Ali (University of London)
Professor Diane Elson (University of Essex)
Dr Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths University)

This conference theme seeks to critically explore the concept of protest – its discourse, image and impact, and to examine the possibility of creative feminist engagement across a spectrum of moments, movements and mobilisations. Women have always participated in and led a wide variety of protests, feminist and otherwise. Their historical participation in movements for equal rights and civil liberties has routinely thrown up questions about feminist knowledge and political praxes. However, the visibility of women in a range of contemporary protests on a global scale - the ‘Arab spring’, the North American ‘occupy’ movement and activist marches like the ‘Slut Walk’ and ‘Muff March’ phenomena - makes revisiting debates on women and protest apposite. At the same time, the ‘war on terror’, the so-called death of multiculturalism in Europe, and women’s global participation in fundamentalist mobilisations and armed struggle raises new questions concerning the interstices between race, religion, class, sexuality and citizenship.

We conceive of the term ‘protest’ in its widest sense existing in a variety of practices including activism, critical pedagogies, literature, film, technologies, art and aesthetics – all of which coalesce around the challenge they mount to multiple hegemonies. By unpacking the concept of protest and expanding existing notions of the political through a feminist lens, we seek to understand how feminist protest, in particular, responds to and emerges in spite of, the challenges of our contemporary world. We invite papers from across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• Women and protest: theoretical, historical, and contemporaneous concerns;
• Sexual and gendered economies of neo-liberalism, recession, and austerity;
• Gender, securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism(s);
• New forms of trans-national activism and feminist politics;
• Critical feminist pedagogy in times of continuity and change;
• Protest literature, music, film, and art;
• The language/rhetoric of feminist movements and mobility;
• Non or anti-feminist protest and politics.

To submit:
Please send 250 word abstracts for twenty minute papers by 30 October 2012 or 600 word panel proposals by 30 September 2012 to the conference organisers : Claire O’Callaghan, Trishima Mitra-Kahn and Srila Roy 

To visit the conference website, please click here.

The Futures of Feminism

New Directions in Feminist, Women's & Gender Studies

Annual FWSA Conference, 5-7 July 2011, Brunel University

Since the final decade of the twentieth century, discussions about and within feminism have often focused on feminism's place and relevance in today's Western societies and on the conceptualisations of the relationships between different strands and waves of the movement. This conference seeks to redress the focus on internal and generational divisions by exploring potential feminist futures and investigating new directions in feminist, gender and women's studies across activism, theory and practice in a range of disciplines and through a variety of social and cultural phenomena. As such, the event aims to address both where feminism is going as well as where it has not yet been, including areas of enquiry which have been neglected or ignored in past decades and approaches which conceptualise or help to shape potential feminist futures. We welcome paper and panel proposals from a range of disciplines across the sciences, arts and humanities. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• New directions and developments in feminist, women's, gender and queer studies
• Post and third-wave feminisms' roles in the future of feminism
• The impacts of new forms of (transnational) activism and the 'global'
• Critical pedagogy and feminist futures
• Feminist historiography and its influences on feminisms' futures
• Feminist developments and futures in literature, popular culture, the media and on screen.

Please email 250 word proposals for 20 minute presentations or 750 word panel proposals to the conference organisers Dr. Jessica Cox and Nadine Muller by 1st April 2011, and feel free to send any queries you may have regarding this event to the same address.

For more information about the FWSA, including current competitions, joining information and contact details, please click here.

Nadine Muller
Department of English
University of Hull
Cottingham Road
Hull
HU6 7RX

Feminist and Women's Studies Association UK & Ireland (FWSA)

Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Network (PG CWWN)