Minding the Field: Exploring and Expanding Women’s and Gender Studies in North Texas

Call for Proposals

Hosted by The Women’s and Gender Studies Program at The University of Texas, Arlington

Symposium: Thursday, October 29, 2015

In honor of the 30-year anniversary of our Women’s History Month lecture series (1986-2016), the Women’s and Gender Studies program at UT Arlington invites proposals for papers and panel presentations at a one-day symposium entitled “Minding the Field: Exploring and Expanding Women’s and Gender Studies in North Texas.” The symposium will be held October 29, 2015 in conjunction with our annual screening of the women’s film festival, Lunafest (http://www.lunafest.org) .  As an academic field and activist enterprise, Women’s Studies has been active in the Dallas/Fort Worth area since 1974.  With six Women’s and Gender Studies programs and the first Ph.D. program in the field to be located in the South Central region of the U.S. at Texas Woman’s University, North Texas is an important part of the contemporary network of Women’s and Gender Studies in higher education nationally.

The purpose of this symposium is to foster dialogue and networking among Women’s and Gender Studies faculty, students and staff for future collaboration across campuses; highlight cutting edge research in Women’s and Gender Studies programs at the faculty, graduate and undergraduate levels; and, finally, to recognize and reflect on the rich history of Women’s Studies in the area while imagining future possibilities for the discipline.  We invite papers that engage new and ongoing debates in Feminist and Women’s Studies.  In order to demonstrate the wide-reaching and interdisciplinary nature of Women’s Studies, we encourage submissions including work in literature, fine arts, popular culture, the social sciences and the natural sciences.  Though not exhaustive, some examples of themes and subject matter relevant to the symposium include:

•        Examinations of the shifting roles of women and feminism in popular culture.

•        Analyses of the state of women’s sexual and reproductive freedoms nationally and in the state of Texas.

•        Women’s Studies, critical anti-racist feminisms and contemporary racist violence in the U.S.

•        Women and work in both the paid public sphere and the unpaid private sphere.

•        The work of Women’s and Gender Studies in movements for Trans rights and inclusion.

•        The challenges, possibilities and complexities of teaching Women’s and Gender Studies in the state of Texas and in the D/FW area more specifically.

•        The role of community partnerships and service learning in Women’s and Gender Studies

Please submit short proposals of 250 words to mindingthefield2015@gmail.com by September 1, 2015.  Please include your name, institutional affiliation(s) (if applicable), and contact email in your proposal. All accepted presenters will be notified bySeptember 15, 2015. We are accepting proposals for individual paper presentations as well as proposals for complete panels.  However, we encourage individual paper proposals to aid in the spirit of networking and collaboration. 

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