CALL FOR PAPERS: Publishing Feminisms at NWSA 2016
Montreal, November 10-13, 2016
Publishing Feminisms is a working group that draws together feminist
scholars and practitioners who are working on a variety of linked
projects related to publishing, periodicals, and print culture in and
beyond feminism’s second wave. In 2015, the working group formed a
special interest group within the NWSA and we are now interested to
solicit proposals for papers to be included in sponsored panels on the
topics outlined below. Interested participants should send a paper
title, a 50-100 word abstract, and a brief cv to
michelle.meagher@ualberta.ca by February 15th.
Contributors with proposals related to the interest group as well as to
the conference theme of decoloniality but not in alignment with the
calls for papers below are encouraged to contact the organizer.
CALL FOR PAPERS #1: Feminist Publishing on the Margins (Conference
subtheme one: Unsettling Settler Logics)
In this panel, we interrogate the influence of settler colonial logics
and its structural violences on the production and study of feminist
publishing more broadly. The panel is interested, in other words, to
consider how taking up the NWSA conference theme of decoloniality must
push us toward identifying and unsettling the silences in settler-
colonial feminist print cultural production. We are interested in papers
that investigate the force of settler colonial thinking in feminist
publishing as well as for papers that expand the field of feminist
publishing by examining marginalized publications and publishing
practices. Case studies of artifacts like kimiwan, Unceded Voices, or
other publications produced at the margins of settler colonial
publishing practices are particularly encouraged. Ultimately, we are
soliciting papers that expand and alter the logics of feminist
publishing in ways that demand a rethinking of feminist histories.
Key questions include:
• What are the legacies of the exclusion of some knowledges,
experiences, words, and bodies from the field of feminist publishing?
• How can feminist publishing practitioners and feminist scholars
of print and digital culture respond to the erasure and silencing of
colonized and marginalized voices?
• How have and can feminist publishing studies center the voices
and knowledges of marginalized activist (feminist) communities?
• How can the field of publishing studies centre what Adela Licona
(2012) describes as “zines in third space”?
CALL FOR PAPERS #2: Decolonial aesthetics in print culture (Conference
subtheme five: World-Making and Resistant Imaginaries)
This panel takes up the broad theme of feminist world-making through an
analysis of publishing as creative work that sparks revolutionary
struggle. We define print culture as a broad category that includes
zines, periodicals, feminist presses, scholarly periodicals, popular
periodicals, textbooks, blogs, and more. Publishing studies examines
these artifacts, but it also examines the conditions of their production
and circulation, which means that this field of study is open to
examination of community formation, social, political, activist, and
commercial networks. We take up the NWSA’s description of decoloniality
as a worldview that challenges, queries, unsettles knowledges in order
to ask how decolonial ways of knowing and making have shaped the
production, circulation, and reception of feminist periodicals,
anthologies, zines, and blogs.
Key questions include:
• How does feminist publishing break down the divisions between
aesthetic and analytical, the affective and the intellectual, between
art and theory, creativity and criticism?
• How does feminist print and digital cultural production practice
decoloniality?
• How might feminist print and digital cultural production more
radically and revolutionarily practice decoloniality?
• How have feminist publishing projects taken up decolonial ways
of working by practicing, for instance, collaboration as a form of
knowledge making based on alliance, reciprocity, and relationality?
For more information about the Publishing Feminisms Working Group, see
our webpage, publishingfeminisms.com or contact one of the Special
interest group co-chairs, Michelle Meagher, michelle.meagher@ualberta or
Amy E. Farrell, farrell@dickinson.edu