Category Archives: NWSA

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

2011 Call for Proposals

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NWSA 2011 CFP Now Available:
February 15 Submission Deadline

Feminist Transformations • November 10-13, 2011 · Atlanta, GA

Program Co-Chairs: Bonnie Thornton Dill,
NWSA President 2010-2012
Professor and Chair Department of Women’s Studies
Founding Director, Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity
University of Maryland

Nikol Alexander-Floyd
Associate Professor, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Co-Founder, Association
for the Study of Black Women in Politics Rutgers University

Feminist Transformations will extend the conversations begun in the past two years
by the NWSA on “Difficult Dialogues” by exploring how we as feminists and women’s
studies scholars are transforming the academy-even as it experiences its own transformation-and
how it has also transformed us; how we understand and assess the limitations and
 inroads we have made in transforming our relationship to traditional disciplines;
and how we continue the struggle to make social justice a central aim of our scholarship
and a core value of this society.

The conference explores a central question: how are we transforming thinking about
social change, social movements, knowledge production and agency and how are these
shifts transforming our thinking?   Moreover in doing so, it seeks to provide a
forum for examining how women’s studies as a field and feminist theorizing as an
 analytical approach are being transformed through practices that center the ideas
and knowledge generated by intersectionality and transnationalism.

NWSA 2011 identifies several thematic areas in which feminist transformations have
been particularly relevant and/or require sustained dialogue:

* The Politics of Crisis
* Subverting the “Master’s” Tools?
* Deploying Feminisms
* Women’s Studies without Walls
* Creative Interventions

http://www.nwsa.org/conference/
Visit the conference site for full details and to download the CFP

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New Program Feature: Nominations Invited

Authors Meet Critics Sessions

Nomination Deadline for Author Meets Critics Sessions: March 18, 2011
This year we will introduce a new set of featured sessions into the program:  Authors
Meet Critics sessions will be designed to bring authors of recent books, deemed
to be important contributions to the field of women’s studies, together with discussants
chosen to provide a variety of viewpoints. Two or three such sessions will be included
in the program and NWSA members are invited to nominate books published between
2009 and 2011. 

Both single authored books and edited collections that are the result
of collaborative engagement among the contributors will be considered. Only NWSA
members may submit nominations; self-nominations and nominations by presses will
not be accepted.  Members of the 2011 program committee will review the nominations
and make selection decisions.

Author Meets Critics Sessions proposals must be submitted via the conference website
 and include:

* Name and affiliation of book author(s)
* Rationale for inclusion in the 2011 program, and
* Suggestions for critics and session organizer, including background and rationale for inclusion for each person

Full details at: http://www.nwsa.org/conference/sessions.php

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