2018 CFP

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

November 30 – December 1, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS – DEADLINE EXTENDED TO  OCTOBER 12, 2018

**Small Travel Awards Are Available For Presenters From Outside the Triangle**

Undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows are invited to submit abstracts to the third meeting of Feminisms Here and Now, an interdisciplinary conference organized by PhD students in the Departments of Communication and Geography of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This year’s theme – Continuities and Contradictions – builds on our two prior themes, “An Interdisciplinary Conversation” and “Alongside | Across | Against,” by taking up the notion that often as academics, activists, and people interested in feminisms, womanism, equity and justice, we must come together from very different frameworks of experience and belief to work toward our goals. To do this work, it is often essential that we hold many – often different, contradictory, or even paradoxical, ideas and truths in our hands, hearts, and minds simultaneously. Thus, we must navigate our continuities and contradictions.

This navigation is complicated and risky particularly in this era of regressive politics. We are experiencing continual systematic legislative and judicial attacks across multiple fronts including human rights, voting rights, free speech, racial justice, reproductive justice, LGBTQIA rights, economic justice, indigenous rights, and environmental justice, and many other urgent concerns. All of these issues demand our attention and action. Activism in response to these issues has been long standing but now rises into public consciousness through movements such as Black Lives Matter, the fight for clean water at Standing Rock, the Women’s March, the Not One More, the Me Too, and the Time’s Up campaigns. Moreover, social media and digital platforms ensure that these types of feminist discussions are occurring across not simply local or national contexts but globally. This seeming eruption of activism and resistance highlights the urgent need for feminists to explore tensions between the popular consciousness and the ongoing daily efforts of feminist activists, academics, and authors.

Thus the theme, “Continuities and Contradictions” is meant to examine the necessity of feminisms and for feminists to move forward together without homogenizing or resolving our differences but instead valuing our complexities and contributions as essential to forging a different and more just world.

Here and now, we ask:

• What does it mean to value our differences as not only necessary but also as the deep strength and generative force from which our (feminist) world making stems?
• How do we bridge multiple different theoretical, activist, and quotidian approaches including academic feminisms, on the ground organizing / activism, and engaging with the problematics and benefits of pop-feminism?
• Which tools, constructs, and theories help us to hold onto the complexities of our experiences while simultaneously keeping an eye to the tensions between daily living and structural challenges, the local and the global, and the systemic and the individual?
• Where or at what points can we work across the academic, the activist, and the popular to steer a new course into the future?
• How do we address feminisms’ own histories of complicity with systems of power and of producing and reproducing white, western hetero-patriarchal structures of oppression within and across feminist spaces, groups, organizations, and activity?

The conference invites abstracts on feminisms here and now with an understanding that writers may consider each of these terms in their broadest contexts. “Feminisms” may refer to a multiplicity of personal, political, and theoretical positions; “here” may designate any place, space, or scale; and “now” can include all relevant pasts, presents, and futures. Work utilizing critical, theoretical, qualitative, social scientific, performative, or other methodologies are welcome, as are all disciplinary, departmental, activist, or programmatic orientations and perspectives. Submissions not directly responding to this year’s theme are also encouraged. Abstracts (400 words maximum) may be submitted on the Feminisms Here and Now: Continuities and Contradictions website at https://feminismhereandnowconference.web.unc.edu.

The deadline for submissions is October 12, 2018. Participants will be notified of acceptance by October 26, 2018.

Please visit https://feminismhereandnowconference.web.unc.edu for details about the conference, including schedule, speakers, registration (free), travel, and location information. The website will be updated regularly with new information. Please use the “Contact Us” form on the website to send any questions or comments about the conference logistics or this call. All other questions should be directed to our conference email address: FHN@unc.edu