Call for Papers

How can feminisms and Women’s Studies help scholars, policymakers, students, and practitioners navigate the complex precarity of the world today? Climate emergencies are producing climate refugees. Billionaires, horde the world’s resources while others starve from inequitable policies exacerbated by human exponential population explosion, loss of biodiversity in a 6^th mass extinction, and global pandemic. These are precarious times indeed, especially for the most vulnerable among us, women and children, particularly those of marginalized, minoritized social statuses—caste, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, disability and the like. Even among those of us who are more privileged, mental health crises are rising through the daily stresses of inflation, poor air and water quality, difficulties accessing health care and other services, long working hours, battling stereotypes and micro-aggressions, combined with the existential awareness of overarching planetary problems. Most ironic, is that many of the ideas for how to transform current realities exist. The problem is in the intractability of human sociocultural, political, and economic systems, slow to move, stifled by those in power. 

Feminists have galvanized change in societies worldwide for over a century and a half and must continue to do so, in spite of pushback. In fact, pushback is the inevitable response when the status quo is threatened by those who think they have the most to lose and who measure their loss in material wealth and the capacity to make decisions over others. Thus, humanity is always in need of transformative visions—visions for how to enact change, visions about the nature of change. Feminist decolonial curricula and scholarship, meaningful across borders, are increasingly shedding light on global histories of multiple colonizations, power abuses, and imperialisms. Their truths and pathways for decolonizing minds and bodies can uplift our spirits in hope of a different imaginary. Coalitions built across borderlands, galvanized by optics that are egalitarian, equitable, humane, ecological, queer/non-binary, must be taught in new pedagogies, inspiring the young, creating new social structures in the home, among peers and colleagues, in the workplace, in governing bodies. They must be translated into languages that all understand to bring about the great changes that we need.

The WCWS sets us on this course, motivates us to build partnerships and friendships across but not in denial of our differences. We come together seeking new knowledge, strategies, support, mentorship, relationship-building, creative artistries, to energize us, to offer healing, so that we may return to our localities to do the work that must be done.