2025 Annual Graduate Conference Call for Papers

By
Columbia U ISSG
January 23, 2025

2025 Annual Graduate Conference

Feminisms in Motion: Approaches to Transit, Contagion, and Movement

April 18, 2025
10am – 4pm
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Submission Deadline: February 20, 2025

How do feminist, queer, and trans ideas move across space, time, and people? In what ways do they spread, transfer, and intersect? The 2025 Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender Graduate Conference at Columbia University (in-person) welcomes papers that imaginatively investigate the dynamic and multiple forms of “movement” of feminist/queer/trans thought that include, but not limited to, transit, contagion, and movement.

Foundational to feminist activism, the exchange of ideas between individuals, groups, and collectives has facilitated critical collaboration, coalition building, and strategic alliances. Feminisms are cited, reproduced, passed hand to hand, retold, retweeted, and transmuted. Gendered & sexual (counter)publics are formed by virtue of finding
themselves named and addressed in texts, art, or media.

Perspectives are transformed through feminist theorizing – sometimes expansively, and sometimes in ways that echo the appropriative, universalizing logics of colonization. The encounter of gendered, sexual, and racial differences has also provoked fear and anxiety, embodied in reactionary responses, border policing, and sedimentation of identity categories.

Challenging the ubiquity and romanticization of “movement” in feminist studies, we invite submissions that examine disagreement and contradiction that manifest in (mis)communication of differences by highlighting the untidy processes of transformation, resolution, and/or maintenance. How can we approach, work through, and counter these contrary impulses in the studies of sexuality and gender? With our discussions, we hope to expand the theorization of what it means to “transmit” feminist queer/trans ideas across disciplines and generations.

We welcome submissions from graduate students who work with feminist, queer, and trans methods across all academic disciplines. We also welcome creative approaches to presentation modality, including seminar papers, personal reflections, creative writing, poetry, or art.

Thematic approaches may include but are not limited to:
• Virality, memes, & the spread of ideas on social media
• Speed, rapidity of spread, dissemination of information
• Transnational feminism & geographical movement of ideas
• Feminist, queer, and trans intellectual histories & the politics of citation
• Translations, popularizations, and/or bastardizations of feminist thought
• Generational feminist lineages & conflicts; cycles of feminist thought
• Appropriation & improper articulations
• Intersectional encounters & transformative dialogues
• Indigenous & decolonial interventions into feminist intellectual histories
• Propaganda, public outreach, recruitment, & movement building
• Censorship
• Feminist, queer, and trans responses to “social contagion” narratives & the spread of identity
• Disability studies & crip approaches to contagion & movement
• Networks, collectives, & movement organizing in the digital age
• Biopolitics, miscegenation, and feminist approaches to race
• Border wars, border policing, fear & anxiety
• Archiving for the future & feminist, queer, and trans pedagogies
• Romanticization of past movements & its effect on present activism
• Social & ideological reproduction
(*This is only a preliminary list of themes. We encourage anyone that works on or adjacent to this topic to submit a proposal.)

Each participant will be given 15 minutes to present. The conference will take place in person at Columbia University. Participants are responsible for funding their own attendance; we regret not being able to offer financial assistance for travel or accommodation.

Please submit proposals as a .docx or .pdf file to Levi Hord at [email protected] by 11:59pm on February 20, 2025, and include the following:
1. A cover page that includes: the title of your proposed presentation, your name, affiliation(s), email address, a brief (150-200 word) bio, and 3-5 keywords for your presentation.
2. A separate document that includes: the title of your presentation and an abstract of 150-200 words describing the intentions of your presentation.
3. An indication (in the body of your email) of any schedule conflicts on the day of the conference.