2009 Mid-Atlantic Women's Studies Association

Dates: March 27-28, 2009
Deadline for Submissions: October 15, 2008
Location: Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901

Taking Stock: Transformative Scholarship, Transforming Practices

2009 will mark the 40th anniversary of the first glimmerings of Women’s Studies within colleges and universities across the United States. Over the past four decades, feminist scholars have transformed knowledge in the humanities, social sciences and life sciences, challenging long-established beliefs, contesting dominant paradigms, identifying new areas of research, and introducing new strategies of analysis using a complex matrix of gender, class, race, age, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality as fundamental categories of social, cultural, historical and scientific inquiry.

Simultaneously, feminist activists have mobilized in grass-root struggles in communities around the globe and within national institutions and international organizations to envision a future worthy of feminist allegiance, and to combine activism, political interventions, and policy transformations to bring that future into being. Seeking changes in consciousness, attitudes, expectations, interpersonal relations, cultural practices, social institutions, agencies of governance, and knowledge production, feminists have wrought profound changes in the world.

"Taking Stock: Transformative Scholarship, Transforming Practices" will examine the intellectual, political, social, and interpersonal worlds that feminists have created despite three decades of backlash. The Organizing Committee welcomes papers that address feminist efforts to reduce inequities and inequalities associated with race- and gender-based oppression; efforts to create adequate health care, education, welfare, employment, personal security and equity policies that redress gender- and race-based injustices; efforts to “engender” states by seeking gender parity and gender quotas in elective and appointive offices, constitutional guarantees of equal citizenship and equal protection of the law and policy changes to require gender mainstreaming, gender-impact analyses, gender equitable budgets, and monitoring to insure compliance with equality objectives across all policy domains; efforts to make visible women’s reproductive and domestic labor and to reduce the burden of women’s triple shift by redistributing subsistence, childcare, and community-building labor more equitably across genders; efforts to secure women’s rights as human rights, to end all forms of violence against women, and to secure reproductive freedom and sexual self-determination; efforts to transform educational and pedagogical practices; efforts to transform the arts and cultural production; and efforts to devise innovative methodologies to transform knowledge production.

Plenary sessions will feature distinguished feminist scholars and activists including Sara Ahmed, Charlotte Bunch, Florence Butegwa, Cheryl Clarke, Nikol Alexander Floyd, Paula Giddings, Carol Gilligan, Elizabeth Grosz, Alison Jaggar, Diana Tientjens Meyers, Jacqueline Pitanguy, Jasbir Puar, Cheryl Wall, and Deborah Gray White.

Please send electronic versions of paper or panel proposals to Mary Hawkesworth, mhawkes@rci.rutgers.edu <mailto:mhawkes@rci.rutgers.edu>, noting MAWSA 2009 Conference Proposal in the subject head.

*DEADLINE for Submissions: October 15, 2008*

MAWSA 2009 Organizing Committee
Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
Rutgers University
162 Ryders Lane
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901