Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 13:46:53 -0600
Subject: An exciting conference



Please distribute the announcement below to all those who might be interested.  I look forward to your feedback!
Thanks,
Sonita.

Sonita Sarker
Chair, Women's and Gender Studies/Associate Professor, WGS & English
Macalester College       1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA.
PH: +1-651-696-6316      Fax: +1-651-696-6350  sarker-AT-macalester.edu
________________

A Ford Foundation ?Emerging Leaders, New Directions? Initiative
At The Women?s and Gender Studies Program of Macalester College

Sustainable Feminisms: Enacting theories, Envisioning action
A Cross-border conference

Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Friday, October 3?Sunday, October 5, 2003

THEMES: The crises we face daily and over time?poverty, dislocation, marginalization, delegitimation, attack, or disenfranchisement?have compelled us, in our anti-discriminatory work, to imagine as well as enact challenges to dominant policies and practices.  We have learned about, debated, and modified these challenges inside and outside our institutions, 
our neighborhoods, our conference halls, and our homes.  And we have encountered them in diverse and often separate ways, through single-issue or multi-issue politics that open categories such as gender, race, citizenship, sexuality, class, religion, and nation to mutual redefinition.

It is urgent, particularly at this moment in our histories, to review and re-imagine our diverse and separate engagements.  This conference invites you?artists, scholars, community organizers, educators, policy-makers, lawmakers, students, and people who live in more than one of these identities.  Are we content with divisions such as theorist vs. activist, inside vs. outside our institutions (educational, legal, political), socio-political work vs. intellectual work?  It welcomes you to argue whether we have already been practicing across such divisions as well as across local, national, and international borders.  It asks you to analyze how and why we have created/create such collaborations.  It seeks to open up for discussion how feminisms, and your interpretations of them, contribute to such collaborations.  And it supports conversations on how sustainable forms of feminisms, through various generations, can tackle the 
needs of our times.

This conference invites proposals from people who have already engaged one another closely and from those who wish to dialogue for the first time, across the various categories mentioned above.

GOALS:
*To investigate what legacies we rely upon, where we come from, whether there are unexplored connections, and how we can build new templates of mutually sustainable theorizing and action.
*To imagine what the present and future prospects are for trans-categorical 
collaboration that materially and conceptually redefines our work to address the crises of our times, through our acts of scholarship and programming objectives.

Some guiding QUESTIONS:
*From your perspective, what are the relationships between feminist theory and practice?
*Does it serve our purposes/goals to recognize or deny that practice is a form of theorizing and vice versa?
*Do historical contexts, economic, or other geopolitical relations emphasize or suppress the need for such collaborations?  And how are such collaborations affected by perceived differences of culture, class, religion, nation, gender, age, ability?
*Are we able or even willing to translate across perceived differences or do we accentuate our separate spheres, and why?
*What are the factors that facilitate as well as obstruct collaborations?
*How does your work engage knowledge that circulates as ?academic theory,? ?action research,? or ?public scholarship??
* Is ?activism? different from ?action??
* Can transformation occur in both theory and practice?
*How do our agreements and disagreements shape policies and practices in women?s, feminist, gender, and sexuality work?

Possible ISSUES (you are welcome to propose others):
* Institutional structures, e.g., social work organizations, liberal arts colleges, research universities, legislatures, economic and cultural policy 
organizations.
* Immigration and migration
* Cultural work and art activism for social change
* Global capitalism and labor organizing: sweatshops; service-workers in global cities; unionization
* Structural adjustment policies and state sovereignty
* Pan-indigenous organizing
* Apartheid and ethnic cleansing
* Health in relation to poverty, social welfare, environmental racism, HIV/AIDS prevention work
* Human rights advocacy
* Systemic violence: economic, political, military, terrorist, sexual, etc.
* Reproductive politics
* Redefining sex: cosmetic genital surgery on intersex infants; sex-worker organizing; intersex and transsexual civil rights
* Bodily and genital mutilation
* Tourism
* Prison activisms
* Education and curricular transformations
* Autonomous organizing by women and sexual minorities, including two-spirit, intersex, transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay people.

A volume of selected papers from this conference is planned for publication.

FORMATS:
The conference will feature a variety of roundtables, workshops, discussant 
panels, plenaries, and performances.  Creative submissions are encouraged.

DEADLINES:
All proposals, e-mail or otherwise, MUST reach Macalester College by Friday, February 14, 2003.  Please send a 1000-word description, with title, of paper or 2000-word panel, roundtable, or workshop.  In each case, 
include names of participants, affiliation, and current contact information.  In each case, please also submit a 50-word abstract (strict word-limits for all of the above).

NOTE: A small stipend is available to enable travel for small-budget groups/individuals, such as non-profit organizations and volunteers in informal community social-work groups.  Along with your proposal, please submit a rationale demonstrating relevance of issue and need for the funds, 
also by Friday, February 14, 2003.

All decisions of selected participants and stipends will be announced by Monday, March 11, 2003.

All full-length submissions, e-mail or otherwise, MUST reach Macalester College by Friday, May 9, 2003, for full paper, if submitting for consideration of publication.  Maximum length of essay: 5000 words.

The conference website will appear soon at www.macalester.edu/wgs and will be updated every month.  Visit the Macalester WGS website for information about the program and its initiatives.

For other details, please contact Sonita Sarker (sarker-AT-macalester.edu) or Scott Morgensen (morgensen-AT-macalester.edu).  All proposals and submissions must be addressed to either Sonita or Scott at their e-mail addresses or their postal address: Women?s and Gender Studies, Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA.


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