FTGS Call for Proposals for ISA2023 Montreal (Deadline 01 June 2022)

Time to submit proposals to the ISA Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) section programme!

You may have seen that the call for proposals is now live and the deadline for submissions is June 1, so now is the time to start planning papers, roundtables and panel. The conference is scheduled for 15-18 March 2023. Details can be found here.  

The theme for this year is “Real Struggles, High Stakes: Cooperation, Contention, and Creativity.”

Feminist scholarship has played a crucial role in theorising, resisting, and transforming how ‘struggles’ and ‘stakes’ are shaped by overlapping structures of power based on gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity/citizenship, epistemologies, and geographic location. Feminists have multiple traditions that critically unveil the continuum of struggles between ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics, ‘crisis’ and the ‘mundane’, and the individual with the ecological. These traditions offer diverse ways of rethinking the very terms of the debates that constitute political domains and disciplinarity itself. Moreover, they generate pluralist understandings and a richer accounting of the stakes involved in human and societal struggles through analysis of gendered ideologies, structures, subjectivities, onto-epistemologies, and processes. Feminism’s diverse epistemological, ontological, conceptual, methodological, and ethical toolkits can inform and embody emancipatory solutions and processes in addressing contemporary political struggles. They connect feminist research with activism and practice and disrupt the dualism between the two.

The FTGS section invites proposals seeking to critically interrogate diverse struggles and stakes that define global politics today. The section is particularly interested in submissions that address elements of the following questions, with the aim of creating dialogues among established and emerging feminist and gender theory scholars across our Section and our broader Association.

These questions include:  

• What forms of gendered struggles animate international studies as a discipline and arena of power?

• How might feminist scholarship challenge, inform and reimagine prevailing knowledge on global risks, hazards, and what is at stake?

• How can feminist approaches help reveal the gendered logics underpinning how and why particular struggles are memorialised while others are erased or ‘normalised’? 

• What are feminist alternatives to ‘cooperation’ and ‘contention’? How might these concepts link with ‘solidarity’, ‘resistance’ and kinship?

• What are past, present and emergent forms of feminist cooperation and contention to address global political struggles?

• What has been the role played by creativity in feminist struggles and knowledge making practices? To what extent can creativity reflect feminist ethics and activism?

• How can feminist research and activism privilege struggles from the margins and in so doing decentre current global centres, subjectivities and structures of economic, political, ecological decision making?

This is not an exhaustive list, and we invite proposals for panels and roundtables relevant to the conference theme and those advancing more expansive understandings of or alternative frameworks to cooperation, contention, and creativity.

While we encourage FTGS panels that specifically address the conference theme, this is not a requirement. The ISA is also accepting some specialty proposals for a limited number of innovative panels, non-English language roundtables, research workshops and career courses (see here for Special Convention Programmes.  

We are also looking to continue co-sponsoring panels with other Sections to maximise our presence, the depth of our reach, and co-learnings: please do indicate your co-sponsorship preferences when submitting as it is likely to enhance the possibility of getting on to the program as well as enhancing our links with other elements of ISA.  

Please be reminded that following the decision from ISA, the conference will be an in-person event only.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact FTGS Program Co-Chairs: Toni  Haastrup  (toni.haastrup@stir.ac.uk) and Maria Tanyag (maria.tanyag@anu.edu.au).