Call for Papers: Fourth Biennial European Association for Americ an Studies (EAAS) Women’s Network Symposium

CFP: Fourth Biennial European Association for American Studies (EAAS) Women’s Network Symposium, in collaboration with the Polish Association for American Studies (PAAS)

Feminisms in American Studies in/and Crisis: Where Do We Go From Here?

University of Warsaw, Poland: 30 April 2021
or online: 16 April 2021

Understanding feminist scholarship as a form of critical practice necessitates the continuous crit­ical self-scrutiny of one’s field, one’s archive, one’s canon, and one’s own situatedness and posi­tionality. The question of who speaks, and who speaks for whom, in feminist scholarship requires thorough inquiry because un/marked universalisms have always been written into Western dis­courses of identity, agency, and, not least of all, woman*hood.

We, the Steering Committee of the EAAS Women’s Network, would like to take our 2021 confer­ence as an opportunity to take stock of feminist scholarship in (European) American studies, and we invite contributions (research papers, position papers, meditations, and musings) that reflect on, interrogate, and rethink cultural production, philosophy, and lived experiences with respect to conceptions of feminism as a critical practice of scholarship from intersectional perspectives.

Although feminism has been conceived most broadly as an heiress to the women’s liberation and suffrage movements, its liberatory practices have, time and again, unveiled that other forms of oppression and inequality cannot be remedied by or subsumed under the feminist project. For instance, in regard to the ongoing climate crisis and the latest health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the particular inequalities and vulnerabilities of women* and trans* and non-binary people have especially come to the fore. The formation of nationalist, (alt)right, racist, and xeno­phobic ‘feminisms’ have been gaining popular and populist support in Europe and the United States, deploying racist and racializing tropes firmly rooted in anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism; and the backlash against gender studies is often based on simplistic (mis)understandings of and hostility towards deconstructivist and queer approaches.

In response to these challenges and crises, this conference is interested in (revisionist) readings of U.S.-American feminist history, interrogations of past and current feminist theories and prac­tices, grievances of and towards (particular) feminist positions, national and global challenges to feminist activism, and utopian visions. We invite contributions on all forms of cultural production, the production of knowledge, activism in the academy, critical pedagogy, the history of science, and the history of ideas, including but not limited to the following:

●     feminist and intersectional perspectives on

○     forced migration

○     healthcare and the global care chain

○     climate justice

○     the (neoliberal) academy

●     feminism and political movements: suffrage and abolition, feminism and the civil rights movement, women’s rights and the (alt)right, women’s marches, the Pussyhat Project, Black Lives Matter

●     feminist and intersectional pedagogies and methodologies in American studies class­rooms

●     feminist and intersectional activism in/and research

●     intersectionality and critiques of power: feminisms, post-colonial and de-colonial studies, critical posthumanism, etc.

●     feminist “declarations of whiteness” (Ahmed) and critical whiteness studies; (critiques of) white fragility (DiAngelo); liberal feminism and white allyship in academia and beyond

●     intersectional perspectives on sex and gender in the sciences and medicine

●     intersection of race, sex, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability in positions of power and politics

Please submit your proposals (300–400 word abstract) and a short bio note (up to 150 words) to: eaaswomensnetwork@gmail.com

Deadline for proposal submission: December 15, 2020. Acceptance notes will go out in late January 2021.

In order to encourage the participation of as many speakers and audience members as possible, this symposium will not have a registration fee.

Presenters will be encouraged to submit full-text articles (5,000-8,000 words) to the double-blind review process of  our e-journal, WiN: The EAAS Women’s Network Journal (http://women.eaas.eu/win-journal/).

A note on logistics: due to the unstable situation re. COVID-19, we will have to remain flexible in regards to the format of the conference. We are planning to convene in Warsaw on April 30, 2021 (one day before the EAAS conference), but we may have to hold our symposium online (possibly on April 16, 2021). Please indicate in your proposal whether you can imagine traveling in the spring; we want to consider speakers’ needs and preferences during the planning phase. We will keep confirmed speakers updated.

More information will be posted on our website as it becomes available: http://www.women.eaas.eu

The EAAS Women’s Network Steering Committee:

Ingrid Gessner (Austria)
Johanna Heil (Germany)
Izabella Kimak (Poland)
Elisabetta Marino (Italy)  

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EAAS Women’s Network
http://women.eaas.eu
https://www.facebook.com/EAAS-Womens-Network-350803805637592/ 

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