Call for GSR Applications: 2023 Thinking Gender Conference Coordinator

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Call for Graduate Student Researcher Applications

The Center for the Study of Women (CSW) is accepting applications for a 25-50% Graduate Student Researcher (GSR) from July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2023.  The GSR’s main responsibility will be to plan the 2023 Thinking Gender Conference and may be assigned other research-related duties depending on the needs of the center.

Thinking Gender is an annual public conference that draws scholars from across disciplines – humanities, social sciences, life sciences, arts, law, education, public health, and public policy – to share research on women, sexuality, and gender. Thinking Gender 2023 will be the 33rd year of the conference.

All applications must be submitted using the online application form by Monday, April 11, 2022 at 11:59 PM.

CONFERENCE THEME

Transforming Research: Feminist Methods for Times of Crisis and Possibility

Feminists, particularly racialized and postcolonial subjects, have long played critical roles in rethinking the methods and genres that constitute research, working as scholars, activists, and artists.

At its best, research offers grounds for transformative ideas, unraveling conventional ways of knowing. But the concept of research can also evoke extractivist, pathologizing methodologies that claim ownership of knowledge. While it is by now common to recognize that knowledge is situated, Eurocentric, patriarchal matrices of power persist, sometimes taking subtler form in academic research practices and in the institutional structures that such practices inhabit.

Building from longstanding conversations on feminist epistemologies, decolonial methodologies, and institutional activism, this year’s Thinking Gender conference theme takes the question of feminist research practice as a broad point of engagement. The theme responds to the shifting conditions of academic labor, research, and creative practice that have reshaped the ways students and faculty work, in the academy and beyond. At a moment when institutional structures are in flux due to the unevenly distributed effects of the global pandemic, mass resignations, movements for racial justice, growing economic inequality, and rising authoritarianism in the US and around the world, how can feminist researchers expand the scope and limits of possibility for research? What forms of connection and collaboration are possible, and in what contexts might strategies for disconnection come into play? How can academic fields rethink the conventional scales, rhythms, and formats of research? What are the possibilities for creative practices of writing, making, and activism that offer alternatives to entrenched research genres? How can researchers build regenerative structures within neoliberal university systems, creating spaces that resist the casualization of labor and hierarchical, capitalist forms of knowledge production?

TG23 will take an expansive approach to these areas of inquiry, aiming to foreground historically underrepresented perspectives and seeking to build a space that both reflects upon and models collaborative, feminist modes of research. We welcome submissions from a range of disciplines that engage with critical issues in feminist research theories, practices, and methods, including but not limited to:

  • Collaboration, co-creation, and co-authorship
  • Bridging the theory/practice divide: Art as research, video essays, literary approaches to critical writing
  • Activism and participatory action-research, community-based research
  • Decolonial research methods, ethics and accountability, questions of language
  • Indigenous feminist knowledge making and settler colonialism as epistemology
  • Afterlives of slavery, fugitivity, and critical fabulation as method
  • Disruptions of research temporalities (e.g., slow scholarship, flash ethnography, patchwork ethnography)
  • Data feminism, data sovereignty, algorithms, feminist approaches to race and technology
  • Feminist, decolonial approaches to archives and historiography, archival absences, critical fabulation
  • Critical cartographies, feminist modes of spatial analysis
  • Affect and embodiment in research, experiential research, reflexivity and authorial positioning
  • Nonhuman forms of knowledge, alternative forms of knowledge-making and dissemination
  • Feminist epistemologies, situated knowledges, critical objectivity, forms of empirical evidence
  • False starts, failure studies
  • The relation between theory and method, the universalizing tendencies of theory, low theory, mid-level theory, piecemeal theory
  • Critical university studies, institutional and material conditions for feminist research
  • The relation between the personal and the professional, care work and research
  • Reports from/reflections on research collectives, networks, and other forms of organizing
  • Historical case studies of feminist research or collective worK

While we are particularly interested in applications from candidates with strong research and/or activist interests related to this theme, we invite all UCLA graduate students with an interest in intersectional feminism to apply.

The selected applicant will have the opportunity to collaborate with professor and Thinking Gender 2023 faculty director Jasmine Trice in refining this conference theme and developing a program that makes a significant contribution to transforming feminist research and methodologies.

ELIGIBILITY AND COMPENSATION

The conference will take place in late winter 2023 or early spring 2023. In spring 2023, the GSR will conduct research, writing, analysis, and other assignments based on the needs of CSW.

This GSR position will be at 25-50% time from July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2023. Fee remissions will be included.

The GSR must be registered as a full-time student (enrolled in a minimum of 12 units) during the academic year and maintain a cumulative GPA of 3.0 throughout the duration of the appointment.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Under the supervision of the CSW Program and Research Developer and Thinking Gender faculty director, the GSR will:

  • Plan and oversee an international, interdisciplinary conference
    • Develop and implement plans that will aid the conference goal of serving graduate students and contributing to feminist research
  • Head the conference selection and program committee
    • Curate conference abstracts and papers
    • Review and critique submissions
    • Lead and prepare agendas for conference planning meetings
    • Write and prepare conference documents, including but not limited to calls for submissions, publicity materials, manuals, etc.
  • Build and engage with a network of prominent scholars and administrators to create an interdisciplinary program
    • Develop cross-campus fundraising strategies and hone academic development skills
    • Interact with high-level university administrators
    • Spearhead outreach initiatives

QUALIFICATIONS

  • Registered UCLA graduate student in the 2022-2023 academic year
  • Experience organizing or participating in research conferences
  • Demonstrated ability to lead networking, fundraising, and outreach initiatives
  • Demonstrated ability to work as part of a team and to collaborate during meetings and discussions
  • Strong organizational skills, including:
    • Demonstrated ability to set and meet deadlines and priorities
    • Ability to organize and present information effectively and concisely
    • Ability to set and maintain a reliable work schedule
  • Research interests related to the conference theme and compatible with CSW’s core research on women, sexuality, and gender. We encourage students in any discipline to apply.

APPLICATION MATERIALS

The following materials are required when submitting your application through the online application system:

  1. Cover Letter, outlining how your research interests relate to the conference theme, and what sessions you would incorporate (keynote speakers, workshops, etc.) that would both support the theme and serve the professional and research development needs of graduate students (1 page maximum)
  2. CV
  3. Unofficial UCLA Transcript (with most recent coursework and grades)
  4. List of References: Provide at least two references (name, title, contact information, relation to applicant), one of whom must be a UCLA faculty member. We advise that references be able to comment on your research aptitude (particularly as it relates to the theme), organizational skills, and capacity to oversee the production of a conference.

If selected for an interview, please be prepared to suggest and discuss possible sessions related to the theme, speakers, outreach and fundraising strategies, and formats for the conference.

SUBMISSION DETAILS AND DEADLINE

Please submit your application online via Submittable.

DEADLINE: Monday, April 11, 2022