Thinking Gender 2023: Call for Abstracts

/, by


UCLA Center for the Study of Women | Barbra Streisand Center Presents

Thinking Gender 2023

33rd Annual Graduate Student Research Conference

“Transforming Research: Feminist Methods for Times of Crisis and Possibility”

Thursday, February 23, 2023 (Virtual) and
Friday, February 24, 2023 (In Person)
UCLA

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Submission deadline: October 23, 2022, at 11:59PM PDT

Call for Abstracts

The UCLA Center for the Study of Women | Barbra Streisand Center invites proposals for our 33rd annual and first hybrid Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference.

This year’s conference theme, “Transforming Research: Feminist Methods for Times of Crisis and Possibility,” seeks to open conversations about feminist methods and research across fields and disciplines.

In lieu of a keynote address, the conference (TG23) will feature two in-person interactive sessions. One session will be co-facilitated by TL Cowan and Jas Rault on Trans-Feminist & Queer collaborative “heavy processing” methods for working with digital materials. The second session will be facilitated by Celine Parreñas Shimizu on “Creativity in the Face of Devastation: Methodologies of Research and Practice Across Inequality.”

Students may present at this conference in one of three ways:

  1. Virtual workshops for works-in-progress (for graduate students) on 2/23/2023
  2. In-person presentations of finished projects (for graduate students) on 2/24/2023
  3. In-person poster presentations (for undergraduate students) on 2/24/2023

We welcome a range of submission formats from graduate students, including scholarly papers, works in hybrid critical/creative genres (e.g., multimedia projects, performance, experimental forms of academic writing), and film/mixed media. While submissions are not limited to these, some media formats that might work particularly well for this year’s call include short films and videos, soundscapes, digital and alternative archives or cartographies, and interactive works. We also invite poster proposals from undergraduate students.

  • Virtual graduate student participants will workshop works-in-progress in closed online sessions on 2/23/2023. All participants in a workshop (3–4 students) will be asked to read or view each other’s submissions in advance. Participants will then convene in a Zoom session with a moderator who will offer constructive feedback and facilitate discussion around each submission. The workshops will provide opportunities for thoughtful engagement with each participant’s submission under an ethos of generosity in intellectual engagement. This format was highly successful at the previous two Thinking Gender conferences and received strong support from workshop participants.
  • In-person graduate student participants will give a public presentation of their finished projects at a panel on the UCLA campus on 2/24/2023. In addition, participants will take advantage of other in-person activities offered by the conference, including speaker-led interactive sessions, a poster session, and networking opportunities.
  • Undergraduate poster presentations will be in person on 2/24/2023 only.

This conference is interdisciplinary, and we encourage submissions from all fields of study, across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts. Successful submissions will center feminist research methods and practice, and ideally, engage substantively with power relations concerning race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, Blackness, gender, transness, queerness, and/or forms of colonialism and settler colonialism.

We will highlight work that speaks to different knowledge systems, research formats, critical and creative practices, and/or collaborative modes. We welcome work that reflects upon and/or models feminist, decolonial, collaborative, community-centered, activist, and creative modes of knowledge production and dissemination. We also welcome work that rethinks the possibilities of research settings, formats, scales, rhythms, and durations.

We see the expansive format of this year’s conference as a form of feminist praxis. 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. Even though it is commonly recognized that knowledge is situated, we still see Eurocentric, patriarchal matrices of power persist, sometimes taking subtler forms in academic research practices and institutional structures.

Building from longstanding conversations on feminist epistemologies, decolonial methodologies, and institutional activism, this year’s Thinking Gender conference responds to much-needed inquiries, reflections, and imaginations of feminist, decolonial research methods and practice. We welcome submissions situated in a wide range of inter/disciplinary areas, so long as they engage with critical issues in feminist research theories, practices, and methods. We also encourage work that considers art/creation as methods (beyond simply an object of research or a platform for research dissemination), investigating how creative making and critical writing can mutually inform each other.

Questions for engagement might include:

  • How can we create and disseminate knowledge intentionally and ethically, with accountability to communities as well as awareness of our positionalities and limits to our knowledge?
  • How can we recognize differential ways of being, but also collaborate across different knowledge systems to provide new ways to understand our interhuman, interecological 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?

We encourage applicants to think within, alongside, beyond, and perhaps against the following topics as they consider the shape and content of their prospective participation in TG23:

  • Collaboration, cooperation, co-creation, co-authorship
  • Bridging the theory/practice divide: Art as research, play as method, 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
  • Black feminist thought, 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 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


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Eligibility

Registered graduate students from any institution are eligible to submit abstracts or synopses of scholarly papers, works in hybrid critical/creative genres (e.g., multimedia projects, performance, experimental forms of academic writing), and film/mixed media to present or workshop. While not exhaustive, formats that might work particularly well for this year’s call include seminar papers, dissertation chapters, personal essays, speculative fictions, short films, video/photo essays, soundscapes, digital and alternative archives or cartographies, and interactive works.

Registered undergraduate students from any institution are eligible to submit proposals for in-person poster presentations only.

Please note that students must be registered at the time of the conference, not just at the time of submitting the application.

Submissions of works that are collaborative or co-authored with other students are welcomed. Unpublished submissions are preferred. Recently published and forthcoming projects will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Submissions that are not directly related to the theme, “Transforming Research: Feminist Methods for Times of Crisis and Possibility” will not be considered.

Deadline for Application Submissions

Deadline for Application Submissions: Sunday, October 23, 2022, at 11:59PM PDT

Applicants whose submissions are accepted will be notified by December 12, 2022.

All accepted virtual graduate student participants will be required to submit the final version of their work-in-progress by January 30, 2023, for pre-circulation among their co-participants and faculty moderator. When deciding on submission proposals, please keep in mind that final drafts need to be ready for circulation by this date.

All accepted in-person graduate student participants will be required to submit their finished work by January 30, 2023, for pre-circulation with the faculty moderator. Please note that works will need to be completed, not in-progress, by this date.

All accepted undergraduate student participants will be required to submit their final posters in hard copy by January 30, 2023 at the UCLA Center for Study of Women’s campus office. Please note that posters will need to be completed, not in progress, by this date.

Online Application Form

All proposals must be submitted using the online application form. You will need to create a Submittable account if you do not already have one. In such case, select “Create Account” at the bottom of the form.


APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

Graduate Student Applicants

Virtual Workshops (will take place on Zoom Thursday, February 23, 2023): Each workshop will include four graduate students, a faculty moderator, and up to three observers from other workshops, who will read and provide detailed feedback and questions for each submission. Panelists will be required to submit the final version of their work-in-progress (not to exceed 20–25 double-spaced pages or 20 mins of runtime) by January 30, 2023, for pre-circulation among their co-participants and faculty moderator.

In-Person Presentations (will take place at UCLA on Friday, February 24, 2023): Each panel will include four graduate students, a faculty moderator, and public conference attendees. Paper presentations will be 12 minutes long. Panelists will be required to submit their completed paper by January 30, 2023, for the faculty moderator to read and prepare comments and questions.

Scholarly Paper, Dissertation or Thesis Chapter, or Article Draft Application Requirements:
  1. Abstract or description (2–3 double-spaced pages maximum) of work to be workshopped/presented that includes: (1) a thesis/research question, (2) discussion of methodology and theoretical framework, (3) explanation of your argument and supporting data, and (4) conclusions or anticipated conclusions. If your piece is co-authored with other students, please make this clear. If your paper is co-authored with faculty, please explain who is responsible for which parts or aspects of the paper. We will only accept papers for which the student submitter is the primary author.
  2. Works Cited or References List (1 page maximum)
  3. CV (2 pages maximum)
  4. Online application form
Works in Hybrid Critical/Creative Genres Application Requirements (e.g., Multimedia Projects, Performance, Experimental forms of academic writing, and others):
  1. Project Description (2–3 double-spaced pages maximum) of work to be workshopped/presented that includes: (1) a research question or argument, (2) description of format, (3) discussion of framework, methodology and process, (4) explanation of your argument and evidence, and (5) conclusions or anticipated conclusions. If your piece is co-created with other students, please make this clear.
  2. Works Cited or References List (1 page maximum)
  3. CV (2 pages maximum)
  4. Online application form
Film/Mixed Media Application Requirements:
  1. Film/Media Synopsis (2 pages maximum)
  2. CV (2 pages maximum)
  3. Link (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) where Film or Mixed Media can be viewed. Total run-time should not exceed 20 minutes. Note: while links are preferred, smaller files may also be uploaded in jpg, png, pdf, or mp3/mp4 format on the application platform. If your piece is co-created with other students, please make this clear.
  4. Online application form


Undergraduate Student Applicants

Undergraduate students will present visually compelling research posters. Undergraduate poster presentations will take place in person at the poster exhibit. Presenters will be required to submit their completed posters in hard copy by January 30, 2023, at the UCLA Center for Study of Women’s campus office.

Poster Session Application Requirements:
  1. Poster proposal (1–2 double-spaced pages maximum) that includes (1) a thesis/research question, (2) discussion of methodology and theoretical framework, (3) explanation of your argument and supporting data, and (4) conclusions or anticipated conclusions. If your poster presentation is co-authored with other students, please make this clear.
  2. Works Cited or Reference List (1 page maximum)
  3. CV (2 pages maximum)
  4. Online application form


All materials must be submitted using the online application form. Unless otherwise specified, please submit materials as Word documents, not as PDFs.

Deadline for Application Submissions: Sunday, October 23, 2022, at 11:59PM PDT

Only complete submissions received by the deadline will be considered.

Questions?

Contact Zizi Li, Thinking Gender Coordinator at thinkinggender@women.ucla.edu.