Call for Proposals: Thinking Gender 2026

“Feminist and Queer Ecologies” | April 16-17, 2026

Submission deadline: Sunday, October 26, 2025 at 11:59 pm PDT.

The UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center invites proposals for our 36th annual Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference (TG26).

This year’s conference theme, “Feminist and Queer Ecologies,” explores how ecologies and environments are shaped, understood, and struggled for in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality. It simultaneously considers how scholarly and other observations and theorizations of ecological and environmental processes have yielded insights for feminist and queer theory, practice, and organizing.

Ecological processes and experiences are profoundly shaped by, and productive of, gender and sexuality. Agriculture, the built environment, labor, social reproduction, and other gendered patterns of everyday life have long shaped ecologies, as have gendered understandings of the substance and geography of nature. Feminist and queer thought have shown how water is gendered and affects the lives of women and girls, how climate change can be faced and conceptualized in relation to queer life and futures, and how ecosystem degradation and restoration occur and matter. Queer ecologies provide insights into relationality, kinship, and temporality. Artists and scholars, including Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Joanne Barker, have built understandings of Black and Indigenous feminisms through, for example, exploration of marine mammals and water. Indigenous epistemologies, as well as posthumanist and material turns in scholarship, have called attention to kinship and relationality with more-than-humans. Historians have shown how ecologies have been shaped by gendered and colonial ideas of wilderness, domesticity, and reproduction. Feminist and queer place-based narratives and multimodal storytelling, along with other methods, provide both evidence and promise for climate resiliency, environmental justice, and well-being. Social movements against environmental injustices around the world–e.g., at Standing Rock in Lakota/Dakota territory, in Flint, at the Rio Blanco in Honduras, at “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades, in rural India, and in nearby Compton, California–have been led by women. Colonialism and empire, in their many forms, have operated through entanglements of environment, gender, and sexuality. Climate change and climate justice differentially affect people based in part on gender, sexuality, race, and class. Health and reproductive justice are intertwined with environment. Activists around the world have shown how ecological flourishing is bound up with feminist and queer justice.

Understanding feminist and queer ecologies requires multidisciplinary inquiry and collaboration, as well as engagement with disciplinary formations. This theme calls for gathering environmental scientists, humanities scholars and social scientists, artists and other creators, and other thinkers and organizers. It opens up methodological examination and experimentation with scientific methods, storytelling, ethnography, place-based knowledge production, natural and environmental history, political theory, ecological and economic modeling, and other ways of knowing and truth-telling. It invites feminist and queer collaborations across disciplines and ways of knowing, species, space, and time.

Possible questions for engagement include, but are not limited to:

How have feminist and queer theories contributed to understandings of ecologies and environment?
What can scientific understandings of ecological, physical, chemical, or environmental processes contribute to understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality?
What is the role of the state in constraining or enabling feminist and queer ecologies?
How have Black feminists reoriented thought through concepts like wake, shoals, and undrowned?
How might environmental histories be retold and environmental data be reinterpreted through feminist and queer methods and inquiries?
Why and how have gender and sexuality been built into land and water management, agriculture, and environmental governance?
How do discovery science and science/engineering practice as management relate to identity and gendered modes of engagement?
How does attention to feminist and queer relationality teach us about anticolonial environmental pasts, presents, and futures?
Why is food sovereignty so often a feminist project?
How is environment connected to health, including reproductive justice?
How can ecosystem restoration be guided by feminist and queer ways of knowing?
What is kinship in relation to ecology and more-than-human worlds?
Why and how has science shaped feminist or queer ecologies?
What forms of solidarity emerge from the “radical relationality” (Melanie Yazzie and Cutch Risling Baldy) that water teaches?
How have access to, data about, or the governance of, environments been shaped by relations of power, including gender, sexuality, sex, indigeneity, race, disability, and class?
What forms of care come into view through the study of feminist and queer ecologies?
How are just ecologies tied to Indigenous sovereignty and environmental governance?
How can communities of learning come together around feminist and queer ecologies?
Why and how is climate change gendered? How has climate hazard exposure been stratified?
Which research methods are called for in studying feminist and queer ecologies?
Which forms of labor shape ecologies in gendered ways, and what is the role of labor organizing?
In what ways has posthumanist scholarship propelled or sidelined insights from feminist and queer scholarship?
What are the feminist and queer dimensions of migration and environment?
How are gender, sex, and sexuality entailed in projects of just transition and fossil fuel reduction?
How can decolonial and feminist art and activism challenge extractive capitalism and offer insights into other ways of living?
(How) Do ideas of environmental sustainability intersect with feminist and queer ideas of social reproduction and futurity?
In what ways have infrastructural design and technical interventions differentially affected marginalized communities?
What has been the impact of settlement patterns shaped by sex, gender, and sexuality (e.g., queer neighborhoods, gendered public/private space)? Conversely, how have physical geographies/environments shaped those patterns?
Why have so many environmental justice campaigns been led by Indigenous women, women of color, and queer folks? What are the implications for scholarship?
What forms of organizing are called for, toward feminist and queer ecological flourishing?

Graduate students have two ways to participate in this conference:

Hybrid workshops for works-in-progress on Thursday, April 16, 2026
Participants will workshop their works-in-progress in closed online sessions either via Zoom or in person at the UCLA campus on Thursday, April 16, 2026. Each workshop will include up to 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. All participants will be asked to read or view each other’s submissions in advance. Participants will then convene with a faculty moderator who will offer constructive feedback and facilitate discussion around each submission.
In-person presentations on Friday, April 17, 2026
Participants will give a public presentation of their finished papers (or other genre) at a panel on the UCLA campus on Friday, April 17, 2026. In addition, participants will take advantage of other in-person activities, including a keynote presentation, offered at the conference.

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), place-based engagements, and film/mixed media.

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), place-based engagements, and film/mixed media to present or workshop. Applicants cannot submit multiple proposals and must choose if they will present a finished paper (or other genre) or workshop a work-in-progress. Only one submission per applicant will be considered.

Please only submit if you are available for the full day, since we cannot confirm which time the panel/workshop will be until later in the planning process.

Submissions of works that are collaborative or co-authored with other students are welcome.

Unpublished submissions are preferred. Recently published and forthcoming articles will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Submissions that are not directly related to the theme, “Feminist and Queer Ecologies” will not be considered.

Due date for submissions: Sunday, October 26, 2025 at 11:59 pm PDT.

Applicants whose submissions are accepted will be notified in mid-December 2025.

Workshop participants (for 4/16/26) will be required to submit the final version of their work-in-progress (not to exceed 20–25 double-spaced pages) by Sunday, March 8, 2026, for pre-circulation among their co-participants and faculty moderator.
Presenters of completed works (on 4/17/26) will be required to submit the final version of their work (not to exceed 20–25 double-spaced pages for a 10–12-minute presentation) by Sunday, March 29, 2026, for pre-circulation among their co-panelists and faculty moderator.

Application Materials

All proposals must be submitted using the online application form.

Only complete submissions received by the due date will be considered.

Scholarly Paper, Dissertation or Thesis Chapter, or Article Draft Application Requirements:

Abstract (max. 250 words) of work to be presented/workshopped that includes: (1) a thesis/research question, (2) methods, (3) theoretical framework, and (4) conclusions or anticipated conclusions. Please submit as a Word doc, not PDF or other formats.
Works Cited or References List (1 page maximum)
CV (2 pages maximum)

Film/Mixed Media or Hybrid Critical/Creative Genres Application Requirements:

Film/Media Synopsis (2 double-spaced pages maximum) of work to be presented/workshopped that includes: (1) a research question or thesis, (2) description of format, (3) discussion of theoretical framework, methodology and process, (4) explanation of your argument and evidence, and (5) conclusions or anticipated conclusions. Please submit as a Word doc, not PDF or other formats. If your piece is co-created with other students, please make this clear.
CV (2 pages maximum)
Link (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) where Film or Mixed Media can be viewed. Total run-time should not exceed 20 minutes. Note: our submission platform does not support uploaded files. Please insert links into your synopsis.

For applications in other genres, please contact us for requirement details at the email below.

Questions?

Contact CSW|Streisand Center at thinkinggender@women.ucla.edu.

Apply here