Category Archives: Category_Calls for Papers

CfP: Zukunft machen: Soziale Bewegungen, historische Zukunftsvisionen und politische Praxis. Workshop für Nachwuchsforschende (04/2027, Bern); bis: 15.01.2027

Lena Joos (Univ. Bern), Leo Grob und Sarah Probst (Univ. Fribourg) (PDF)

Zeit: Fr., 23.04.2027
Ort: Univ. Bern
Einsendeschluss: 15.01.2027

Welche Rolle spielt die Zukunft in sozialen Bewegungen? Soziale Bewegungen richten sich nicht nur gegen bestehende gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse. Sie entwickeln zugleich Vorstellungen davon, wie eine andere Zukunft aussehen könnte. Spuren solcher vergangenen Zukünfte finden sich in politischen Programmen, in strategischen und theoretischen Schriften oder auch in Bildern, Metaphern und Erzählungen. Sie zeigen sich ebenso in Handlungen, die eine bessere Zukunft bereits im Hier und Jetzt vorwegnehmen wollten. Soziale Bewegungen sind damit ein reichhaltiges Archiv alternativer Zukünfte. Utopien, Hoffnungen und konkrete Praktiken des «Zukunft-Machens» begleiten politisches Handeln nicht bloss, sie können es anleiten, Menschen mobilisieren und Identität stiften.
Der Workshop behandelt unterschiedliche soziale Bewegungen und ihre Bezüge zu Zukunftsvorstellungen und Zukunftspraktiken in historischer Perspektive. Er fragt zudem nach deren Bedeutung für die Gegenwart. Zukunft interessiert uns dabei sowohl als analytische Kategorie der Geschichtswissenschaft als auch als Ressource und Praxis sozialer und politischer Bewegungen. Die Beschäftigung mit historischen Zukunftsvisionen kann sichtbar machen, wie gesellschaftlicher Wandel vorstellbar wurde, welche Handlungsspielräume dadurch entstanden und welche Vorstellungen sich als prägend erwiesen. Zugleich wollen wir diskutieren, was historische Zukunftsvorstellungen für heutige Bewegungen und ihren Umgang mit gegenwärtigen Krisen bedeuten können. Diese Frage stellt sich umso dringlicher in einer Gegenwart, in der die Zukunft vielen als Zeitraum der Katastrophe und nicht der Utopie oder Hoffnung erscheint. Mögliche Fragen sind:

  • Welche Zukunftsvisionen, Utopien und Hoffnungen entwickelten verschiedene soziale Bewegungen, und wie wirkten sie mobilisierend oder identitätsstiftend?
  • Welche Quellen geben Auskunft über Zukunftsvorstellungen? Wie lassen sie sich auswerten? Continue reading →

CfP: Age, Alcohol and Drugs: Global Histories (08/2027, Guelph); by: 15.12.2026

Univ. of Guelph, Ontario and the Journal „Social History of Alcohol and Drugs“ (Web)

Venue: Univ. of Guelph, Ontario
Time: 04.-05.08.2027
Proposals by: 15.12.2026

Sociologists have long been interested in the phenomenon of “maturing out” out of alcohol and drug use. Yet recent data suggests that the history of drug and alcohol use over the life course is more complicated than people becoming more moderate or abstinent as they age. People often use the drugs of their youth into older ages, even if the ways in which they use these drugs changes over time. This is particularly true of alcohol, a drug whose legal status in most countries means that some of the important incentives for quitting or reducing use are absent. By contrast, there are legions of ex-smokers in most Western countries today. There are interesting questions to be asked about how the use of legal psychotropics such as SSRI’s, tranquillizers and amphetamines changes over the life course. We are interested in how changing patterns of use are impacted by race, ethnicity, gender, and class – including differential access to prescription pharmaceuticals, different understandings of pain and disability, and the question of affordability. This workshop will examine the historical use of psychotropic substances, including studies of children, youth, young adults, middle-aged adults and the elderly. Histories from all parts of the world are welcome. While the focus of the conference will be on historical approaches to age, alcohol and drugs, applications from non-historians working on historical topics are welcome.

The papers at this conference will be considered for a special issue of the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Potential questions include:

  • How have older people inducted younger people into drug use and what lessons have they tried to impart?
  • How have societies at different times and places tried to encourage or prohibit the drug use of individuals based on their age through law (such as legal drinking ages), informal prohibitions, or incentives (such as teachers encouraging the use of Ritalin and other drugs)? Continue reading →

CfP: Trans Lesbian Life (Publication); by: 01.12.2026

Journal of Lesbian Studies; J. Szpilka (SWPS Univ., Warsaw) and (Em Cousens, Northeastern Univ., London) (Web)

Proposals by: 01.12.2026

Trans lesbians are the shadow history of trans femininity. Despite the demographic significance, archival proliferation, and longstanding cultural contributions of trans lesbians – from the paintings of Toni Ebel (c1950) to the films of the Wachowski sisters (1995-present) – both histories of lesbianism and transness consign the trans lesbian to footnotes. Trans lesbians appear as an aside in Esther Newton’s comment about hormone queens gone deep stealth to live with other women. They bear the weight of representation in origin stories for organized feminist transphobia – the fabled flashpoint of Beth Elliot’s attempted exclusion from the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, for example. And trans lesbian identity is rendered historiographically significant for its counter hegemonic exposure of the enmeshment of zones of trans experience, desire and sociality in Jules Gill-Peterson’s invocation of trans lesbians as the TERF’s, and sexology’s, nightmare. For this issue, we propose a change of perspective: it is high time to put trans lesbians in the spotlight, not as a reference point in discussion of supposedly more general or abstract points of lesbian and trans history and theory, but as themselves, in all of the particularities of their trans lesbian life.
We propose trans lesbian life as a broad category that indexes both a discernably non-cis gendered positionality and the desire for women, inclusively conceived. Thus understood, trans lesbian life is inclusive of trans lesbianism as a claimed identity, as a set of erotic practices, as textual or visual representations, as a political orientation, and above all as a desire for the proliferation of lesbian life and culture. Against narratives that see transness as a threat to or a replacement for lesbianism, we seek to turn attention to the ways that trans lesbianism celebrates, upholds, and expands on histories of lesbian life—histories that it has always been a part of. Read more … (Web)

Source: GenderCampus (Web)

CfP: Alter(n) und Geschlechter (Zeitschrift GENDER); bis: 29.11.2026

GENDER. Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft (Web)

Einreichfrist: 29.11.2026

Der demografische Wandel hin zu einer alternden Gesellschaft, das Älterwerden und das Altsein hat viele Facetten – zwischen Menopause und Altersarmut, zwischen Anti-Ageing-Cremes und Einsamkeit, zwischen Rollator und Senior Experts, zwischen „unwürdigen Greisinnen“ und „potenten Silberrücken“, zwischen ‚später Freiheit‘ und Abhängigkeit. Stereotype Geschlechterbilder prägen das Altern, und neben herkömmlichen Klischees werden neue Klischees – insbesondere medial – produziert. „Das Alter lässt sich nur in seiner Gesamtheit erfassen; es ist nicht nur eine biologische, sondern eine kulturelle Tatsache“, so schreibt Simone de Beauvoir 1970 in Das Alter.
Fast zeitgleich spricht Susan Sontag vom Double Standard of Ageing (1972), nach dem Frauen nicht nur früher als Männer gesellschaftlich als „alt“ gelten, sondern Alt-Sein und Alt-Werden auch negativer bewertet und gesellschaftlich unsichtbar gemacht werden. Seither haben sich die Ansätze zur Intersektion von Alter und Geschlecht ausdifferenziert und denken Lebensverläufe diverser Geschlechter mit, etwa in Bezug auf queeres Alter(n). Demnach wird also nicht nur Geschlecht „gemacht“ (doing gender), sondern auch Alter (doing age) sowie das alternde Geschlecht und das vergeschlechtlichte Alter in seiner intersektionalen Verbindung. Geschlechterforschung und Gerontologie strebt eine intersektionale Verbindung von biologischen, sozialen und kulturellen Aspekten an und untersucht dabei Zusammenhänge zwischen Lebensphase und Lebenslage sowie den Praktiken, Diskursen und normativen Erwartungen, die diese herstellen und (de)stabilisieren. Vor diesem Hintergrund laden wir dazu ein, Beiträge zu theoretischen und methodologischen Fragestellungen sowie zu empirischen Forschungsergebnissen aus der interdisziplinären Geschlechterforschung einzureichen – aus Medizin, Gesundheits- und Pflegewissenschaften, aus den Sozialwissenschaften, Geschichtswissenschaft, Erziehungswissenschaft sowie den Kultur- und Medienwissenschaften und den Science and Technology Studies. Weiterlesen … (PDF)

CfP: Ora et collabora. Women’s and Men’s Religious Communities between Cooperation, Competition, and Control (c. 1300-1700) (06/2027, Munich); by: 16.11.2026

Marlon Bäumer (Univ. of Hamburg), Carolin Gluchowski (Univ. of Hamburg), John Hinderer (LMU Munich), and Tamara Klarić (LMU Munich)

Time: 23.-25.06.2027
Venue: Munich
Proposals by: 16.11.2026

Scholarship still frequently examines religious communities either from the internal perspective of individual women’s and men’s houses or as the objects of institutional programmes pursued by predominantly male authorities. Although recent work in the history of religious orders, gender history, and religious history has highlighted the agency of religious women and the importance of wider networks, relationships between women’s and men’s communities have rarely been analysed systematically and comparatively as a constitutive element of religious life. The cura monialium—the pastoral and sacramental care of communities of religious women—formed one of the most persistent institutional links across gender boundaries. It brought nuns and canonesses into regular contact with confessors, chaplains, preachers, provosts, visitators, and male superiors. Yet these relationships cannot be reduced to a one-directional exercise of male authority: women’s communities negotiated the provision of pastoral care, shaped the activities of their spiritual advisers, mobilised competing authorities, and could appropriate, modify, or resist external demands.
A relational perspective reveals more broadly that religious life did not unfold within clearly bounded institutions. Nuns, monks, canonesses, canons, sisters, brothers, and female and male tertiaries exchanged books, knowledge, and liturgical models; administered property; mediated legal transactions; and mobilised social and political networks. Abbesses negotiated with provosts and visitators; women’s houses collaborated with male communities without simply adopting their ideas; and confessors, preachers, and religious superiors acted simultaneously as supporters, intermediaries, and agents of control. Read more and source … (Web)

Source: HSozKult (Web)

CfP: Gender and Nation (Publication); by: 09.04.2027 [REMINDERIN]

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (Web)

Proposals by: 09.04.2027

Across the globe, nationalist projects are being renewed and intensified, mobilizing “gender” as a central site of social and political struggle. From anti-gender movements and border regimes to racialized citizenship policies and digital surveillance, contemporary nationalisms draw on gender and related intersectional structures to organize political belonging, govern populations, and delineate whose lives are recognized as part of “the nation.” These developments lend a particular urgency to examining thephilosophical stakes of the relationship between “gender” and “nation” today.
This special issue of Hypatia invites philosophicalengagements of the topic of “Gender and Nation.” We seek contributions that interrogate how nations are imagined, experienced, constituted, and governed through genderedlogics that shape various forms of exclusion, political subjectivity, citizenship, and national belonging. While broadly soliciting contributions that (re)consider “the nation” alongside “gender,” we also wish to mark the 30th anniversary of Nira Yuval-Davis’ influential book, Gender and Nation. Yuval-Davis’ work has been foundational for studies on gender and nationalisms, and has inspired countless feminist analyses of the idea and lived experience of “the nation.” In the 30 years since the book’s publication, the world has changed in unimaginable ways, with the last decade, in particular, witnessing a resurgence in nationalist fervour that forms part of a global shift to the right. An assessment of and reengagement with “gender and nation” is therefore not only apt, but arguably more pressing than ever, given that such nationalist resurgence has deployed gendered dynamics that are deeply troubling from a feminist perspective.
Questioning whether the idea and attendant realisation of “the nation” can ever be straightforwardly adopted by feminists, this special issue also provides an opportunity to highlight past and present feminist resistance to misogyny and sexist policymaking underlying patriarchal nation-building projects. Indeed, there are numerous examples of feminist activism and scholarship challenging nationalism, but also reconfiguring and claiming “the nation” and “nationalism” in progressive terms. Building on the by now large and influential feminist literature on nationalisms, of which Gender and Nation is a stalwart, we invite contributors to take stock of work on “the nation”, and to present new and promising ways of thinking about the theme of gender and nation. To this end, articles might address the following questions: Read more … (Web)

Source: GenderCampus (Web)

CfP: Women And Art: Representation, Creativity, And Resistance (Publication); by: 31.10.2026

Conference „Women and Art: Representation, Creativity, and Resistance“; Habib Tekin & Ayşenur Özkan Işık (Web)

Proposals by: 31.10.2026
Publication Fee: 115 Euro

Art has long served as a powerful space in which gender identities, social roles, cultural expectations, and forms of resistance are constructed, questioned, and reimagined. Across different historical periods and cultural contexts, women have participated in artistic production as creators, performers, patrons, critics, and subjects of representation. Yet their contributions have frequently been shaped by unequal access to artistic institutions, dominant aesthetic traditions, and gendered structures of visibility and recognition. The conference „Women and Art: Representation, Creativity, and Resistance“ invites scholars, researchers, artists, and postgraduate students to explore the complex and changing relationship between women and artistic production. The conference seeks to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on how women create, experience, interpret, and transform art, as well as how femininity and gender are represented within different artistic forms.
We particularly welcome contributions that examine the ways in which art can function as a space of memory, identity formation, cultural negotiation, political intervention, and resistance. Papers may address historical or contemporary contexts and may focus on individual artists, artistic movements, particular works, comparative perspectives, or broader theoretical questions concerning women, gender, and aesthetics.
The proposed book seeks to examine the representation, production, and experience of women in art from gendered, cultural, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including but not limited to the following areas:

– Women artists in historical and contemporary contexts
– Representations of women in art
– Women and literature
– Women in painting, sculpture, and visual arts
– Women in photography and film
– Women in theatre, performance, dance, and music
– Feminist art and feminist aesthetics Continue reading →

CfP: Epistemologies of the Hinterland. The Making of Rural Knowledge in the 20th Century and beyond (Publication); by: 15.11.2026

Dietlind Hüchtker (Univ. of Vienna) (Web), Friedrich Cain (Univ. of Vienna) and Pavla Šimkóvá (Collegium Carolinum)

Proposals by: 15.11.2026

Today’s rural environments mirror long historical processes. Especially since the industrial revolution, they can be conceived as the outcome of social, administrative-technological, political, and scientific interventions in a taken-for-granted nature. In our publication project we aim to reconsider these interventions as epistemic complexes that defined rurality along several hierarchical divides that also carved out European modernity: civilization/nature; science/belief, the individual/community; urban/rural; system/habit; measurement/experience; rationality/emotion etc. Focusing on examples from the area of rurality, we want to search for encounters between bodies of knowledge that have historically been perceived as incommensurable and look at the practices, subjects and objects of knowledge production. We envision analyses of incommensurability narratives to open perspectives on developments since the early 20th century, but also on the most recent global climate debates and their often very local pinpoints as well as on recent political attempts to re-naturalize complex histories as national cultures.
We want to bring together case studies from different contexts of rurality that offer a new perspective on rural knowledge. At the centre of our attention is on the “how” of knowledge production in all its contradictions, perceived incommensurabilities and inherent power relations. We are focusing mainly on the 20th century, with some sojourns into the 21st century, and on Europe situated within its imperial, colonial, and global context, and the neo-national backlash of re-naturalizing complex histories as national cultures. The significance of science is a central, but not the only aspect.
We are seeking to publish the contributions as a special issue of an international peer-reviewed journal such as Knowledge or Science in Context. Topics can include but are not limited to:

– researching rurality from different disciplinary perspectives
– relations between the researchers and the researched
– historicity of wilderness, nature, and rural spaces
– knowledge production and gender Read more … (Web) 

Source: Rural History Newsletter 97/2026-109/2026

CfP: The (Un)forgettable Women: Female Presences in Memoirs, Diaries, Correspondence, and Biographies (11/2026, virtual space); by: 15.10.2026

IFSGen. The Romanian Network for Women’s and Gender History (Web)

Time: 19.-21.11.2026
Venue: virtual space
Proposals by: 15.10.2026

On the publication of his book of essays, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, Georges Duby examined the question of male dominance in medieval society and at the same time pointed out the limited and one-sided nature of the sources that historians depend on when reconstructing women’s history. Since 1988, Duby’s statements have been modified and corrected, especially as a result of the emergence of new historical methods and the progress of the feminist movements. More voices and sources from women – such as memoirs, diaries, autobiographies and artistic works – have now been included in the (re)construction of women’s history. As a result, the recovery of historical writings produced by women has not only broadened our knowledge of the past but also enabled us to understand it in a more nuanced manner by considering women’s experiences and memories.
Similarly, the memoirs and diaries of people like Anne Frank, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Queen Marie of Romania, Monica Lovinescu, Martha Bibescu, Cornelia Blaga Brediceanu, Marta Trancu-Rainer, and Elena Hartulari have helped ensure their positions in cultural memory, in some instances making them emblematic female figures or even archetypal heroines. Historians have generally concentrated on or restricted themselves to the experiences of these women. Although this has been useful in reconstructing the worlds and experiences of women, it has also involved certain risks, especially the marginalisation or neglect of other women. A result of this method has been the creation of a history mainly focused on ‚female elites‘ – a trend which is still evident in school curricula, for example – in which the majority of women have been treated as a single collective group and have thus remained anonymous.
In view of this, the fourth conference in the IFSGen series wishes to give renewed attention to women’s writings and to the female figures whose contributions have helped lead to a more detailed understanding of major historical events. It also aims to go beyond the existing canon of well-known women and to examine how far it is possible to write the history of those who have remained nameless—women coming from diverse social and professional backgrounds who have generally escaped the notice of historians. Read more … (PDF)

CfP: Dirty Laundry: Architecture, Labour, and the Spatial Politics of Washing (Publication); by: 15.10.2026

Chloé Darmon, Marianna Janowicz, and Elke Krasny

Proposals by: 15.10.2026

Dirty Laundry is an architectural and feminist inquiry into how washing reveals the spatial organisation of social life and environmental relations. From rivers and communal wash places to social housing laundries, domestic interiors, laundromats, industrial facilities, and global textile infrastructures, washing connects bodies, materials, water, labour, technologies, and landscapes. Yet despite its fundamental role in sustaining everyday life, laundry has rarely occupied a central place within architectural histories and theories. It has not been invisible; rather, the spaces, practices, and labour relations through which washing is organised have often been naturalised, feminised, displaced, or excluded from architectural narratives.
Moving from river to machine, this volume examines washing as a spatial practice through which social, political, and ecological relations are mediated by architecture and the built environment. It explores how relations of labour, gender, class, ownership, coloniality, welfare, public health, wealth, whiteness, hygiene, cleanliness, technology, water, detergents, chemicals, and waste systems become organised through space — shaping the distribution of bodies, resources, responsibilities, and forms of belonging. Washing reveals how ideas of modernity, health, respectability, domesticity, and care are not only social values and economic conditions but spatial arrangements, materialised through buildings, infrastructures, landscapes, and everyday environments.
While the Frankfurt Kitchen became an emblematic architectural response to domestic labour, efficiency, and the organisation of everyday life, it also generated feminist counter-imaginaries that challenged the spatial confinement and unequal distribution of domestic work. The kitchen became not only an object of architectural reform but a site from which feminist activists, artists, and practitioners reimagined relations between labour, care, and space. Laundry offers a different but equally significant field of inquiry. There is no equivalent canonical figure through which washing has entered architectural history. This absence raises questions about how laundry has been imagined, designed, and spatially organised, and what forms of architectural and feminist counter-planning might emerge when washing becomes the starting point. Dirty Laundry seeks to examine … read more and source (Web).