Berkshire Conference of Women, Genders and Sexualities – Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the „Big Berks“ (Web)

Time: 28.06.-02.07.2023
Venue: Santa Clara University, California
Proposals by: 31.12.2021

What does it mean to gather on the Ohlone peoples’ ancestral homeland, situated next to the San Francisco Bay, a gateway to the Pacific Ocean and Pacific Islands? What does it mean to convene, craft, share, and celebrate feminist histories in the ongoing contexts of climate change-fueled hurricanes and storm surges, sea level rise and coastal flooding, fires, and marine life extinction? What does it mean to celebrate fifty years of promoting and exploring histories of women, genders, and sexualities when immigrants, refugees, Indigenous and Black people, queer and trans communities are marginalized and subject to violence; political and individual freedoms are eroded; and growing autocratic and totalitarian regimes embolden racial nationalism?

The organizers invite national and international scholars of all persuasions, and especially graduate students and early career colleagues to collaborate in framing histories within broadly expansive configurations across time, space, and place. The organizers seek to develop conversations across our interconnected yet disparate social, political, economic, and cultural worlds and to consider the transitions, transformations, and spatializations that keep them in constant flux.

• The organizers solicit panels, papers, and workshops that help us consider what histories emerge when relations are formed and linkages are drawn that transcend traditional national borders and reference instead, for example, oceans, islands, or continents?
• What innovative or timeless feminist methodologies help us conceptualize and engage in conversations at new depths, attentive to the vastness of the oceans, lands, and islands we traverse and inhabit, as well as the importance of the care we give to a loved one, a garden, or a forest?
• What are the affective geographies and histories of spaces of refuge, resistance, and renewal? What are the gendered histories of water, rain, and rivers that move us into new understandings of the relationships among plants, animals, and humans?
• What are the specific histories of organizing against nuclear testing, deep sea drilling, rainforest destruction, political prisoners, femicide, human and sex trafficking, … read more and source (Web).