The 20th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities (Web)

Time: 18.-21.06.2026
Venue: Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL
Proposals by: 31.01.2025

What does a well society – or wellness in a socially just society – look like? These are profound questions of great magnitude and consequence whether we are examining the past or abiding in the present. And they are quite definitely weighty matters as we consider and construct, right here and now, our individual and collective human- and eco-futures. The organisers invite historical, intellectual, artistic, activist, and world-building contributions that define and explore wellness, well-being, and care in relationship to the personal, interpersonal, societal, human-centric, and eco-centric.
At the 2026 „Big Berks“, the organisers are starting from these three foundational premises: We want to get well. We know it’s a weighty matter. And we want to get clearer about what this means by investigating, dialoguing, and funning together. In the tradition of Kitchen Table Press (Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Audre Lorde), the organisers welcome you to sit down together to be in conversation to co-create kitchen table history. They invite scholars, activists, and artists of all persuasions, and especially graduate students and early career colleagues to collaborate and be nourished and nourish each other. Read more … (Web)

You might consider the following prompts:

• Historical narratives, interpretations, and analyses we create: shifting frameworks and „states of mind“ toward wellness.
• Re-imagining power and the -isms, informed by our lives, to create a more holistic history and historical record.
• Decentering people as the sole focus of history: exploring alternate approaches such as eco-centric realities (e.g. remembering and belonging linked to microbes, animals, ecology, and the Earth).
• Investigating strategies of the past to deal with local and world political systems and their discriminatory, unequal, oppressive, and dystopian contexts.
• Healing from trauma, harm, and toxic environments: identifying ideological dogmatism, the ill-politics of revenge interpersonally and systemically; carceral systems and prison abolition; gracelessness in the wake of conflict and austerity, eco-annihilation, etc.
• Struggles for embodied physical autonomy and mental wellness, including reproductive justice; disability studies; impacts of pandemics, etc.
• Strengthening relationships between healing justice and structural transformation, including urban excavations and immigration; public health and anti-gentrification work; homelessness; environmental justice as human justice, etc.
• Connecting individual health to social, economic, and political health.
• Be guided by joy, love, collective care modalities, improvisation, collaboration as well as liberatory work within systems of spirituality, religious, sacred communities including freedom lineages and praxis.
• Engage the questions – What is ill-being, what creates it, and how can we break cycles of ill-being – as a way to think deeply about how we sustain wellness in its stead.
• Explore how culture, art, and music can create new worlds, as well as illuminate connections and pathways to wellness in activist, academic, and policy spaces.
• Reaffirm the morals, ethics, principles, and aspirations for scholarship and community-engaged work and how that ultimately connects to our vision of a well world.
• Recommit to activism and resistance at the local, global, and transnational levels.
• Or other related topics!

Source: H-Net Notifications