This conference invites graduate student scholars, activists, and practitioners to examine what it means and has meant to survive in a world in crisis. What do we mean by crisis? How do historical experiences of crisis inform our understanding of present crises? What is the meaning and purpose of “liberatory practices” in the historical and contemporary world? How do Indigenous, feminist, queer, trans, disability or other lenses offer alternative understandings of crisis? What world is possible after a crisis? By exploring these and more questions, we hope to consider how new methods of study and care practices in our scholarship might allow us to imagine different worlds, develop resilience in a crisis-laden world, become “undisciplined” academically, and/or form more caring and collaborative communities. 

Time and space, while often seen as linear and confined concepts, can be stretched, altered, and reconfigured. We move through time and space in fits & bursts; some ways of moving and being are deemed normative or “good” and brought to the forefront, while others might be marginalized and cast aside. Here, we instead cast aside normative ideas of time and and space to focus on how liberating the concepts of temporality and spatiality can help us imagine and create new futures, communities, and ways of being. This conference seeks to look at liberatory conceptions of spatiality and temporality, particularly in the contexts of racial justice, abolition, disability rights, queer/trans ecologies, human development, death studies and practices, embodiment, community building, and more.

By using a praxis of love to highlight the struggles toward liberation, we approach what hooks suggests is a culture of refusing systems of domination. The importance of expressing, maintaining, and transforming radical love, especially across differences, is more pressing than ever. This conference seeks to explore the role radical love plays in health crises, climate change, racial justice, migration, economic justice and further social justice movements through community and belonging, pedagogy and literacy, creative expression and storytelling, virtual life and presence, and further fields

In her 1988 book A Burst of Light, Audre Lorde said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” The concept of self-care, which arose through the activist practices specifically of marginalized groups, has been increasingly adopted and discussed by health care settings, non-profit organizations, commercial and marketing enterprises, and psychological approaches.

GCWS Student Conference 2017

In the late 1960s, the statement “the personal is political” emerged as a central rallying cry for feminist activists. While salient before, it has become all the more urgent in light of the 2016 United States election results. Given this, our conference seeks to investigate how this slogan has been, can be, or is now being mobilized as a concept for resistance by marginalized groups theoretically, analytically, and practically.