THE GCWS GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE
GCWS Organizing Team and Process
Want real project-leadership experience that looks great on a CV and a job application? Join the team organizing the GCWS Graduate Student Conference — a biennial event planned entirely by graduate students like you, from across our nine member institutions.
As a co-organizer, you'll help turn an idea into a real event and walk away with skills that transfer directly to careers inside and outside academia:
Program development — shaping panels, themes, and projects
Marketing & outreach — publicizing the event and building an audience
Event & vendor management — securing venues and coordinating logistics
Communications design — creating conference materials
You won't be doing it alone. The GCWS Program Manager and Board of Directors offer guidance and mentorship throughout, and you'll be working alongside a genuinely interdisciplinary team (different fields, frameworks, and backgrounds), all united by the GCWS mission.
Have a theme idea, or just want to get involved? Email the GCWS Program Manager, we'd love to hear from you.
GCWS 2025 Conference: “Liberatory Practices for Worlds in Crisis”
In 2024, we are surrounded by crisis in nearly every sector of our world(s): environmental, political, social, cultural, and interpersonal. Crisis is not a new nor a unique phenomenon: Indigenous societies have faced decimation, war has torn through family and political associations, and environmental devastation cycles again and again.
And yet, we have found new ways of living, resisting, and surviving. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2019), Brazilian philosopher and Indigenous movement leader Aílton Krenak urges us to consider the past and present, writing that “When people speak of imagining a new possible world, it's in the sense of rearranging relations and spaces, introducing new understandings of what we recognize as nature as if we were not nature ourselves.”
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.
