[Commlist] Thinking Gender 2023: Call for Abstract

UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center Presents

THINKING GENDER 2023

“TRANSFORMING RESEARCH:

FEMINIST METHODS FOR TIMES OF CRISIS AND POSSIBILITY”

Thursday, February 23, 2023 (Virtual) and Friday, February 24, 2023 (In 
Person)

UCLA

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Submission deadline: October 23, 2022, at 11:59PM PDT

The UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center invites 
proposals for our 33rd annual and first hybrid Thinking Gender Graduate 
Student Research Conference.

This year’s conference theme, “Transforming Research: Feminist Methods 
for Times of Crisis and Possibility,” seeks to open conversations about 
feminist methods and research across fields and disciplines. 
Communication and Media Studies scholars are welcome. No payment from 
the authors will be required.

In lieu of a keynote address, the conference (TG23) will feature two 
in-person interactive sessions. One session will be co-facilitated by TL 
Cowan and Jas Rault on Trans-Feminist & Queer collaborative “heavy 
processing” methods for working with digital materials. The second 
session will be facilitated by Celine Parreñas Shimizu on “Creativity in 
the Face of Devastation: Methodologies of Research and Practice Across 
Inequality.”

Students have three ways to participate in this conference:

1. Virtual workshops for works-in-progress (for graduate students) on 
2/23/2023

2. In-person presentations of finished projects (for graduate students) 
on 2/24/2023

3. In-person poster presentations (for undergraduate students) on 2/24/2023

We welcome a range of submission formats from graduate students, 
including scholarly papers, works in hybrid critical/creative genres 
(e.g., multimedia projects, performance, experimental forms of academic 
writing), and film/mixed media. While submissions are not limited to 
these, some media formats that might work particularly well for this 
year’s call include short films and videos, soundscapes, digital and 
alternative archives or cartographies, and interactive works. We also 
invite poster proposals from undergraduate students.

- Virtual graduate student participants will workshop works-in-progress 
in closed online sessions on 2/23/2023. All participants in a workshop 
(3–4 students) will be asked to read or view each other’s submissions in 
advance. Participants will then convene in a Zoom session with a 
moderator who will offer constructive feedback and facilitate discussion 
around each submission. The workshops will provide opportunities for 
thoughtful engagement with each participant’s submission under an ethos 
of generosity in intellectual engagement. This format was highly 
successful at the previous two Thinking Gender conferences and received 
strong support from workshop participants.

- In-person graduate student participants will give a public 
presentation of their finished projects at a panel on the UCLA campus on 
2/24/2023. In addition, participants will take advantage of other 
in-person activities offered by the conference, including speaker-led 
interactive sessions, a poster session, and networking opportunities.

- Undergraduate poster presentations will be in person on 2/24/2023 only.

This conference is interdisciplinary, and we encourage submissions from 
all fields of study, across the humanities, social sciences, natural 
sciences, and the arts. Successful submissions will center feminist 
research methods and practice, and ideally, engage substantively with 
power relations concerning race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, Blackness, 
gender, transness, queerness, and/or forms of colonialism and settler 
colonialism.

We will highlight work that speaks to different knowledge systems, 
research formats, critical and creative practices, and/or collaborative 
modes. We welcome work that reflects upon and/or models feminist, 
decolonial, collaborative, community-centered, activist, and creative 
modes of knowledge production and dissemination. We also welcome work 
that rethinks the possibilities of research settings, formats, scales, 
rhythms, and durations.

We see the expansive format of this year’s conference as a form of 
feminist praxis. Feminists, particularly racialized and postcolonial 
subjects, have long played critical roles in rethinking the methods and 
genres that constitute research, working as scholars, activists, and 
artists. At its best, research offers grounds for transformative ideas, 
unraveling conventional ways of knowing. But the concept of research can 
also evoke extractivist, pathologizing methodologies that claim 
ownership of knowledge. Even though it is commonly recognized that 
knowledge is situated, we still see Eurocentric, patriarchal matrices of 
power persist, sometimes taking subtler forms in academic research 
practices and institutional structures.

Building from longstanding conversations on feminist epistemologies, 
decolonial methodologies, and institutional activism, this year’s 
Thinking Gender conference responds to much-needed inquiries, 
reflections, and imaginations of feminist, decolonial research methods 
and practice. We welcome submissions situated in a wide range of 
inter/disciplinary areas, so long as they engage with critical issues in 
feminist research theories, practices, and methods. We also encourage 
work that considers art/creation as methods (beyond simply an object of 
research or a platform for research dissemination), investigating how 
creative making and critical writing can mutually inform each other.

Questions for engagement might include:

- How can we create and disseminate knowledge intentionally and 
ethically, with accountability to communities as well as awareness of 
our positionalities and limits to our knowledge?

- How can we recognize differential ways of being, but also collaborate 
across different knowledge systems to provide new ways to understand our 
interhuman, interecological world?

- How can feminist researchers expand the scope and limits of 
possibility for research?

- What forms of connection and collaboration are possible, and in what 
contexts might strategies for disconnection come into play?

- How can academic fields rethink the conventional scales, rhythms, and 
formats of research?

- What are the possibilities for creative practices of writing, making, 
and activism that offer alternatives to entrenched research genres?

- How can researchers build regenerative structures within neoliberal 
university systems, creating spaces that resist the casualization of 
labor and hierarchical, capitalist forms of knowledge production?

We encourage applicants to think within, alongside, beyond, and perhaps 
against the following topics as they consider the shape and content of 
their prospective participation in TG23:

- Collaboration, cooperation, co-creation, co-authorship

- Bridging the theory/practice divide: Art as research, play as method, 
video essays, literary approaches to critical writing

- Activism and participatory action-research, community-based research

- Decolonial research methods, ethics and accountability, questions of 
language

- Indigenous feminist knowledge making and settler colonialism as 
epistemology

- Black feminist thought, afterlives of slavery, fugitivity, and 
critical fabulation as method

- Disruptions of research temporalities (e.g., slow scholarship, flash 
ethnography, patchwork ethnography)

- Data feminism, data sovereignty, algorithms, feminist approaches to 
race and technology

- Feminist, decolonial approaches to archives and historiography, 
archival absences

- Critical cartographies, feminist modes of spatial analysis

- Affect and embodiment in research, experiential research, reflexivity 
and authorial positioning

- Nonhuman forms of knowledge, alternative forms of knowledge-making and 
dissemination

- Feminist epistemologies, situated knowledges, critical objectivity, 
forms of empirical evidence

- False starts, failure studies

- The relation between theory and method, the universalizing tendencies 
of theory, low theory, mid-level theory, piecemeal theory

- Critical university studies, institutional and material conditions for 
feminist research

- The relation between the personal and the professional, care work and 
research

- Reports from / reflections on research collectives, networks, and 
other forms of organizing

- Historical case studies of feminist research or collective work

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Eligibility

Registered graduate students from any institution are eligible to submit 
abstracts or synopses of scholarly papers, works in hybrid 
critical/creative genres (e.g., multimedia projects, performance, 
experimental forms of academic writing), and film/mixed media to present 
or workshop. While not exhaustive, formats that might work particularly 
well for this year’s call include seminar papers, dissertation chapters, 
personal essays, speculative fictions, short films, video/photo essays, 
soundscapes, digital and alternative archives or cartographies, and 
interactive works.

Registered undergraduate students from any institution are eligible to 
submit proposals for in-person poster presentations only.

Submissions of works that are collaborative or co-authored with other 
students are welcomed. Unpublished submissions are preferred. Recently 
published and forthcoming projects will be considered on a case-by-case 
basis.

Submissions that are not directly related to the theme, “Transforming 
Research: Feminist Methods for Times of Crisis and Possibility” will not 
be considered.

Deadline for Application Submissions

Deadline for Application Submissions: Sunday, October 23, 2022, at 
11:59PM PDT

Applicants whose submissions are accepted will be notified by December 
12, 2022.

All accepted virtual graduate student participants will be required to 
submit the final version of their work-in-progress by January 30, 2023, 
for pre-circulation among their co-participants and faculty moderator. 
When deciding on submission proposals, please keep in mind that final 
drafts need to be ready for circulation by this date.

All accepted in-person graduate student participants will be required to 
submit their finished work by January 30, 2023, for pre-circulation with 
the faculty moderator. Please note that works will need to be completed, 
not in-progress, by this date.

All accepted undergraduate student participants will be required to 
submit their final posters in hard copy by January 30, 2023 at the UCLA 
Center for Study of Women’s campus office. Please note that posters will 
need to be completed, not in progress, by this date.

Online Application Form

All proposals must be submitted using the online application form: 
https://uclacsw.submittable.com/submit/234349/thinking-gender-2023-submissions

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

Graduate Student Applicants

Virtual Workshops (will take place on Zoom Thursday, February 23, 2023): 
Each workshop will include four graduate students, a faculty moderator, 
and up to three observers from other workshops, who will read and 
provide detailed feedback and questions for each submission. Panelists 
will be required to submit the final version of their work-in-progress 
(not to exceed 20–25 double-spaced pages or 20 mins of runtime) by 
January 30, 2023, for pre-circulation among their co-participants and 
faculty moderator.

In-Person Presentations (will take place at UCLA on Friday, February 24, 
2023): Each panel will include four graduate students, a faculty 
moderator, and public conference attendees. Paper presentations will be 
12 minutes long. Panelists will be required to submit their completed 
paper by January 30, 2023, for the faculty moderator to read and prepare 
comments and questions.

Scholarly Paper, Dissertation or Thesis Chapter, or Article Draft 
Application Requirements:

1. Abstract or description (2–3 double-spaced pages maximum) of work to 
be workshopped/presented that includes: (1) a thesis/research question, 
(2) discussion of methodology and theoretical framework, (3) explanation 
of your argument and supporting data, and (4) conclusions or anticipated 
conclusions. If your piece is co-authored with other students, please 
make this clear. If your paper is co-authored with faculty, please 
explain who is responsible for which parts or aspects of the paper. We 
will only accept papers for which the student submitter is the primary 
author.

2. Works Cited or References List (1 page maximum)

3. CV (2 pages maximum)

4. Online application form 
https://uclacsw.submittable.com/submit/234349/thinking-gender-2023-submissions

Works in Hybrid Critical/Creative Genres (e.g., Multimedia Projects, 
Performance, Experimental forms of academic writing, and others) 
Application Requirements:

1. Project Description (2–3 double-spaced pages maximum) of work to be 
workshopped/presented that includes: (1) a research question or 
argument, (2) description of format, (3) discussion of framework, 
methodology and process, (4) explanation of your argument and evidence, 
and (5) conclusions or anticipated conclusions. If your piece is 
co-created with other students, please make this clear.

2. Works Cited or References List (1 page maximum)

3. CV (2 pages maximum)

4. Link to work-in-progress (if applicable): While links are preferred, 
smaller files may also be uploaded in jpg, png, pdf, or mp3/mp4 format 
on the application platform.

5. Online application form 
https://uclacsw.submittable.com/submit/234349/thinking-gender-2023-submissions

Film/Mixed Media Application Requirements:

1. Film/Media Synopsis (2 pages maximum)

2. CV (2 pages maximum)

3. Link (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) where film or mixed media can be viewed. 
Total run-time should not exceed 20 minutes. Note: while links are 
preferred, smaller files may also be uploaded in jpg, png, pdf, or 
mp3/mp4 format on the application platform. If your piece is co-created 
with other students, please make this clear.

4. Online application form 
https://uclacsw.submittable.com/submit/234349/thinking-gender-2023-submissions

Undergraduate Student Applicants

Undergraduate students will present visually compelling research 
posters. Undergraduate poster presentations will take place in person at 
the poster exhibit. Presenters will be required to submit their 
completed posters in hard copy by January 30, 2023, at the UCLA Center 
for Study of Women’s campus office.

Poster Session Application Requirements:

1. Poster proposal (1–2 double-spaced pages maximum) that includes (1) a 
thesis/research question, (2) discussion of methodology and theoretical 
framework, (3) explanation of your argument and supporting data, and (4) 
conclusions or anticipated conclusions. If your poster presentation is 
co-authored with other students, please make this clear.

2. Works Cited or Reference List (1 page maximum)

3. CV (2 pages maximum)

4. Online application form

All materials must be submitted using the online application form 
https://uclacsw.submittable.com/submit/234349/thinking-gender-2023-submissions. 
Unless otherwise specified, please submit materials as Word documents, 
not as PDFs.

Deadline for Application Submissions: Sunday, October 23, 2022, at 
11:59PM PDT

Only complete submissions received by the deadline will be considered.

Questions?

Contact Zizi Li, Thinking Gender Coordinator at 
(thinkinggender /at/ women.ucla.edu).

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