In response to this year’s theme of Unstable Geographies, the Feminist Research working group welcome contributions around the theme of ‘Unstable Genders, Uncertain Lives’.

 

Unstable Genders, Uncertain Lives

 IFTR Feminist Research Working Group call for papers:

 In response to this year’s theme of Unstable Geographies, the Feminist Research working group welcome contributions around the theme of ‘Unstable Genders, Uncertain Lives’.  Participants are invited to think about the relationship between gender and instability in the current context of global economic and political uncertainty.  We will investigate the feminist desire to de-stablise gender norms and gender’s intersections with other identity formations in the past twenty years, alongside the emergence of global instability, insecurity and uncertainty in the 21^st Century. For some this political uncertainty is a fairly new experience, for others a longstanding feature of daily life.  The experience of instability and uncertainty in gendered lives is distributed differently within diverse cultural and geographical contexts, and we will draw on the insights of the richly diverse community of feminist scholars who make up this group to gain a sense of how the de-stablisation of gender has sat alongside broader forms of cultural uncertainty.

 Colleagues who would like to participate may want to consider the following questions when proposing their papers:

·         How should feminist artists and scholars work with lives that are uncertain?

·         How has the de-stabilisation of gender by feminists produced new forms of cultural certainty?

·         When can instability and uncertainty be productive strategies for feminist thought?

·         The postmodern approach to the theatre celebrated its capacity to destabilize identity norms – in an era of uncertainty, do these critical strategies still hold purchase?

·         Are uncertainty and instability celebrated in art practice but harder to live with as part of one’s daily existence?

·         What is the relationship between certainty, expertise and the practices of the feminist scholar?

·         How do we work with certainty and uncertainty with our audiences, readers, colleagues, collaborators?

·         What is the history of feminism and uncertainty? What histories does this intersection invoke? How do we identify the differences in uncertainty from one historical moment to another?

·         How does the question of intersectionality destablise and enrich the feminist project?

   

Abstracts for the Feminist Research Working Group should be submitted through the Cambridge Journals Online pages by 31^st January, 2017. For more information on this process, go to:

http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/abstract-submission-form-iftr-2017-conference

We welcome new members to join the Working Group. Please read the details of our working process below before submitting and abstract.

 

Our Process
The Feminist Research Working Group is composed of scholars from Sweden, India, Pakistan, Britain, China, Japan, South Korea, Chile, Spain, Germany, Canada, Australia, and the United States. It works by circulating papers to members in advance of the conference. Those who have circulated papers are invited to speak for no more than five minutes, followed by fifteen minutes of responses and discussion by the whole group, who will have read the papers in advance. The twenty minute presentation and response format is structured to encourage cross-cultural exchange and we emphasise constructive participation, debate and feedback among our members.

The full text of the selected papers (no more than 3000 words) should be emailed to the conveners by for uploading into the group’s dropbox by 10^th June 2017. For further information please do not hesitate to contact the conveners. You are reminded that in order to present your paper it is necessary to formally submit your abstract according to the guidelines on the conference website, register for the conference and to become a member of IFTR. You are also reminded that papers can be given to the working group or within the main conference, but you may not do both.