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

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.

We are interested in how life (or living) in urban spaces mark as well as produce gendered and sexed bodies and how gender, class and race relations, performances and sexualities, in turn, make their marks on the urban spaces. By urban spaces, we mean the lived practices and representations through which a variety of spaces are constituted within and beyond the scope of the city. We are looking to examine the construction of gender and sexuality (in conjunction with race, class, & mobility) and urban spaces across a range of historical, cultural, national, fictional, and conceptual contexts.