Deadline Extended: Rural Women's Studies Association Triennial Conference Proposals due July 31, 2014

RHN 66/2014 | Call

Organiser: Rural Women's Studies Association (RWSA)

19-21 February 2015, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas

Deadline: 31 July 2014

 

Rural Women's Studies Association Triennial Conference
“The Local is Global”: 
Gender and Rural Connections across Time and Place

The theme of the 2015 conference “The Local is Global”: Gender and Rural Connections across Time and Place emphasizes the importance of rural women’s local activities and experiences – both historical and contemporary - to global affairs. At the same time, it highlights the gendered impacts of and reactions to global processes – including globalization, international and transnational trends, policies and programs, and climate change –at the local level. It especially aspires to explore how these different scales are connected across time and space.

RWSA is an international association for the advancement and promotion of research on rural women and gender in a historical perspective. Worldwide, the Association aims to encourage research, to promote existing and forthcoming scholarship, and to establish and maintain links with contemporary organizations around the interests of rural women, rural communities and the rural environment, including farming and the agricultural sector, from a gender perspective. RWSA welcomes academic scholars, public historians and archivists, graduate students, and representatives of rural organizations and communities to be association members and conference participants.

Along with paper presentations and panels, proposals for workshops, interactive sessions, posters, open discussions, performances, readings, audiovisual presentations are very much encouraged. Especially welcome are those with inter-, trans- or multi-disciplinary approaches, and/or that connect rural women's / gender history and present-day political, ecological or social and economic concerns, worldwide. We are also looking for submissions that integrate creative work with the conference themes. We plan to have at least one evening dedicated to creative work, but are interested in integrating artists from visual, film, performative and literary genres into the fabric of the conference as well.

RWSA aims to discuss and further develop the thematic areas relevant to rural contexts, such as gender and labor, food, health, education, the professions, cultural heritage, leadership, migration, technology, communication, iconography and creative expression in rural contexts. Proposals for this conference are especially encouraged to also include:

  • Rural women's voices as forms of power and arbiters of change;
  • Differences and changes in rural femininities and masculinities;
  • The intersection of rural women and/or gender with other socio-cultural dimensions such as wealth / class, ethnicity / race, age / generation, religion, sexuality, health status;
  • Gender and/or women in social and other reform movements, social and welfare policy initiatives, rural grassroots organizations, especially with respect to rural communities, agriculture, the rural environment and natural resource management;
  • International, transnational, governmental and/or non-governmental organizations and their gendered rural policies or gender-specific policies on rural women and men;
  • Gender and/ or women in intersections between non-indigenous rural populations and indigenous peoples - commonalities in struggles, collaborative experiences, similarities, differences, breakthroughs, etc;
  • Knowledge and scholarship in rural gender/women’s history and women’s integration in rural history.

 

Please submit the following information by 15 May 2014.
1. Title of paper/session/workshop/performance (working title is acceptable).
2. 400 word description/abstract of paper or proposed session/workshop, etc.
3. Brief vita/bio of presenter or session participants and complete contact information.
Please indicate if your proposal does not fit in the regular session time of 1.5 hour with three presentations and discussion. We will get in touch if the proposal has been accepted.
Submissions should be sent electronically to: RWSA2015@gmail.com.

If it is not possible to send your proposal electronically, please send by regular mail to the following address if you are submitting from the Americas:

Cynthia Prescott
History Department, University of North Dakota
221 Centennial Dr., Stop 8096
Grand Forks, ND 58202-8096
USA

Submissions by post from elsewhere in the world should be sent to:

Margreet van der Burg
Rural History, Social Sciences, Wageningen University
Hollandseweg 1, NL-6706 KN Wageningen
The Netherlands

For information on travel grants and letters of invitation, contact Rebecca Montgomery, rm53@txstate.edu. For additional information on the RWSA, please go to the organization website, http://www.ohio.edu/history/rwsa/.

Source: H-Rural