All Calls

Call for papers for a Special Issue
“Revisiting Global Feminist Solidarity amid Rising Planetary Threats”

Existential planetary threats, from environmental emergency to global health outbreaks and rising inequality and conflict, are drawing different feminist agendas closer together. As interconnections between global, national, local, and institutional dimensions of feminist political interventions intensify, global feminist solidarity emerges as no longer an unachievable and somewhat discredited utopia but an urgent and necessary strategy of feminist resistance. This Special Issue will revisit theoretical and empirical approaches to global feminist solidarity in the evolving context of shared planetary threats and the coalitional action required to address them.

Feminist attempts at transnational and global solidarity have historically privileged agendas of women’s inclusion in Western modernist projects of global development, overlooking and sometimes de-legitimizing non-Western feminist knowledge and de-prioritizing more radical interrogations of global governance, state building, and international cooperation (Kardam 2004). By favoring the inclusion in, over the transformation of, global governance and state institutions, liberal feminism has helped to co-opt more radical agendas of Indigenous and other non-Western feminists oriented toward more profound socio-political transformation. This has led to a consensus-based approach to global frameworks for gender equality, which reproduces a global hierarchization of feminist agendas mediated by race, indigeneity, age, disability, class, sexuality, and other categories of marginalization (Chowdhury 2016).

However, the global, as the terrain of feminist collective action, is rapidly shifting. Cracks in liberal feminist theories of change are evident, as even the policy targets of inclusion and representation that have been reached across decision-making institutions prove inadequate to resist global racial capitalism (Rai 2008). Moreover, previously divergent strategic and practical feminist interests (across and within national borders) are converging because of the manifestation of the consequences of ecological disasters, public health tragedies, and economic and social depletion. In the face of the necropolitics of inaction, austerity amid concurrent planetary crises of care (Sandset 2021), and the urgency of addressing ongoing breaches of international law in Palestine, the time is right to call for a rethinking of feminist solidarity, situated at the junctures of global feminist coalitions.

To theorize emergent global feminist solidarity, we must trace the ridges of ontological and epistemological boundaries of diverse feminist agendas that shape it. Such efforts must be grounded not in a nostalgia for global sisterhood but in (self-)critical, historically sensitive analysis of the challenges faced, and the shared responsibility of identifying and pursuing avenues of feminist collective resistance. In this sense, both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian critical feminist scholarship – to borrow Amy Allen’s (2015) and Seyla Benhabib’s (1986) words (see also Cooper 2014) – are needed to inform a new wave of scholarship on global feminist solidarity. “Planetary, as an analytical frame,” (Pratt 2022) therefore, allows us to cast light precisely on the interconnections between the geopolitical dimensions of global racial capitalism and the bottlenecks and strategic possibilities across and within transnational, national, and local terrains of feminist action.

We invite inter- and multi-disciplinary submissions on anticipatory and explanatory feminist theory regarding global and transnational feminist solidarity. Possible areas of focus include but are not limited to (1) intersectionality for global feminist coalitions; (2) Indigenous and decolonial ontologies of interconnectedness; (3) critiques of existing feminist global governance and collective action; (4) strategies of broadening coalitions for global social justice; and (5) feminist epistemic resistance across institutional, academic, and activist arenas of action. For example, submissions might address questions such as:

• How can we reconceptualize difference and commonality in articulating more equitable mechanisms of global feminist solidarity?

• How is transnational feminist solidarity theorized and/or operationalized in the fight against global racial capitalism?

• What is the role of feminist coalitional action in the current legitimacy crisis of global governance?

• What global, regional, and/or transnational feminist strategic possibilities emerge in transnational coordination of feminist and global justice coalitions?

• How can historically subjugated feminist knowledge inform our understanding of transnational feminist solidarity?

• How can Indigenous ontologies reframe feminist agendas and collective responsibilities for addressing them?

• What would it look like to operationalize multi-layered intersectional approaches to feminist agenda setting and/or coalition building?

We hope to bring together theoretical and empirical contributions reflecting diverse ontological, epistemological, disciplinary, and identity-based perspectives, and geographical and thematic foci. We encourage historical, anticipatory, comparativist, policy-oriented, and other critical contributions to this debate that reflect the inherently political mandate of feminisms.

The Special Issue will be guest edited by Shirin M. Rai, Distinguished Professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and Gloria Novović, Gender, Development and Globalisation Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

The deadline for abstracts (up to 300 words) is on May 30, 2024. Selection will made shortly thereafter. For any questions and suggestions, please email Shirin M. Rai (sr86@soas.ac.uk) and Gloria Novović (g.novovic@lse.ac.uk).

References

Allen, Amy. 2015. “Emancipation without Utopia: Subjection, Modernity, and the Normative Claims of Feminist Critical Theory.” Hypatia 30 (3): 513–529.

Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chowdhury, Elora Halim. 2016. “Development Paradoxes: Feminist Solidarity, Alternative Imaginaries and New Spaces.” Journal of International Women's Studies 17 (1): 117–132.

Cooper, Davina. 2014. Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kardam, Nüket. 2004. “The Emerging Global Gender Equality Regime from Neoliberal and Constructivist Perspectives in International Relations.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (1): 85–109.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 2022. Planetary Longings. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rai, Shirin M. 2008. The Gender Politics of Development: Essays in Hope and Despair. London: Bloomsbury.

Sandset, Tony. 2021. “The Necropolitics of COVID-19: Race, Class and Slow Death in an Ongoing Pandemic.” Global Public Health 16 (8–9): 1411–1423.

International Feminist Journal of Politics & FLACSO-Ecuador

In-person conference / Keynote sessions will be livestreamed

Quito, Ecuador, September 7-8, 2023

We invite participants to this in-person conference, Constructing Transnational Feminist Resistances in Times of ‘Crises,’ co-convened by International Feminist Journal of Politics and the Sociology and Gender Studies Department at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO-Ecuador).

The co-editors of the Conversations section of the International Feminist Journal of Politics seek submissions for a Special Section entitled “Restorative and Reparative Conversations.” The purpose of this Special Section is to create space for conversations and dialogues that address the harms that feminist scholars and activists may inflict on each other. Examples of possible submissions include:

• true stories that may fictionalize certain aspects (such as utilizing an imagined conversation or changing identifying characteristics and names);

• dialogues to engage in an attempt to restore or repair a misunderstanding;

• pieces that contest the ethics of public restorative conversations, perhaps unpacking the politics of apologies;

• affective and aesthetic responses to the politics of gatekeeping, the politics of authenticity, competition, rejection, emotional labor, caretaking, betrayal, trauma, and more at feminist journals, conferences, and academic spaces.

Submissions may be one piece of 8,000 words, shorter pieces totalling 8,000 words that are curated by a team of co-authors, or smaller pieces by separate authors that will be chosen on their individual merit.

The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2023.

International Feminist Journal of Politics - Asian Center for Women’s Studies, Ewha Womans University

Hybrid conference
South Korea, July 21-23, 2022

We invite participants to this multi-location hybrid conference, Remapping the Feminist Global co-convened by International Feminist Journal of Politics and Asian Center for Women’s Studies (ACWS), Ewha Womans University.

Feminism(s) – like other academic knowledge and global movements – bear the effects of historic and new permutations of Eurocentrism, colonialism and imperialism that continue to shape not only feminism but the global world we inhabit and seek to change. Convened in South Korea, this 2022 conference turns to Asia as a geographic location and imaginary that offers an important anchoring for global feminist conversations to move beyond the current hegemonic hold of the West and the (imperial) nation-state system that emerged wherein the global governance structure has pre-determined how feminism becomes a salient political and academic discourse. Urgently needed are collective reflections on emerging hierarchies not only between West and non-West but as the focus of this call for conversation, the hierarchies and relations in and between ‘the non-West’. Feminist scholars, editors, policymakers, practitioners, activists and teachers, more than ever, need to come together to exchange ideas and co-create transnational and/or global feminist futures by mending broken linkages. This is an age-old conundrum that has riddled feminist inroads into institutions and public spaces; we seek a more satisfactory redress in the wake of greater separate and parallel developments in feminist research in siloes, global anti-feminist backlash and polarization of politics.

The set of questions animating this conference is: How do feminists across regions and locations speak and share ideas when the work cannot wait for academic feminists, when the worlds we live in and work to change do not wait and cannot wait for academic conventions to catch up? These questions are not discrete or exclusive. We encourage and expect work where multiple inquiries/conditions/identities/experiences intersect and/or collide.

We believe that in a world where feminists working in universities as organic intellectuals and teachers for change not only requires foundational interrogation but also demands radical methodological moves to keep true. In this spirit, we invite critical and creative discussions that expand and better locate the ‘academic research’, ‘university’ and ‘scholarship’ with artists, poets, activists, and policy practitioners across regions and locations. We believe engendering new, surprising conversations and encounters that would otherwise not happen should be the main way we think about inter-institutional, and interdisciplinary collaboration across the activist-academia divide and locations.

Format

The two-day in-person proceedings will be held in Seoul, hosted by the Asian Center for Women’s Studies (ACWS), Ewha Womans University. They will be livestreamed, allow online participation, and connected with three additional hubs in Oceania, South East Asia and South Asia (hubs will be announced early 2022). The third day of the conference will be fully virtual, hosted by the hubs each convening a plenary event as well as functioning as a physical gathering place for that day for those who can travel to these sites better.

Themes

We are inviting individual and co-authored papers, panels, roundtables, book launch proposals, and other creative proposals under the theme, Remapping the Feminist Global: A Multi-vocal, Multi-located Conversation convened by co-hosts, ACWS, which houses Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, and IFJP. All participants will be invited to submit their papers to the journals for their respective special issues after the conference.

This gathering recognizes Asia is plural, requiring inter-Asian exchanges, and further, that the global world requires more careful remapping and engagement via and from Asia. With inter-Asia/plural Asias at the center, the conference also seeks to explore the global through interregional south-south connections such as Afro-Asia and Pacific-Indigenous-Asia. The gathering also seeks to remap global feminism through rethinking disciplinary and academic categories of knowledge production that marginalize feminist visions, bodies, connections and modes of politics and knowing.

Centering Asia as a way of disrupting hegemonic discourses requires a reckoning with race, racialization and the dynamics of gender discourses that are shaped by western and colonial influences. We invite diverse scholars and knowledge producers to convene under this theme to engage in multi-levelled and nuanced conversations about how issues of race, gender and racialization are conceptualized and entwined, how they manifest, what meanings they carry, especially when using terminologies developed and spread from imperial spaces. We hope to stimulate scholarly debates that think through implications of these alternate discourses in light of the urgent need to dissect ramifications of racial, ethnic and gendered discriminations particularly when examined from Asian and postcolonial settings.

We invite diverse and innovative submissions from feminists with strong critical, methodological, and theoretical strengths in the themes below. The categories are not meant to be mutually exclusive or exhaustive, and we welcome especially what may be amiss in them. We also especially encourage submissions offering new explorations of Asian feminisms, energizing feminist debates about processes of racialization that can help us to develop transformative visions to enact change, and delve into new directions.

Postcolonial and non-western feminist theories and practices

• methods and theories on remapping the feminist global through Asia and/or other locations

• methods for theorizing the intimate, aesthetics and/or the non-

• military colonialism and neocolonialism

• empires and imperialism

• south-south relations and internationalisms

Feminist politics and policy

• feminist perspectives on humanitarianism and human rights

• discourses and practices to tackle gendered/sexualized violence

• hate crime, affect, and activisms

• activism and in-between spaces as sites of democratization

• sexuality, liberation and body politics

Race, racialization and gender

• racialization and racial hierarchy in Asia

• intersectional discrimination, anti-multiculturalism and activism

• gendered and racialized social policies and institutions

• gendered and racialized experiences of the Covid19 pandemic

• queer perspectives on race and racial issues

• migration and displacement

Submission date: 28 FEBRUARY 2022

Submission type

Individual and co-authored papers, panels, roundtables, book launch proposals, and other creative proposals.

Submission Method

Submit your 250-word abstracts by filling out the form here.

Please note: For panel or other multi-person submissions, you will need information of all your panelists/contributors including, individual contribution/paper abstracts, email addresses, location/institution information, and mode of participation

Notification date: 19 MARCH 2022

Questions?

Contact a member of the Organizing Committee

• shine choi, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand

• Bina D’Costa, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

• Ji young Jung, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea  

• Swati Parashar, Göteborg University, Sweden

Global feminist scholarship is flourishing, with a significant number of new books that explore feminist politics and gender relations in a global frame published each year. The IFJP Book Reviews Section provides a space where new work and new ideas can be made visible, critically discussed, and brought into conversation across established disciplinary, spatial and discursive boundaries. Our book reviewers make significant contributions to our intellectual community through identifying emergent and innovative literature and analytical directions, and through contributing to thoughtful and critical intellectual exchange.  

IFJP is now issuing a special call for review essays that cover at least three recent books. Review essays discuss several texts on the same theme and bring them into conversation with each other, aiming to explore a recent debate or emerging research field that has generated a range of new publications. While review essays should be written in English, we also welcome submissions that review feminist scholarship published in other languages, and discuss ongoing debates beyond English-speaking academia. With the aim of fostering a truly global feminist community of scholars, this will allow a broader range of feminist scholarship to be debated in IFJP, and allow IFJP readers to learn about and benefit from feminist scholarship representing diverse positionalities and perspectives.

Review essays should be between 2000-2500 words long. To maximize the availability of these review essays, they will be made free access for six months from the date of online publication.

If you are interested in submitting a review essay, please contact the Book Reviews Editors:

Elisabeth Olivius, Department of Political Science, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
Ebru Demir, Law School, Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Ankara, Turkey
Katrina Lee-Koo, School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page on Book Reviews.

10th Annual IFJP COnference - A FULLY Virtual conference

February 17–20, 2021

Distance has been one of the catchwords of the year 2020. People have been pushed apart by fear and precaution, though those from the Global South, who have long been marginalized from epistemic communities based in the Global North, are familiar with having their movements be restricted by others’ fear. Nevertheless, scholars across the globe feel more isolated than ever, stemming from both the restrictions on social contact resulting from the pandemic and the rapid changes in our communities that this modified behavior has caused. Feminist scholars have, however, already thought about distance and connection. Feminists have long studied the marginalized as well as the powerful in many contexts, and feminist scholars are aware of the impact of the digitally networked world and how it can substantially change the historical terms and conditions of gendered power (Harcourt 2015). This distanced yet digitally connected period also brings new insights into feminist epistemology, which has sought “to build understanding of the connections between the local and global, between the micropolitics of subjectivity and everyday life, and the macropolitics of global political economy” (Mama 2004, 122). 

Feminist scholarship in International Relations has been at the forefront of investigating the interconnectivity of people, places, events, and discourses and narratives (Ackerly and True 2019), but the present moments in global politics demonstrate that there is more to be done. In this light, the thematic focus of this conference is on feminist connections in global politics, whether that be the connections that feminists IR scholars make or the connections between feminists themselves across organizations, sites, and crises. We encourage submission that seek not only to theorize such connections but also to explore how connections break down. The conference will highlight connections and collaborations among scholars as well as between scholars and the students they teach, practitioners, and activists, noting how feminist methodologies and pedagogies highlight the importance of connection between individuals, communities, and species (Fredlund, Hauman and Ouellette 2020).

Potential contributors may wish to consider the following questions:

• How can feminist IR theories help illuminate connections—sustained or broken—among individuals, states, non-state actors, economies, bodies, and other concepts within global politics? 

• What lessons can we apply from feminist IR scholarship to the present? Can research on conflict or economic stagnation inform global understandings of COVID-19? Does the current global pandemic shed light on other topics in global politics?

• How do global social movements thrive in a world of social isolation? Can anti-patriarchy, anti-racist, and anti-colonialist actions be sustained beyond their primary catalysts?

• What will be the impact of distance on international collaborations? Is the study of global politics particularly affected by limited travel and interactions, or does digital access bridge the divide created by financial limits, border controls, and visa schemes?

• What is gained and what is lost in losing physical connections? Do the opportunities afforded by virtual connections make up for this?

• How can feminist scholars leverage their connections/connectivity to support their non-academic co-collaborators, including practitioners and activists?

• How can feminist professors of global politics adapt their pedagogies to a partially or fully online context? Can such a move generate connections in our teaching? What do we lose when we do not teach face to face?

By offering a fully virtual conference experience, this conference creates a platform to share knowledge and mobilize collectively across boundaries, disciplines, and time zones. Presentations can be pre-recorded (details provided after acceptance to the conference program), and we will also provide spaces to chat and post questions during and after panels. We intend to group presentations by time zone so that all attendees have the opportunity to join at least some sessions live. We hope that this setup enables students and scholars from the Global South and North alike to benefit from the sharing of ideas at a time when many are unable to travel due to restrictions, health concerns, and limited funds.

Submission guidelines

This conference will be 100% virtual. We welcome innovative use of panel, roundtable, and presentation formats that take advantage of flexible technology and time. We also encourage submissions that could be incorporated into a live classroom, where students would be able to participate in the discussion. If you are presenting a format other than an academic paper or conference panel or roundtable, please describe the format of your presentation and approximately how long your presentation will be.

Abstract word limit is 300 words. Panel organizers will submit the panel abstract with a list of the paper titles and authors, then separately submit individual paper proposals. If the word count does not allow for list of paper titles, send a brief email to the conference organizers. Panels and roundtables should include 4 to 6 participants, plus a chair.

Paper and panel abstracts should be in English. Full panels may present in a language other than English. Please send an email to the conference organizers with questions or to discuss language options.

• If you have any questions about the conference, your submission and more, please contact the organizers at: IFJPvirtual2021@gmail.com

Conference/program chairs