“I revisit the past to arrive at the present.” —Iris Morales, Through the Eyes of Rebel Women: The Young Lords, 1969-1976 (2016)
“Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.” —bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1999)
Since Donald Trump’s election as 47th President of the U.S. empire, many of us have understandably asked, “What do we do now?” As we pose and respond to this question and similar ones, we should make space for our anxieties, frustrations, and fears. We should allow our sadness, disappointment, and rage to breathe.
We must also make space for remembering. We must remember 1970, when our colleagues at San Diego State inaugurated the first Women’s Studies Program. We must remember Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera founding Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Florence Howe founding The Feminist Press, and Toni Cade Bambara publishing The Black Woman that same year. We must remember Fatema Mernissi publishing Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society five years later. We must remember Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Helena Byard, Susan Yung, Ana Oliveira, Rosío Alvarez, Alma Gomez, and Leota Lone Dog founding Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press five years after that. We must remember 1990, when the first Disability Pride March was held and when the American Disabilities Act passed as a result of fierce advocacy by Yoshiko Dart and others. We must remember the Kanienʼkehá:ka of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke resisting the planned expansion of a golf course on their sacred land and burial grounds that same year. We must remember Amina Wadud leading the first Friday Prayer 20 years ago in 2005.
This is the spirit in which we will gather in November. Our annual
conference will be an honour song, a space where we will remember these and other feminist struggles and feminist victories. In addition to asking “what do we do now,” NWSA encourages us to ask, what might become possible when we remember who we are and who we’ve been? What can we (re) learn by remembering the places and spaces from where we come, the places and spaces who made us who we are? What might become possible when we remember the people and communities who taught us how to resist?
Since feminist and womanist resistance is anchored in solidarity, we must also acknowledge the land on which we will gather and the people who call it home. Borikén—a place many of us refer to as Puerto Rico—is the occupied and unceded territory of the Boricua Indigenous people, guardians of the waters and lands they have called their motherland for thousands of years. As Sandra Guzmán notes, the Taíno People “have been fighting for their right to self-determination since 1493.” So, as we come together to listen, talk, laugh, cry, dance, and sing, we must also work together to routinely name, interrogate, and resist settler colonialism in Borikén and throughout the world.
We must also acknowledge the brilliant, radical Puerto Rican ancestors and elders who continue to make our work possible, such as Mariana Bracetti Cuevas, Julia de Burgos, Sylvia del Villard, Luisa Capetillo, Lolita Lebrón, Juana Colón, and Rivera. We must acknowledge our contemporaries like Pluma Barbara Moreno, Natalia Ibrahim Abufarah Dávila, Yansi de Abacoa, Libre X. Sankara, Ruth N. Figueroa
Couvertier, Aurora Levins Morales, Sandra Rodriguez Cotto, and the countless others who continue to share their resistive and generative wisdom and strength. After most of us return home, the work of Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, Amigxs del M.A.R., La Sombrilla Cuir, Mi Patria, Diversxs, Colectivo Moriviví, Waves Ahead, Para la Naturaleza, Taller Salud, Coordinadora Paz para las Mujeres, our colleagues at the University of Puerto Rico, and others will continue. So as we seek to be nourished by our annual conference, may we also uplift and nourish our comrades in Borikén who seek justice for survivors of domestic violence, homophobia, sexual assault, racism, political repression, environmental injustice, poverty, food and housing insecurity, and others who are vulnerable to subjugation and oppression—year round and often without recognition, support, or encouragement.
In doing so, may our shared commitment to breathing into memory give way to a louder, stronger feminist honour song.
In solidarity, Heidi R. Lewis 22nd Association President
Our Conference Co-Chairs serve as thought partners in designing a conference experience that attends to the contours of place/space - leveraging their leadership in the radical tradition of Black feminist, Queer, antiracist, anticolonial, political struggle as well as transformative pedagogy in naming, resisting, and dismantling systemic oppression. We’re honored to have curated our 45th Annual Conference program alongside Alexandra Pagán Vélez, Zoán T. Dávila Roldán, and Shariana Ferrer-Nuñez!
Our Conference Co-Chairs, selected and invited by our President Heidi R. Lewis, support the vision of our annual convening and work collaboratively with the National Office in (re)designing how we gather - whether as arrivants or peoples of the Puerto Rican diaspora, and/ or as generations of Feminist Freedom Warriors - and intentionally incorporating space for building power and political action, co-developing pedagogical interventions, enacting feminist ethics of imagined communities, amplifying your contributions that enrich our field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies, and anchoring our whole selves as sites of joyful and radical possibility.
Alexandra Pagán Vélez is a poet, storyteller, and essayist. She is also a professor of Spanish at the School of General Studies at the University of Puerto Rico, where she coordinates Women’s and Gender Studies. She has published books of poetry: A mar, Otro duelo, Del Alzheimer y otros demonios (hybrid text) and Cuando era niña hablaba como niña; as well as books of short stories: Horror-Real, Relatos de domingos and Amargo. She runs the blog Adicción a volar and incorporates her poetics and narrative work in both her pedagogical and community work.
Zoán T. Dávila Roldán is a Black feminist activist, human rights defender, and lawyer. She studied Journalism and Law at the University of Puerto Rico. She has worked as a reporter and content producer for various multimedia platforms and newspapers in Puerto Rico. Zoán also worked as a litigation attorney at the Community Legal Office and as a researcher at the Puerto Rico Civil Rights Commission. In her legal work, she has represented protesters affected by state and police repression, impoverished communities at risk of displacement, and has supported survivors of gender-based violence. She is a leader and spokesperson of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, a grassroots political organization rooted in the radical tradition of Black and decolonial feminism.
Shariana Ferrer-Nuñez is a Black queer feminist, political organizer and educator. She is a co-founder and leader of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, a grassroots radical Black feminist organization in Puerto Rico. Her activism began during her leadership in the student movement at the University of Puerto Rico’s 2010–2011 strike. She worked at Proyecto Enlace del Caño Martín Peña as an environmental organizer and educator, supporting communities resisting land grab, forced displacement, and impoverishment, and led the Construyamos Otro Acuerdo campaign advocating for retirees rights and pensions. Shariana has a vast experience in movement-building and organizing focused on reproductive justice, anti-racism, class struggle and decolonization. She was recognized with the Ann Snitow award in 2023.
The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) is governed by a Governing Council (GC) comprised of the Executive Committee (EC), Members-at-Large, and the chairs/co-chairs of the Lesbian Caucus and the Women of Color Caucus respectively, all of whom serve as the Association’s board of directors.
Heidi R. Lewis President 2023-2025
Hiram Ramirez Treasurer 2024-2026
Umme al-Wazedi Secretary 2024-2026
Dominique C. Hill Lesbian Caucus Chair 2024-2026
Stephanie Andrea Allen, Women of Color Caucus Co-Chair 2024-2026
Sabah Uddin Women of Color Caucus Co-Chair 2024-2025
Kristina Gupta, Member at Large & Member Liaison 2023-2025
Latoya Lee, Member at Large 2023-2025
Jessica Pabón, Member at Large 2024-2025
FEBRUARY 27-28, 2026
NEW
Keynote by JUDITH BUTLER
Peformance by TOSHI REAGON
“If your house ain’t in order, you ain’t in order. It is so much easier to be out there than in here.”
—Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970)
“She would not break her discipline to comfort herself in a shallow way. Would no more break discipline with her Self than she would her covenant with God.”
—Toni
Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (1980)
by President Heidi R. Lewis
November 3, 2025
write this blog from Colorado Springs, CO. Stolen land—the unceded territory of the Ute Peoples, to be precise—developed with stolen and exploited labor. I do so, because as Sandra Guzmán points out, land acknowledgements “recognize and respect Indigenous peoples as the traditional stewards of their lands and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous peoples and their traditional territories.”
Ican’t honestly say I never dreamed of being President of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) when I was what the streets would call “a puppy.”
Well, that may not be exactly true. It might have been that I dreamed of being your President, but I’ve also been a member of the American Studies Association, the National Council of Black Studies, and other interdisciplinary organizations since I began pursuing my doctorate. So, it honestly could have been any one of those. In any case, I have long-aspired to give back to, strengthen, and eventually lead many of the professional spaces I’ve entered, guided by the wisdom of my ancestors and elders, as well as the camaraderie of my peers and the responsibility I proudly take for my young bucks.
Now, here am; or, rather, there was.
As I’ve written and said what feels like ad nauseum, I joined NWSA when I was selected to participate in the Women of Color Leadership Project (WoCLP) as a second-year Ph.D. student almost 20 years ago. I don’t remember much about that weekend except that it was, I believe, the last time the conference was held in the summer, and it was at the University of Cincinnati. So, was glad to be back home in the Buckeye State, only a short, three-hour drive from Purdue, and to have folks there I could stay with. I also remember presenting first thing in the morning to an audience of, maybe, 3 people and being glad about that, because I was way insecure about my work. Later, I learned Toni King facilitated
WoCLP that year, and fifteen years later, she wrote a letter supporting my promotion to Full Professor. I won’t act like I knew this back in 2008, but NWSA was slowly but surely becoming one of my most critical academic homes—one that would educate, frustrate, motivate, and enrage me, one that would always nurture me during every phase of my career.
I started attending the annual conference regularly. In 2014, I was selected to attend the Curriculum Institute, also in Cincinnati. I served as Founding Chair of the Feminist Media Studies Interest Group from 2015-18. I also regularly attended the directors and chairs meeting even before becoming Director of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College in 2016. Because of that, I communicated every so often with Allison Kimmich, the Association’s Executive Director back then, and I communicated pretty regularly with Patti Provance, the former Deputy Director. But I don’t remember ever communicating with the Governing Council.
So, before serving a one-year replacement term as Secretary from 2021-22, I didn’t exactly know what was getting myself into. I had respect for the Board, but I didn’t exactly know what they did. To be honest, I rarely even knew who they were other than the President. I wasn’t a Membership Assembly girlie, and no shade, but I didn’t really spend my NWSA time trying to get next to the “Who’s Who” of the field or the Association. Other than attending panels during which they might have been presenting, would only briefly introduce myself and thank them
for their work. And to be even more honest, I rarely even did that. I can only remember doing it twice, and the first one don’t really count. During our last conference in Denver, I accidentally bumped into Angela Y. Davis and knocked what seemed like all her shit out her hands. I apologized, thanked her for her work, told her it was an honor to meet her, and kept it pushin’—albeit shakin’ like a leaf from embarrassment but also gratitude. Then, during our last conference in Cincinnati, I approached Layli Maparyan to say “hi” and give thanks. In Detroit last year, I reminded her of that during our plenary celebrating 45 years of the conference. She remembered, and my heart swelled.
Speaking of Detroit, I have a funny “aside.” When I said “hi” to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, she told me it was nice to meet me and asked why we hadn’t met before. I basically told her what I just told you, that it was probably because I’d intentionally spent most of my conference time attending presentations and hanging out with friends. To that, she said something like, “That’s probably the best thing you ever did.” Mmmhmm. I hope you know I know it. Haha.
To be clear, I don’t have a problem with networking. I don’t even have a problem with taking pictures with folks one respects and admires, even if we don’t know them well. In fact, asked to take one with Dr. Maparyan all those years ago, I was honored when she agreed, and I cherish that picture to this day. I do, however, have a big problem with clout chasin’. That just ain’t my motion, and like Dr. Mohanty, I think that’s one reason I’ve
been able to serve as President in the ways I have. A major one.
But anyway. didn’t know much, if anything at all, about the goings on of the Governing Council, but I was certain their work was hard and important. trusted those folks were bringing a lot of knowledge and experience to the table, I trusted they understood their roles and responsibilities, and I trusted they took that very seriously. Then, Venetria K. Patton, my dissertation Chair, academic advisor, and now friend, asked if she could nominate me for Secretary. I agreed, ran, won, paid attention, and learned enough to believe I could be a strong President.
Now, here am; or, rather, there was.
It wasn’t easy, of course. Sometimes, it was much harder than I thought it would be. Hell, sometimes, it was much harder than it should have been. For about a month this past spring, even hollered, threw up both my hands, and walked away, wondering why ever volunteered to do something that often felt so damn thankless. Then, after receiving a lot of support and encouragement from my family, friends, and members of the Governing Council and National Office, I came back more determined than before. came back determined to continue giving back to an organization that has given and continues to give so much to me, an organization full of brilliant, powerful, dynamic, and beautiful intellectuals who have given me so much patience, guidance…love. I came back determined to finish strong. And I ain’t even gon’ lie. I came back determined to be remembered
And with that, I decided to do some remembering of my own by looking back at the candidate statement I submitted when accepted my nomination and ran for office:
As a trusted, boundary-spanning thought partner committed to collaborative and transformative leadership, I am well-positioned to be your next President.
I look forward to relying on my expansive professional relationships and partnerships in support of NWSA’s commitments to transformative teaching, learning, research, and service within and outside the academy
I am committed to centering communities that have been systematically and systemically subjugated and oppressed, ensuring they are deeply engaged and encouraged, not merely seen rather than heard and felt.
As a leader, aim to amplify the knowledge and experiences of my collaborators, as well as my own, in service to transformational work guided by a collaboratively defined mission that communicates who we are and a vision for who we aim to be.
My commitment to catalyzing change is grounded in understanding the past and present as much as it is focused on visualizing the future.
While was re-reading, I kept asking myself, “Is that who you were? Is that still who you are? Is that still what and how you do?” I most certainly popped my collar and told myself “yes” more than a few times. I thought about the strategic plan, the membership engagement initiatives, both CFPs, both statements, Detroit, all the blogs, the new Proposal Review Committee structure, the major bylaws revisions, the Governing Council community space, everything contributed to the new website, the new Governing Council reporting structure, all the dope infographics, the Colorado College summer fellows, and the list, fa sho, goes on…at least a li’l bit.
But you know what I also kept thinking about? My team. Our team. The Governing Council and National Office staff. I hope y’all know you’ve been my most critical thought partners during this entire presidency. Even when our thoughts collided in ways I could not understand (and maybe still don’t and never will), mine could not have possibly flowered how they did without yours. I could not have done all this alone, and I didn’t We might not always have lived up to each other’s expectations. We might have pissed each other off. We might have done some things we regret. But we stuck together, kept it pushin’, and fought as hard as we could to do what we came to do, to fulfill our promise to the field, the membership, each other, and ourselves. We earned back so much trust that had been understandably lost. We spanned boundaries, intersectionally and transnationally, making sure our communities were seen and heard to every possible extent. We worked together to catalyze necessary change, to transform the Association,
the field And for that, I will be eternally grateful. I love y’all. I’m proud of us. And I’m so excited about and honored to be part of what you do next, as immediate past President and for as long as there is to be an after.
also kept thinking about you, our members and partners, old and new, who have taught me so much about yourselves, the field, the Association, and even myself. Even though I got what the streets call “buck” way more than wanted to (or should’ve “had” to), more often than not, it was all love. Even when you got critical, supremely critical, it was patience, support, encouragement. More often than not, it was,
“I love your president’s blogs!” You’re welcome…I see you. “Thank you for my travel grant!” We’re so glad we can help you get to the conference and only wish we could do more.
“I can’t wait for the next Care Community event!” Dom was twirlin’ that hula hoop, wasn’t she, honey? “Thank you so much for the statement!” You’re welcome…we worked really hard on it and hope it’ll help you fight the good fight. “I really appreciated the range of plenaries and presidential sessions this year!” I’m so glad…I see us. “What up, doe? Thank you for making sure Detroit was in the house!” Thank you for having us…it’s been a pleasure and an honor. “Thank you for that last episode of Feminist Frequencies!” I’m so glad you watched and learned a li’l somethin’ from the data. don’t know all of you, but I really do love all y’all. hope you’ve seen and felt that, and I hope you continue to see and feel it even after my term officially ends in about two short weeks.
did things during the past two-plus years. A lot of things. Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t. But overall, I believe the National Women’s Studies Association is better for it now and will continue to be in the long run. But in all honesty, don’t really get to decide. You do.
So…how’d I do?
In solidarity,
Iam a believer of signs – the shiny penny’s promise of luck, the itch of my left palm when money is soon on the way, and the full moon’s bright reminder that abundance is possible. In my practice of turning to Homegirl HQ’s Harvest of Survival Affirmation Deck each morning, I pulled this card. Repeatedly. For nearly 7 months, regardless of how much I shuffled the deck. The belief that this work has been done before continues to drive us forward at the National Office; we are able to achieve the impossible alongside incredibly generous, patient, and trusting thought partners across the archipelago and our membership.
Convening in Puerto Rico is no act of indulging in paradise’s promise of escapism. Rather than lean into recreating “what we used to do”, preparing for our time in Borikén warranted review of the few records available to us from the Association’s 2014 Annual Conference in this very same location. We dug through 40+ boxes of memories, scoured every digital file we could find, and talked with past NWSA leadership to stitch together an idea of what it was like to bring over two thousand WGSS educators to Puerto Rico over a decade ago. Perhaps it was a sign that we found very little – an invitation to nestle even further into our 44th Annual Conference theme as a reminder, that we must attend to the journey, not only the arrival – so that we could spend 2025 reframing what it would take to do the impossible when our field is under intensified attack.
as we toured venues/businesses as arrivants on land nestled in the teeth of empire. Our members similarly shared examples of state-level censorship, institutions bending the knee to authoritarianism, silence from leaders in response to Women’s and Gender Equity Centers closures, and more and more and more and more examples of erasure in and outside of formal academia.
We delved into serious reflection on how we developed and nurtured relationships across Puerto Rico and within our community – we knew that this work of conference planning “happened” before, but what could and should we do differently to enact feminist principles of care, solidarity, consciousness raising, and community building? And so, we listened. We collected stories of academic extraction, binaries between the academy and the communities it/we claim to serve, the exhaustion of being in constant language translation for the sake of admission to the conference space, and the ever-present stain of US imperialism
We gathered these stories and worked to address these concerns and wounds with our actions and our dollar. We followed the thrum of Octavia’s reminder with the understanding that we could not do this work alone and without siblinghood. We empowered our member-based committees to advise us on local partnerships, programming, and revisement of our NWSA policies on accommodations. We moved slower, spending time sitting with our ideas rather than rushing to arrive at perfection; we lived in WhatsApp group chats and Instagram DMs courting artisans and artivists; our Governing Council crafted Special Sessions that brought our conference sub-themes to life, and we are honored to amplify the work of our invited speakers as experts and exemplars of our honour song Cultural workers at Universidad de Puerto Rico welcomed us to their offices – safe havens on campus – and reminded us that their very presence is a disruption in white academia’s landscape. La Colectiva Feminista en Construccíon met our invitation to collaborate with necessary skepticism - how would we be different from the academics (including the feminist ones) who dutifully led interviews with organizers and left the island to publish behind scholarly journals’ paywalls? Family-owned businesses opened their homes and storefronts and asked what it would cost for them to be included in a convening wrapped in words like decolonial and anticapitalist We received beautifully penned conference proposals and stretched every dollar to provide Ann K. Schonberger Registration Waivers and Travel Grants, negotiated to
provide more meals for our attendees, and advocated for waived fees for local artisans interested in vending in our Exhibit Hall but deterred by the cost. A number of members shared how much attending our conference meant to them - how a proposal acceptance helped pride in their scholarship bloom, the shifts inspired by rich reviewer feedback, the validity that a proposal acceptance brings to a dissertation committee who critique the strength of feminist methodologies, as well as the honor of being selected for Authors Meets Critics and In Praxis Workshop sessions.
As a two-person team, the National Office is able to truly do the impossible because we were never alone in this journey; in answering the affirmation card’s question – what inspiration are you drawing from right now to remind yourself that you are not alone? –the inspiration lay in each relationship planted, restored, nurtured, and honored along this journey. Each relationship, like the luster of a shiny penny or the tingle of my left palm, was a sign that doing this work with a feminist lens is possible.
Our Conference Co-Chairs asked how we would be different, in comparison to past organizations and individuals seeking collaboration, and they let us rise to the occasion; we are humbled by their trust and willingness to dream up new/different ways of inviting connection at our conference. Our friends at SIEMPRE VIVAS Metro (SVM) and the Programa de Estudios de Mujer y Género exemplify feminist care praxis, healing, and reclamation. It is through their interfaculty and student kinship that we can create space for local maestros, artivists, dreamers, survivors, and students to take up space within NWSA as experts in their own right. Dr. Rafael Ocasio showed us his beloved Old San Juan and made sure we did not separate its beauty from the island’s history of colonization; similarly, our NWSA Puerto Rican Feminisms Interest Group, under the leadership of Mariela Méndez, poured much love and healing energy into our Pre-Conference “Beyond Colonial Constraints: Cuir Feminist Praxis as Rupture
and Healing across the Archipelago” as a real-time honour song to the Borikén diaspora. The Association is indebted to each San Juan entrepreneur and business owner who heard our vision for feminist freedom dreaming and met us with generosity – we are proud to platform their businesses, with the help of Gamelyn F. Odouardo Sierra, and to highlight how this work has been done before, across generations, via their legacies. Our practice of strengthening our Association is co-facilitated by our committee members who volunteer their knowledge, time, networks, and experience. Christine Busiek fiercely advocated for the NWSA at every contract negotiation and helped ensure we could maintain the lowest room rate possible for our members – we are grateful for this work and her connection to inclusive providers like Leading Edge Audiovisual who met our ask for accessibility with expertise-fueled support. The luminaries behind Homegirl HQ – Brittany Brathwaite and Michelina Ferrara – are proof that joy lay at the foundation of revolution as their fierce solidarity and designs make our work tangible (and all the more delicious). And to Lorena Estrella, who is surely an alchemist for her ability to take my fantastical ideas and create artwork that represents the Association’s vision, we remain ever honored to link our arms with yours.
It is my hope that as we convene in Borikén, that proof that each of us can do the impossible be present in every session presentation, new and old connection, warm embrace amongst comrades, and breath between shared meals (or over mock/cocktails), in our rhythmic stomping on the dance floor, and every sign (real or imagined) that we are not alone in this work. Thank you for being here.
REDEFINING THE POLITICAL
Black Feminism and the Politics of Everyday Life
ALEX J. MOFFETT-BATEAU
DISABLING RELATIONS
Wounded Bodyminds and Transnational Praxis
SONA KAZEMI
Dis/color series
FEMALE BODY IMAGE AND BEAUTY POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
EDITED BY SRIRUPA CHATTERJEE AND SHWETA RAO GARG
PROPER WOMEN
DIGITAL GIRLHOODS
NWSA 2025 conference attendees
Take 30% off when you order online at tupress.temple.edu
Enter promo code: WSATUP25 for discount
Offer expires 12/31/2025
Applies to all Women’s Studies titles
Feminism and the Politics of Respectability in Iran
FAE CHUBIN
RIGHTEOUS SISTERHOOD
The Politics and Power of an All-Women’s Motorcycle Club
SARAH L. HOILAND
CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE INTERREGNUM
EDITED BY ROBERT F. CARLEY, ANNE DONLON, BEENASH JAFRI, LAURA J. KWAK, EERO LAINE, SAJ, AND CHRIS ALEN SULA
KATHERINE A. PHELPS
THE FAST TRACK
Inside the Surging Business of Women’s Sports
JANE M c MANUS
ANNOUNCING NEW SERIES
THEORIZING FROM WITHIN
VICTORIA REYES AND GHASSAN MOUSSAWI, SERIES EDITORS SCAN for more information
PROFESSORS : REQUEST
EXAMINATION COPIES
Our electronic exam copies, when available, are free and expire after 90 days; a processing fee of $10.00 will be applied to each request for print examination copies (we will send you a code to purchase your book for $10.00 through our site).
@ TUPRESS.TEMPLE.EDU/FORMS/ COPY-REQUEST
Registration is located on the first floor of the Puerto Rico Convention Center; after entering the Convention Center, you’ll find us right outside of Exhibit Hall A on the first floor.
Pre-registered attendees can pick up conference name badges and programs at our Registration desks; General Conference Registration is required to attend all general conference sessions, including the Presidential Address and Plenary sessions, special programs and events - including our receptions. We ask that attendees wear their name badges throughout the conference to assist in networking and guaranteeing access to attendee-only programming!
NWSA staff and volunteers are available at registration to assist attendees throughout the duration of our annual convening. Do not hesitate to bring questions or concerns to our team’s attention - we will do our best to support you!
Thursday, November 13 7:30 AM - 6:30 PM
Friday, November 14 7:30 AM - 6:30 PM
Saturday, November 15 7:30 AM - 6:30 PM
Thursday - Saturday | 7:30 AM - 6:30 PM Sunday, 7:30 AM - 4 PM
In line with our mission and commitment to enacting a feminist ethic of care, the NWSA proudly offers professional childcare services for participants on-site during our Annual Conference. Professional childcare services are facilitated by local, licensed, and insured providers that specialize in childcare for events; this service is available to members with dependents between the ages of 6 months and 12 years old.
Our 2025 partner, D’Nanny Services, is a local woman-owned business. The Association subsidizes the cost of childcare for attendees in order to meet the needs of our community as well as implement as many conference services that allow your full participation throughout our time during the Conference. These services required pre-registration and payment. These services required pre-registration and payment.
The Puerto Rico Convention Center offers an on-site lactation space for attendees who are lactating. This designated room is located on the first floor of our meeting space by the elevator, please use the map provided on page 14 for a precise location. The key for the space can be retrieved at the information desk directly across from the designated room.
The Association invites members to visit our Multi-Faith Room throughout the duration of the Annual Conference. We strive to provide a peaceful, quiet space for personal reflection, meditation, and allows members to practice their faith with privacy; our Multi-Faith Room will feature soft lighting, seating, and a limited number of prayer mats. Attendees are welcome to visit throughout the event for moments of solitude, prayer, or quiet contemplation. Should you feel comfortable, we encourage you to bring items to contribute to our altar as we honor and celebrate our loved ones and ancestors who shape(d) our commitment to feminist worlds. We ask that attendees remove their shoes before entering the Multi-Faith Room.
NWSA worked with the Puerto Rico Convention Center team to ensure that as many restrooms as possible are gender neutral and will be available for use by all persons. As the Convention Center is a public building, certain restrooms are unable to be converted to gender neutral facilities. Please refer to our map on page 14 of this program book to identify our designated gender neutral restrooms.
NWSA is committed to curating an accessible conference experience for all of our attendees. We appreciate every attendee who shared accessibility needs, suggestions, and requests throughout our planning process as we worked to make appropriate arrangements for support. We hold immense gratitude and kinship with our Access & Inclusion Committee for their nearly year-long support in strengthening how we gather through a disability justice framework. If a need arises on-site, we encourage you to visit our registration hub for assistance and ask for a NWSA staff person.
In the interest of supporting our colleagues with sensitivity to alcohols and scent, we ask that attendees refrain from wearing perfumes or fragrances. Perfumes and fragrances (including scented lotions) can negatively affect people with multiple chemical sensitive syndrome (MCS), asthma, and/ or autoimmune disorders. For every 100 people in America, there are an average of 10 with asthma, 20 with an autoimmune disorder, and/or 12.5 with MCS.
The Puerto Rico Convention Center has multiple large, covered parking areas surrounding the center. Parking is first come first serve. Those parking at the Puerto Rico Convention Center can enter through the main entrance and self-park their vehicle.
Language Justice and ASL Support
The Association partnered with Lighthouse Translations and Interpretations to provide American Sign Language (ASL) services at our Plenaries, Presidential Sessions, and our annual Membership Assembly. As we convene in San Juan, Puerto Rico we strengthened our commitment to language justice and inclusion by securing a limited number of language translation headsets. Headsets are available on a first come, first serve basis and require in-person sign ups in our Ballroom space. Please refer to our digital app for richer details on this feature of our conference support.
English - Spanish Translation
Friday, November 14
Words (Still) Conjure: Honoring the Life, Work, and Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM | Ballroom A
An Honour Song: Feminist Struggles, Feminist Victories
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM | Ballroom A
Saturday, November 15
Membership Assembly
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM | Ballroom A
Spanish - English Translation
Saturday, November 15
Seguimos: Honoring the Lineage, Legacy, and Leadership of Puerto Rican Feminisms
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM | Ballroom A
For the most up-to-date details, we encourage folks to download our personalized conference app via the QR code below to access our live schedule, curate your own itinerary, and connect with fellow attendees!
The NWSA redesigned our Exhibit Hall to invite more engagement, more space for kinship, and more opportunities to engage in our conference programming. Connect with local businesses, peruse selections of pertinent scholarship, support emerging scholars at our annual Poster Session, and catch your breath in between presentations while spending time with colleagues. Visit our conference app for a listing of vendors and special programs hosted in the Exhibit Hall!
Developed by the 2025 Access & Inclusion Committee
As we prepare to convene in San Juan, Puerto Rico for our annual conference—An Honour Song: Feminist Struggles, Feminist Victories—NWSA leadership affirms our organizational commitment to the feminist position that those most impacted by any particular system of oppression are best situated and equipped to guide us in our efforts to transform and survive it.
We believe that access is “radical love” and a celebration of “collective responsibility and pleasure” rather than a bureaucratic practice of reasonable accommodations and compliance. Therefore, we argue that accessibility, through disability justice frameworks, should and must be ingrained in the design, invitation, and engagement of our convenings. The Association invites our members and attendees to take up the messy work of feminist world building with a willingness to learn, make mistakes, pivot, and strengthen how we teach, share, and imbibe decolonial knowledges as feminist educators. The work of access and inclusion requires all of us and an expansive starting point for reimagining feminist spaces. In this vein, we believe that all bodies, lived experiences, and communities are far from disposable and burdensome; this work is guided by and indebted to disability justice luminaries as well as the generous expertise of our Access & Inclusion Committee.
Keeping a distance between yourself and others when manageable, getting vaccinated and boosted if able, and staying masked as much as possible are small but important expressions of a feminist care ethic, a politics of solidarity and interdependence, and a commitment to dismantling the able bodied supremacist rhetoric claiming it is time to “move on.” We strongly recommend that all attendees take COVID-19 tests, if possible, in order to enact our commitments to collective care. We are not here to reproduce supremacies, but instead to dismantle them and work towards sharing this responsibility.
The Association expects all conference attendees to be fully vaccinated (with the exception of those with medical conditions or faith-based beliefs precluding vaccination) and we strongly encourage you to receive a booster shot at least two weeks before the conference. We also suggest, depending upon your ability, access, and comfort, that you receive your flu vaccination, as well. Although we are not requiring you to show your Vaccination Card, we are taking your conference atten dance as a sign that you are fully aware of our expecta tions and commitment to feminist care ethics.
If you are not vaccinated, we strongly encourage you to mask up in public settings and to engage in personal practices to remain both comfortable and healthy.
While in the general conference session rooms and common areas, masks are strongly recommended unless you are eating, drinking, or presenting. Consider eating and drinking outdoors whenever possible. We hope the premise that we have the power to keep each other safe will guide these interactions. The Association offers a limited number of KN95 masks at our Registra tion Hub.
The Sheraton Puerto Rico Resort & Casino is our official conference hotel for our Annual convening! The hotel offers contactless entry, personalized housekeeping services for your room (at your request), and regular disinfecting of any and all conference-related spaces. We hold deep appreciation for the local team at the Sheraton Puerto Rico Resort & Casino who work to keep our spaces clean and safe as we convene.
Should you test positive or have symptoms, we expect (and strongly encourage, for the safety of our members) that you will stay home - or notify the hotel and quaran tine - and prioritize your health and practice collective care.
AFTER OUR ANNUAL CONVENING
Based on current contact tracing advice, if you learn that you have been exposed to COVID-19 at the event, were exposed less than 14 days prior to the event, or develop symptoms of COVID-19 or test positive for COVID-19 up to 14 days after re turning home, please contact the Association at NationalOffice@nwsa.org.
These recommendations are offered in the spirit of solidarity
Saturday, November 15 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Puerto Rico Convention Center Third Floor
Participating Programs Include:
Arizona State University School of Social Transformation
CUNY Graduate Center
Emory University WGSS
Oregon State University, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Penn State
Indiana University Bloomington Department of Gender Studies
Texas Woman’s University
The Ohio State University
UCLA, Department of Gender Studies
University of Buffalo Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
University Of Colorado
University of Kentucky Gender & Women’s Studies
University of Minnesota Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
University of Nevada, Reno, Department of Gender, Race, and Identity
University of Washington
University of Wisconsin Madison Gender and Women’s Studies
Head to the Lobby across from our registration hub and enjoy complimentary coffee and tea on the days and times listed below!
Friday, November 14
8:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Saturday, November 15
8:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Sunday, November 16
8:00 AM - 11:00 AM
We’re excited to offer the opportunity to connect with our Governing Council Members at this year’s Annual Conference! Members and first-time attendees are invited to share conversations - and a snack - with members of our Association’s elected leaders outside of our annual Membership Assembly. We look forward to fostering meaningful connections during - and beyond - our annual convening!
Friday, November 14
8:00 AM - 10:00 AM | 2nd Floor Mezzanine
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM | Exhibit Hall A
Saturday November 15
8:00 AM - 10:00 AM | 2nd Floor Mezzanine 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM | Exhibit Hall A
Our Special Sessions - our grounding Plenaries and Presidential Sessions - are the cornerstone of our annual convenings; they feature key thought leaders, WGSS scholars, cultural workers, and multi-vocal co-conspirators who help bring our conference theme to life! All 2025 Special Sessions will feature a range of catered treats and beverages. Please explore the digital conference app for richer details of each session and our line up of invited speakers.
Our Authors Meets Critics, or AMCs, bring together authors of recent, cutting-edge scholarship, deemed to be important contributions to the field of WGSS. While invited discussants provide a variety of perspectives on how we might attend to the questions and ideations each text inspires, the Association invites attendees of our AMC sessions to enjoy light fare alongside this rich discussion. The full schedule of AMC panels are viewable via our conference app and in our program book!
We’re proud to support presses and publications who help expand the reach of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies literature! Please explore our Conference App to access an upto-date schedule of book signings and similar events hosted in our Exhibit Hall and as part of key programs, such as our Plenaries.
Our commitment to supporting and platforming the work of local artists, educators, experts, and organizers culminates in curated sessions sponsored by our Conference Co-Chairs! We invite you to participate in a series of Sponsored Sessions designed by our colleagues and thought partners, Alexandra Pagán Vélez, Zoán T. Dávila Roldán, and Shariana Ferrer-Nuñez, by reviewing our “Conference Co-Chair Sponsored Sessions” in our Conference app. You’ll find these sessions with the label “Honoring the Archipelago”, which also includes offerings from Puerto-Rico based activist-scholars.
Join the vibrant community of feminist and queer studies scholars in our interdisciplinary department. Apply by December 1 to join next year’s Fall cohort. More than 25 faculty specializing in: disability studies, reproductive justice, BIPOC feminisms, transnational feminisms, LGBTQ studies, art and literature, media and performance, migration, decolonization, archives and affect, and more!
New from Feminist Press:
Aquí: Puerto Rican Feminisms Against Empire
edited by Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón
“These essays compel us to examine a greater diversity of voices and challenge imperialism as an allegory of patriarchy.”
ANA IRMA RIVERA LASSÉN, human rights activist and former member of the Puerto Rican Senate
Now available wherever you get your books, including at the Feminist Press booth!
Saturday, November 15
4:00 PM - 5:15 PM | Room 202A
Sunday, November 16
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM | Room 101B
The Association is excited to invite you to put pen to paper in our NWSA Writer’s Nest. Inspired by the tradition of women of color feminisms, we aim to honor writing our stories and ourselves as a practice of acceptance and feminist world-building. We evoke Toni Cade Bambara’s loving practice of signing her letters “TCB”—a play on the letters of her name and a reminder to take care of [our] blessings —in designing pockets of time during our annual convening to do just that - to invite us to redesign our relationship to writing (whether that be reflexive work, scholarly drafts towards publication, or poetic crafting) where the expectation to produce does not eclipse how, as Gloria Anzaldúa’ asserts, “the world [we] create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give [us]”. And so, we offer our NWSA Writing Nest as a space for dedicated time to write from and through the intersections of our socio-political and reclaimed identities, nurture the creative power that emerges from nepantla—the in-between — and recommit ourselves to Adrienne Rich’s call to “re-vision” ourselves as authors, creatives, radicals, and disruptors willing to rise to the “challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored” when we pour into our collective honour song.
In offering a Writing Nest, the NWSA asks participants to cultivate a multi-authored shared practice that is both deeply personal and politically alive as feminist scholars; attendees can flow in and out of our writing space, dialogue with our partner Jawn Hawkins on generative writing exercises, snag a cup of tea or coffee (and a snack) and ruminate on your writing, workshop with peers, and delve into our imagination as a site of resistance and sustainability - especially when the university demands of us a relationship to writing that delves into writing as labor rather than as a practice of authoring the stories that make us whole as well as shape more just and fruitful futures.
Thursday, November 13
Room 208A
In naming our struggles and victories, we claim and hold space across many realms and evoke the memory of luminary Toni Cade Bambara, who lovingly closed her letters with “Take Care of your Blessings” as a creative play on her initials. In honor of our coming together to think and feel (sentipensar), we invite a moment to breathe collectively—to honor our resistance, disruption, and defiance, as well as our power and joy — in an effort to nurture our most valued resource, community.
#NWSA2025 attendees are welcome to join our executive director, Kristian Contreras and our beloved colleagues at SIEMPRE VIVAS Metro (SVM) University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, led by Dra. Elithet Silva-Martínez, in this open space for dialogue, reflection, and healing kinships as we break bread and ground our annual convening with an honour song of our own.
Friday, November 14
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM | Exhibit Hall A
Our Annual Conference program invites poster sessions that engage elements of our conference theme, An Honour Song: Feminist Struggles, Feminist Victories, and our sub-themes in meaningful ways. Poster Sessions allow scholars of all entry points - emerging scholars, junior professoriate, and seasoned educators alike - to share their work in visual and dynamic mediums.
Queers for Climate Justice
Friday, November 14
4:00 PM - 6:30 PM | Room 101 A
While Florida’s violent legislation dominated news headlines, LGBTQ2S+ communities have also been organizing for survival on the frontlines of acceler-
ating climate change. As the model bills tested in Florida spread rapidly under the Trump administration, Florida-based activists call on us all to listen to their stories and understand that “Florida is everywhere.”
Following our Healing Circle, attendees are welcome to partake in sweet treats and refreshments in a celebration of feminist artistic expression. Hosted in collaboration with our Conference Co-Chair Alexandra Pagán Vélez, we invite poets, writers, singers, artists and everyone in between to share the work that celebrates feminist struggles and feminist victories as a means of uplifting our conference theme.
Can’t Stop Change: Queer Climate Stories from the Florida Frontlines is a new documentary from the grassroots group Queers for Climate Justice, which weaves interviews with 15 LGBTQ2S+ artists, organizers, and educators across Florida (and the new Florida diaspora) into an intersectional climate justice narrative. The film offers political analysis of the root causes beneath Florida’s climate crises and social injustices, including attention to colonialism, fossil-fueled transphobia and rising disaster militarism. Yet the film simultaneously emphasizes the dreams, joy, and brilliance of queer and trans people. The film concludes with concrete examples of resistance efforts blossoming across the state, calling audiences to engage in the collective work of “shaping change.”
Join us for a film screening of Can’t Stop Change followed by a Q&A with directors and collaborators, including Puerto Rico-based Co-Director Natalia Villarán-Quiñones of Queers for Climate Justice.
CelebratinG
feMinist forMations’ speCial issue on afriCan feMinist subJeCtivities
Friday, November 14
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM | Second Floor Mezzanine
Join Feminist Formations and the National Women’s Studies Association for a special reception celebrating the publication of the journal’s first-ever issue devoted to African Feminism.
This gathering honors the contributors whose work brings new depth and direction to African feminist scholarship, as well as the editorial team whose vision and dedication made the issue possible. Faculty, graduate students, and emerging scholars are warmly invited to join in recognizing this collective achievement. Refreshments and light bites will be served
a visual honour sonG: illustratinG feMinist struGGles, feMinist viCtories
Friday, November 14
6:00 PM | Outside of Room 208A
In partnership with our colleagues at SIEMPRE VIVAS Metro - (Universidad de Puerto Rico Recinto de Río Piedras) and the Concentración Menor en Estudios de Mujer y Género (the Minor in Women and Gender Studies) at the Universidad de Puerto Rico Recinto de Río Piedras, we are proud to feature student artwork that meets our call for a collective honour song that amplifies our feminist struggles and victories.
We invite attendees to visit our art display, curated by Laura García, throughout our 45th annual convening and join in on the “official” opening with the student artists and performers Tuna Magisterio de la Luna before the start of our grounding Presidential Address and plenary, An Honour Song: Feminist Struggles, Feminist Victories.
Friday, November 14
9:00 PM - 10:30 PM | Ballroom B
Following our opening Presidential Address and Plenary discussion, members are invited to grab a plate and enjoy our fully catered opening reception; we’re excited to offer an inclusive menu, a local DJ and dance party, a bar serving adult-beverages, and opportunities to commemorate our first full day of our conference at the NWSA Photobooth. Attendees are welcome to enjoy refreshments, music, and network alongside new and old friends and loved ones. We’re grateful for our partnership with the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians for their sponsorship of our grounding reception and celebration.
Saturday, November 15
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM | Ballroom A
The Association hosts a Membership Assembly each year at the Annual Conference to:
• Receive an annual report of the status of NWSA
• Receive reports from committees and constituent groups as appropriate
• Deliberate upon recommendations for fostering the mission of NWSA, and Consider such other business as may properly come before the membership.
The Membership Assembly is a vital practice of transparent communication and accountability with members of the Association; we encourage you to review our Association Bylaws’s outlining of the Membership Assembly.
To submit your almost-done article in 3 days, you need to choose an article that has only writing tasks remaining (i.e., all the writing problems are solved). This distinction is key to learning how to estimate how long it will take you to finish an article, or any piece of writing.
Writing Tasks: small, repeatable, measurable, easy-to-delegate writing activities. You can get good at predicting the amount of time they will take.
For example, writing tasks include: writing the abstract, creating the figures and tables (once you decide what they should be), including a new source in a lit review.
Writing Problems: the unique, difficult-to-measure, can’t-really-delegate thought work decisions that need to be made in the composition of scholarly work.
For example, writing problems include: deciding which sources to include in a literature review (and which to leave out), constructing the argument in the discussion section, selecting the order in which to present your data in order to tell the story of your paper, creating an outline, deciding on the figures and tables.
Saturday, November 15
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM | Third Floor in front of Ballroom A & B
The NWSA invests in nurturing and facilitation connections with women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS) degree granting programs. Each year, we invite university programs and departments to participate at the Meet & Greet networking session, which is a signature component of our Annual Conference. We welcome any current and/or prospective students to connect with our academic partners and explore the utility and reach of a degree (or certificate) in WGSS; please explore our digital conference program to view participating institutions!
witness: honorinG the life, leGaCy and work of June Jordan
Saturday, November 15
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM | Exhibit Hall A
Join us in celebrating the life and legacy of June Jordan–literary icon, activist, forever poet, master teacher, and Black feminist trailblazer whose work continues to inspire generations. This special gathering marks the launch
of This Unruly Witness: June Jordan’s Legacy a newly edited volume exploring the enduring impact and brilliance of Jordan’s writing, loving teaching, and activism. A first of its kind, This Unruly Witness transgresses disciplinary boundaries, and stages a dialogue between former students of Jordan, as well as scholars/ artists/activists who take up her words and courage. Though no longer with us in body and bone, This Unruly Witness reveals, through fresh insights, the enduring application of Jordan’s wisdom and warnings–resounding with undiminished power today. Come raise a glass with us in Jordan’s honor—holding her memory close, breathing life into her words, and carrying her legacy forward into futures yet to come, and always for our good.
Saturday, November 15 5:30 PM - 8:30 PM | Room 201A
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies one of the first feminist academic journals in the United States, is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding in 1975. This roundtable brings together multiple members of the current Frontiers editorial collective to discuss the journal’s enduring contributions to feminist scholarship, community activism, and grassroots knowledge production. We envision this event as a culmination of the collective’s multiple anniversary projects that explore the past, present, and future of feminist theory, methodology, politics, and publishing. This discussion uses the history of Frontiers as a way to engage with the conference’s theme of remembering who we are and where we’ve been as a field and movement, and asserts the critical role of women’s and gender studies publications for advancing feminist practices and discourses in uncertain and challenging academic and sociopolitical landscapes. The roundtable will begin with a brief presentation from the editorial collective and will then be structured as an open dialogue with the audience, including previous editors and contributors to our anniversary issues that we have invited to participate. We will host an informal celebration sponsored by the University of Nebraska Press immediately following the roundtable.
Each year, the Association hosts Pre-Conference sessions that focus on pertinent topics and issues impacting the field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies (WGSS). These Pre-Conferences are scheduled on the first day of the Annual Conference and are opportunities for professional development, fostering critical connections, and building upon foundational competencies.
All pre-conferences required registration or utilized an application process.
Explore more than five decades of influential feminist thought and activism with the NEW Ms. Magazine Archive.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of the newly digitized Ms. Magazine Archive, providing unprecedented access to every issue from its launch in 1972 to the present. For the rst time, the full run of Ms. magazine has been digitized in a high-resolution, full-color, and fully searchable format in a single title collection. The archive is NOW AVAILABLE for faculty and students to easily access at no charge—and use in your classes!—at academic and public libraries in the U.S. and around the world.
Ask Your Librarian! If you can’t find it at your library, we encourage faculty and students to ask their librarian for free trial access and to purchase a subscription through ProQuest.
Ms. is partnering with the editors of Feminist Pedagogy for Teaching Online and leading WGSS faculty and librarians to develop new teaching guides on current topics, including:
• Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, edited by Karla J. Strand
• Feminism, Race and the Media, edited by Janell Hobson
• Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice, edited by Loretta Ross and Carrie N. Baker
• Gender-based and Sexual Violence, edited by Vanessa Tyson and Caroline Heldman.
NWSA Members GET A FREE YEAR of Ms.! So you and your students can stay informed and ready to fight back.
Questions: Contact Karon Jolna, Ph.D., Executive Director, Ms. Classroom at kjolna@msmgazine.com or go to www.msintheclassroom.com
Thursday, November 13 | Rooms 202A & 202B
8:00 AM - 5:30 PM
Co-Chaired by Dr. Crystal Jackson and Dr. Stephanie Rytilhati
The Program Administration and Development Committee’s (PAD) an nual Pre-Conference provides administrators with ideas, strategies, and approaches to both strengthen and grow WGSS programs through con temporary socio-political issues. These can include: supporting diverse leadership, building coalitions across campus and local communities, fundraising, battling backlash, making external reviews successful, incor porating service learning requirements, and more.
Thursday, November 13 | Rooms 202C & 203
8:00 AM - 5:30 PM
Co-Chaired by Dana Bisgnani and Dr. Letitia Price
The Women’s Centers Committee (WCC) provides an opportunity for Women’s and Gender Equity Center directors, staff, and practitioners to gather and share information, ideas, challenges, successes, and support through its annual Pre-Conference. This space serves as one of coalition building, professional development, and alchemy as Women’s Centers staff work to address modern-day issues that impact their sites of learning, the field as a whole, and our interpersonal lives in this particular socio-political reality.
beyond Colonial Constraints:
Cuir feMinist praxis as rupture and healinG aCross the arChipelaGo
Thursday, November 13 | University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras
8:00 AM - 5:30 PM
Chaired by Dr. Mariela Méndez
Across the archipelago, Puerto Rican activists apply decolonial feminist and cuir strategies to challenge violent liberal and conservative constraints. Led by archipelago-based organizers, artivists, and scholars, the panels and workshops in this pre-conference focus on building transformative paths towards sustainable healing, connection, and liberatory worlds. This development experience is rooted in Puerto Rican Feminist art, scholarship, practitioner-informed interventions, and community-based knowledge production. This pre-conference program is made possible through kinship with our colleagues anchored at the University of Puerto Rico and the organizing committee of the NWSA Puerto Rican Feminisms Interest Group.
woMen of Color leadership proJeCt (woClp)
Thursday, November 13 | Rooms 201A & 201B
8:00 AM - 5:30 PM
Co-Chaired by Dr. Stephanie Andrea Allen and Dr. Sabah Uddin, Women of Color Caucus Co-Chairs
The NWSA Women of Color Caucus (WoCC), Program Administration and Development Committee (PAD), and the Women’s Centers Committee (WCC) jointly sponsor the Women of Color Leadership Project (WoCLP) in conjunction with the PAD and WCC Pre-Conferences. The WoCLP is designed to increase the number of women and non-binary people of color students, staff, and faculty members within the field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies (WGSS)/Women’s and Gender Equity Centers and, consequently, to have an impact on the levels of participation and power by women/non-binary people of color across our field and within the Association.
From first steps to seasoned leadership, there’s a place for you in this movement. Collective Rising connects undergraduates to justice work through paid internships and mentorships. Our 30+ year annual Conference brings organizers, educators, and communities together for political education and action. Together, we are growing the future of reproductive justice – with joy
words (still) ConJure: honorinG the life, work, and leGaCy of toni Cade baMbara
Friday, November 14
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM | Ballroom A
In 1970, 55 years ago, Toni Cade Bambara published The Black Woman: An Anthology a now-classic Black feminist text featuring many of our revered and beloved icons, such as Kay Lindsey, Alice Walker, Abbey Lincoln, Nikki Giovanni, Gail Stokes, Grace Lee Boggs, Audre Lorde, Frances Beale, and Paule Marshall. One decade later, Bambara published The Salt Eaters, the classic novel that taught us “wholeness is no trifling matter.” As NWSA President Heidi R. Lewis points out in “Feminists We Love: Toni Cade Bambara” (2014), Bambara gave us “a feminism that was unapologetically Black” from the time she began sharing her wisdom with the world until she passed away 30 years ago at the tender age of 56. She gave us “a feminism that was loud, strong, collective, vulnerable, powerful, communal, honest, and intimate.” She gave us “the kind of Black feminism that wasn’t afraid to look around and that refused to suffer fools.”1 During this plenary, President Lewis will honor Bambara’s life, work, and legacy alongside some of the women who were closest to her—activist Zoe Bambara, Toni’s granddaughter; Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer and award-winning writer-filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Bambara’s student; as well as two of Bambara’s close friends, writer, curator, and women’s health activist Linda J. Holmes, and Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, past NWSA President and founding Director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies at Spelman College, home of the Toni Cade Bambara Papers.
Zoe Bambara, Doula and Cultural Worker
Beverly Guy Sheftall Spelman College
Linda J. Holmes, Independent Scholar
Heidi R. Lewis, Colorado College & 22nd NWSA President
Aishah Shahidah Simmons SurvivorHealer-Filmmaker-Writer
Zoe Bambara (she/they) is a Queer doula, writer, organizer/cultural worker whose work is rooted in the Southern Black Queer Feminist Radical Tradition. From leading direct actions to advocating for accessible and equitable abortion access to teaching childbirth education in jails, she centers the community in everything she does. Zoe is currently the Community and Volunteer Engagement Coordinator at ARC-Southeast, the largest abortion fund in the South. She is also pursuing her master’s in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State. Her work is deeply rooted in her ancestral heritage, and she plans to open the Toni Cade Bambara Community Arts Center with her mother soon. In the meantime, they host free film screenings and a book club for the community.
Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (she/her) is a trailblazing Black feminist scholar, whose passion for the many communities she encompasses is evident in her work and friendships she has built over the last 55 years She is the visionary architect of The Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College, the first for a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). Since its founding in 1981, she has served as the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies, exposing her students and the broader public to the intellectual contributions of Black feminists throughout history. Two years after opening the center, Guy-Sheftall co-founded SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women Guy-Sheftall has written, edited, or co-edited over ten books, including Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought and her latest publication Black!Feminist!Free! Selected Writing, Interviews, and Speeches
linda J. holMes
Independent Scholar
Linda Janet Holmes M.P.A., (she/her) is an award-winning author, women’s health researcher, and longtime birthing justice activist. More than two decades ago, Holmes and Cheryl Wall, PhD, co-authored Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara In praise of the anthology, Toni Morrison celebrated Savoring the Salt for reflecting Bambara’s “exhilarating intellect and reach of her incomparable talents.” Holmes later wrote A Joyous Revolt: Toni Cade Bambara, Writer and Activist, the first biography on Bambara.
Holmes met Bambara in 1970 at Livingston College, Rutgers University. While enrolled in Bambara’s Black literature class, Holmes wrote the short story “The True Story of Chicken Licken,” which Bambara published in her 1970 anthology, Tales and Stories for Black Folks. Current works by Holmes include Safe in a Midwife’s Hands: Birthing Traditions from Africa to the American South and Listen To Me Good. Living in Hampton, Va., Holmes honors Bambara’s spirit in meditative walks near Hampton’s Salt Water Ponds and beaches.
Colorado College & 22nd NWSA President
Dr. Heidi R. Lewis (she/her) is President of the National Women’s Studies Association, Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Gender & Women’s Studies, and David & Lucile Packard Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College. She is the author of In Audre’s Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk in Berlin (edition assemblage, 2021), and she’s published in Womanism Rising (U of Illinois P, 2025), Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies II (Routledge, 2024), Unteilbar Bündnisse gegen Rassismus (Unrast Verlag, 2019), The Cultural Impact of Kanye West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), the Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships. Lewis has also contributed to The Feminist Wire NewBlackMan, NPR, Act Out, Ms., Bitch Media and other publications. Most recently, she published Make Rappers Rap Again: Interrogating the Mumble Rap “Crisis” (2025), the first in the Oxford University Press Theorizing African American Music Series.
Survivor-HealerFilmmaker-Writer
Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) is a Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer, award-winning filmmaker-author, and Buddhist mindfulness meditation teacher. For five-years, she studied closely with her mentor, the late Toni Cade Bambara, at Philadelphia’s Scribe Video Center. Under Bambara’s guidance, Simmons developed her AfroLez®femcentric voice and lifelong path as a cultural worker.
Her early short films—Silence...Broken (1993) and In My Father’s House (1996)— emerged from Bambara-led scriptwriting workshops. Her more recognized work includes NO! The Rape Documentary (2006), also first developed in a Bambara workshop—a groundbreaking, award-winning film—and her Lambda Literary Award–winning anthology love WITH accountability (2019). Both center Black survivors and envision non-carceral paths to healing.
Grounded in spiritual discipline informed by 23 years of dedicated Vipassanā practice—as well as certifications as a trauma-informed mindfulness meditation teacher and a qualified MBSR teacher—Simmons brings compassionate clarity and brave truth to her art and teaching. Since 1995, she has delivered over 400 lectures and facilitated workshops across the U.S. and internationally, served in faculty and artist-in-residence roles, and earned numerous accolades for her transformative contributions.
Friday, November 14
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM | Ballroom A
Since Donald Trump’s election as 47th President of the U.S. empire, many of us have understandably asked, “What do we do now?” As we pose and respond to this question and similar ones, we should make space for our anxieties, frustrations, and fears. We should allow our sadness, disappointment, and rage to breathe. We must also make space for remembering. This is the spirit in which we are gathering this year. Our annual conference is an honour song, a space where we will remember our feminist struggles and feminist victories. In addition to asking “what do we do now,” we NWSA encourages us to ask, what might become possible when we remember who we are and who we’ve been? What can we (re)learn by remembering the places and spaces from where we come, the places and spaces who made us who we are? What might become possible when we remember the people and communities who taught us how to resist? President Lewis will explore these and related questions during this year’s presidential address. Following the address, President Lewis will continue the conversation alongside Shariana Ferrer-Nuñez, Aurora Levins Morales, and Gina Starblanket in order to breathe into memory and give way to a louder, stronger feminist honour song.
presenters:
Shariana Ferrer-Nuñez, La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción
Aurora Levins Morales, Writer and Poet
Heidi R. Lewis Colorado College & 22nd NWSA President
Gina Starblanket, University of Victoria
“
Our presence is our weapon.
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance
La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción
Shariana Ferrer-Nuñez (she/her/ ella) is a Black queer feminist, political organizer and educator. She is a co-founder and leader of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, a grassroots radical Black feminist organization in Puerto Rico. Her activism began during her leadership in the student movement at the University of Puerto Rico’s 2010–2011 strike. She worked at Proyecto Enlace del Caño Martín Peña as an environmental organizer and educator, supporting communities resisting land grab, forced displacement, and impoverishment, and led the Construyamos Otro Acuerdo campaign advocating for retirees rights and pensions. Shariana has a vast experience in movement-building and organizing focused on reproductive justice, anti-racism, class struggle and decolonization. She was recognized with the Ann Snitow award in 2023.
Writer and Poet
Aurora Levins Morales (she/her) is a writer, artist, historian, teacher and mentor. She is also a homeopathic activist, a healer, a farmer, and a revolutionary. Levins Morales tell stories with medicinal powers. Herbalists who collect wild plants to make medicine call it wildcrafting; she wildcrafts the details of the world, of history, of people’s lives, and concentrate them through art in order to shift consciousness, to change how we think about ourselves, each other and the world. The stories we tell about our lives shape what we’re able to imagine, and what we can imagine determines what we can do. Aurora sees her job as changing the stories we tell and help us imagine a world where greed has no power, the earth is cherished and all people get to live safe and satisfying lives.
Colorado College & 22nd NWSA President University of Victoria Dr. Heidi R. Lewis (she/her) is President of the National Women’s Studies Association, Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Gender & Women’s Studies, and David & Lucile Packard Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College. She is the author of In Audre’s Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk in Berlin (edition assemblage, 2021), and she’s published in Womanism Rising (U of Illinois P, 2025), Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies II (Routledge, 2024), Unteilbar Bündnisse gegen Rassismus (Unrast Verlag, 2019), The Cultural Impact of Kanye West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), the Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships Lewis has also contributed to The Feminist Wire, NewBlackMan, NPR, Act Out, Ms., Bitch Media and other publications. Most recently, she published Make Rappers Rap Again: Interrogating the Mumble Rap “Crisis” (2025), the first in the Oxford University Press Theorizing African American Music Series.
Dr. Gina Starblanket (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the School of Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria. She is Cree/ Saulteaux and a member of the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Treaty 4. Dr. Starblanket’s writings take up Indigenous-settler relations, Indigenous movements towards political transformation, and Indigenous feminisms. Dr. Starblanket is the author of important sole and co-authored interventions theorizing relational responsibilities to the land, including Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial (ARP Press, 2020), Visions of the Heart: Issues Involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada (5th & 6th eds.) and the 3rd edition of Making Space for Indigenous Feminisms, 3rd ed. (2024, Fernwood Press).
Saturday, November 15
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM | Ballroom A
Puerto Rican feminisms emerge within and develop under the material conditions in the “world’s oldest colony.” Rican feminist struggles against extractivist white settler colonial systems are also struggles against the violent logics of cisheterosexism, ableism, and capitalism. They’re struggles for landback, bodily autonomy, climate justice, and food sovereignty. As colonial subjects of the US since 1898, the Rican feminist struggle continues.
In this plenary, Jessica Pabón joins Rican feminists of the diaspora and archipelago to discuss how and why these ongoing struggles dis/appear in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies classrooms, research, advocacy, and activism. In doing so, we invite the NWSA membership to a collective honoring of the legacies, lineages, and leadership of Puerto Rican feminists.
presenters:
Zoán T. Dávila Roldán La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción
Mayra Ivette Díaz Torres Colectivo Ilé
Iris Morales, Activist, Writer, & Independent Scholar
Jessica N. Pabón, Independent Scholar & NWSA Member at Large
Yamilin Rivera-Santiago, Activist, Writer, and Community-Based Communications Specialist
La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción
Zoán T. Dávila Roldán (she/her/ ella) is a Black feminist activist, human rights defender, and lawyer. She studied Journalism and Law at the University of Puerto Rico. She has worked as a reporter and content producer for various multimedia platforms and newspapers in Puerto Rico. Zoán also worked as a litigation attorney at the Community Legal Office and as a researcher at the Puerto Rico Civil Rights Commission. In her legal work, she has represented protesters affected by state and police repression, impoverished communities at risk of displacement, and has supported survivors of gender-based violence. She is a leader and spokesperson of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, a grassroots political organization rooted in the radical tradition of Black and decolonial feminism.
Colectivo Ilé
Mayra Ivette Díaz Torres (she/ her/ella) is an Afro-descendant feminist activist who has been a fierce advocate for the sexual and reproductive rights of women in Puerto Rico for more than twenty years. She is passionate about making health care accessible to economically and socially marginalized people – especially poor, immigrant, trans, and young women. Mayra currently serves as Administrative Director of Colectivo Ilé Corp, a non-profit organization that is focused on strengthening anti-racist and decolonizing work that leads to changes in the community, academic, spiritual, psychological-social, cultural, economic, and political spheres within and outside of Puerto Rico. Before joining Colectivo Ilé Corp, Mayra worked as Program Director of PROFAMILIAS, Fòs Feminista’s partner in Puerto Rico. For the past five years, Mayra has been actively collaborating with the “Campaña Nacional por el Aborto Libre, Seguro y Accesible”, the only multisectoral coalition in defense of the right to abortion in Puerto Rico, and with the community-based organization Urbe Apie. Mayra is also a certified abortion doula with the Boston Doula Project. Mayra’s career began as a Health Educator for various mental health projects, which led her to work with young people and become passionate about youth development and advocacy. She received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology and master’s degree in Public Health at the Medical Sciences Campus of the University of Puerto Rico, where she learned that closing the gap between health services and people living in conditions of poverty and vulnerability is one of the greatest revolutions that can be ignited. She is currently completing a Doctor of Philosophy in Administration of Social Programs and Social Policy at the University of Puerto Rico.
Activist, Writer, & Independent Scholar
Iris Morales (she/her/ella) is a lifelong activist for social justice and the decolonization of Puerto Rico. Her decades of organizing span movements with tenants, students, workers, feminists, community advocates, and media makers. Her activism and love of history led her to create Red Sugarcane Press to produce works centering the Puerto Rican and Latinx Diasporas. She has edited several anthologies, including Voices from Puerto Rico: Post-Hurricane María and two volumes of Latina feminist writings. Morales is the author of Through the Eyes of Rebel Women and Revisiting Herstories: The Young Lords—the only published works documenting the activism of women members—and is the producer-writer-codirector of the acclaimed documentary ¡Palante, Siempre Palante!. She was a leading member of the Young Lords and co-founded its Women’s Caucus and Women’s Union. Morales holds a J.D. from NYU School of Law and an M.F.A. in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College.
Independent Scholar & NWSA Member at Large
Dr. Jessica Pabón (she/her/ella) is a diaspoRican performance studies scholar of identity, community, and resistance. She is editor of the anthology, Porque Estamos Aquí: Puerto Rican Feminisms Against Empire (The Feminist Press, November 2025) and author of Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (NYU Press, 2018). She spends her summers as a butterfly doula helping monarchs on their migration journey and can otherwise be found baking breads, sewing something, or in a forest with her dog admiring the moss.
Activist, Writer & Community-Based Communications Specialist
Yamilin Rivera-Santiago (she/her/ ella) is an Afrocaribbean feminist, communicator, cultural strategist, and activist whose work bridges creativity, storytelling, and community care. With over a decade of experience designing campaigns, producing cultural initiatives, and facilitating educational spaces, she weaves together neuromarketing insights, collective memory, and artistic expression to amplify marginalized voices. Her activism centers on racial justice, gender equity, and LGBTQIA+ visibility, creating platforms that honor lived experiences and generate dialogue across generations.
Guided by empathy and purpose, Yamilin has collaborated with diverse networks of artists, organizers, and educators to curate spaces that blend performance, multimedia, and narrative as tools for healing and change. She is committed to building strategies that place dignity, equity, and connection at the core, while using the power of stories to shift perspectives and mobilize communities. Yamilin continues cultivating her practice at the crossroads of communication, culture, and justice, inspiring collective imagination toward freer futures.
Ongoing Return
Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine
Rana Barakat
304 pages $32.95 paper
Black Pro Se
Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
Faith Barter
236 pages $34.95 paper
AIDS in the Heartland
How Unlikely Coalitions Created a Blueprint for LGBTQ Politics
Katie Batza
182 pages $24.95 paper
Sex and the Office, Second Edition
A History of Gender, Power, and Desire
Julie Berebitsky
396 pages $34.95 paper
Historians on Housewives
Fashion, Performance, and Power on Bravo Reality TV
Edited by Kacey Calahane, Jessica Millward, and Max Speare
294 pages $27.95 paper
The Judicial Politics of Abortion in Latin America
Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico
Jordi Díez
336 pages $39.95 paper
Confederate Sympathies
Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era
Andrew Donnelly
296 pages $32.95 paper
From Vice to Nice
Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS
René Esparza
338 pages $32.95 paper
For a Spell
Sissie Collectivism and Radical Witchery in the Southeast
Jason Ezell
278 pages $29.95 paper
Intrepid Girls
The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA
Amy Erdman Farrell Ferris and Ferris Books
320 pages $35.00 cloth
Custom Made Woman
A Life in Traditional Music
Alice Gerrard
184 pages $30.00 cloth
Shattering the Glass
The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball
Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford
Revised Edition
272 pages $25.00 paper
Black Girls and How We Fail Them
Aria S. Halliday
200 pages $22.00 paper
Colored Women Sittin’ on High Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music
Melanie R. Hill
320 pages $29.95 paper
Midwest Unrest 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement
Ashley Howard
254 pages $27.95 paper
Painful Forms
Aesthetic Violence in American Literature and Art, 1945–2001
Anna Ioanes
220 pages $34.95 paper
Vigorous Reforms
Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Jess Libow
212 pages $32.95 paper
The Undesirable Many Black Women and Their Struggles against Displacement and Housing Insecurity in the Nation’s Capital Rosemary Ndubuizu
324 pages $32.95 paper
Unceasing Militant, Second Edition
The Life of Mary Church Terrell
Alison M. Parker
476 pages $29.95 paper
Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival
Maria Pinto
240 pages $24.00 paper
Urban Borderlands
Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles
Isabela Seong Leong Quintana
224 pages $29.95 paper
Land, Language, and Women
A Cherokee and American Educational History
Julie L. Reed
288 pages $32.95 paper
Secular Sensibilities
Romance, Marriage, and Contemporary Algerian Immigration to France and Québec
Jennifer A. Selby
294 pages $34.95 paper
Reclaiming Clio
Making American Women’s History, 1900-2000
Jennifer Banning Tomás
496 pages $44.95 paper
The Memoirs of Robert and Mabel Williams
African American Freedom, Armed Resistance, and International Solidarity
Edited by Akinyele Omowale Umoja, Gloria Aneb House, and John H. Bracey Jr.
416 pages $34.95 paper
Save 40% on all UNC Press books. Visit www.uncpress.org and use promo code 01DAH40.
Free U.S. shipping on orders of $75 or more. Offer Expires November 30, 2025.
Friday, November 14
10:00 AM - 11:15 AM | Room 102A
On March 18, 2005, Dr. amina wadud led a mixed-gender Friday prayer in New York City, an act that is almost exclusively reserved for men in Islam. Guided by a deep understanding of the Islamic faith and the politics and practices of interpretation (or tafsīr), Dr. wadud’s work has been shaped by a long and ongoing commitment to fighting oppression and centering social justice within Islam. Her ground-breaking books Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1992) and Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (2006) have been translated to many languages and are critical works that continue to inform a growing body of scholarship dedicated to Islamic exegesis. Dr.wadud’s extensive scholarship is shaped by her activist work that transcends neat divisions between the local and the global and insists on the dignity (or karama) of all Muslim practitioners regardless of gender, race, sexuality, age, ability or national background. By connecting the transcendent with the material and lived realities of being Muslim, Dr. wadud’s labor and long legacy of struggle (or jihad) have been defined by a resolute insistence on the spiritual wholeness and well-being of Muslim communities worldwide. Her academic and public scholarship have paved the way for a growing body of Muslim feminist knowledge and praxis that insist on multiple and encompassing range of gendered interpretive possibilities within the Muslim faith. As we mark the 20th anniversary of Dr. wadud’s agential and principled act, how might we understand its significance and enduring relevance today? How does it relate to her broader and continuing scholarship and activism? What are the interpretive and material spaces that Dr. wadud’s work opens, and what intergenerational forms of faith-based activism and scholarship does it inspire within the U.S. and transnationally? What are the ways in which this work has been resisted, misunderstood, or rebuffed by dominant interpretive communities and how might we reckon with such critiques beyond their repudiation or disavowal? This panel invites participants to critically encounter Dr. wadud’s labor and legacy in a time of increased anti-Muslim policies and sentiment and growing political and social unrest through an insistence on an ethics and praxis of care that inspire rigorous engagement, collective imagination, and interpretive possibilities.
Executive Director QIST1
Dr. amina wadud (she/her)
pursued her personal love of the Qur’an all the way to a Ph.D from the University of Michigan in 1988. She joined the International Islamic University in Malaysia. While in Malaysia, she edited her dissertation and published Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Now translated into a dozen languages. She and a collective of 7 other Muslim women organized the first major pro-faith pro-feminist (Islamic) organization: Sister in Islam (SIS). SIS would inspire the network Musawah, a global movement for reform in Muslim Personal Status Law (www.musawah.org).
Between 2016-2018 she received a generous grant from the Arcus Foundation to research Sexual Diversity and Human Dignity in Islamic Primary sources. After completing this research she founded Queer Islamic Studies and Theology (QIST1.com). With Trump in the White House she migrated to Indonesia where she has taken up permanent residence.
Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, University of Michigan Ann Arbor
Juliane Hammer, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Inaash Islam, College of the Holy Cross amina wadud Executive Director QIST1 (Queer Islamic Studies and Theology)
Kristian Contreras, NWSA Executive Director
University of MichiganAnn Arbor
Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer (she/ her) is a scholar-artist-activist originally from Brooklyn, NY. She is curator of Umi’s Archive, a multimedia project documenting Black and Muslim histories and co-founder of Sapelo Square, a digital media and education collective on Black Muslims in the US. Trained as an anthropologist, Su’ad’s first book, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States is field-defining study on Islam and hip hop that examines how intersecting ideas of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reproduce the meanings of race in the United States. Su’ad’s written scholarly work is accompanied by her performance-based work including her one woman solo show, Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life She has written broadly for outlets including: The Root, the Washington Post, Vice and Ebony Magazine and has appeared on Al Jazeera English Su’ad is currently an associate professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr. Juliane Hammer (she/her) is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in the study of gender and sexuality in Muslim societies and communities, race and gender in US Muslim communities, transnational feminisms, as well as contemporary Muslim thought, activism and practice. She is the author of three monographs: Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence (Princeton, 2019); American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (Austin, TX, 2012), and Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland (Austin, TX, 2005). She is also the co-editor of A Jihad for Justice: The Work and Life of Amina Wadud (2012); the Cambridge Companion to American Islam (2013), and Muslim Women and Gender Justice: Concepts, Sources, and Histories (2020), and Sexual Violence in Muslim Communities: Towards Awareness and Accountability (2024).
Activist, Writer, & Independent Scholar
Dr. Inaash Islam (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at College of the Holy Cross. Her research focuses on the post-9/11 implications of anti-Muslim racism, gendered racialization, and Islamic feminism in the lives of Muslim women in America. Her current book project examines the experience of unveiling/taking off the hijab among formerly-hijabi Muslimah Americans, and illustrates the ways by which Muslim women are employing Islamic feminisms in their everyday lives. She has a co-authored book on global anti-Muslim racism with Dr. Saher Selod and Dr. Steve Garner entitled A Global Racial Enemy: Muslims and 21st-Century Racism, and published research in Du Bois Review, Feminist Formations, and the Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research
Dr. Kristian Contreras (she/her) is a Black feminist dreamer and educator focused on honoring the ways in which we’ve survived, created, loved, and learned despite the presumed deficits associated with our socio-political identities. As a long-time member of the National Women’s Studies Association, she is proud to serve the organization as its Executive Director (2024 - present ). Kristian’s ever-present curiosity on how we make feminist futures tangible is informed by Scholastic Book Fairs, library cards, the sacrifices of her Caribbean immigrant parents, mutual aid funds, Women’s Centers staff, New Moon rituals, annotated syllabi, and time spent learning (and gossiping) at the feet of her elders. She is humbled to know that for many in her circle, she is the first Afro-Latina they know with a PhD.
55 years later, honorinG
the transGressive and worldMakinG leGaCy of rivera and Johnson’s star
Friday, November 14
1:00 - 2:15 PM | Room 102A
Co-founded in 1970 by then nineteen-year-old Sylvia Rivera and twenty-five-year-old Marsha P. Johnson, STAR was an organization dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for “street people,” especially estranged youth and housing insecure folks, and providing a space for them to embrace their full selves. Originally named the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and revived in 2001 as Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries, STAR eschewed respectability, undermined personal convenience, and advanced collective advancement. Birthed following sit-ins at Weinstein Hall after New York University revoked utilization of the space for “gay” dances and meetings, STAR manifested as a continuation of the worlds Rivera and Johnson built from audacity, willful dissent, and love. As homage to their insistence on expansive movement building and disinterest in palatability, this presidential session stages a critical conversation about worldmaking politics through/for trans aliveness today. The work of our panelists align with the aspirations of STAR and contribute to spacious and embodied configurations of self-actualization, community, and coalition building.
panelists:
Marielle De León Toledo, activist, writer, and computer scientist
Dominique C. Hill Colgate University & Lesbian Caucus Chair
Julian Kevon Kamilah Glover, Virginia Commonwealth University
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, University of Michigan
Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Universidad de Puerto Rico Mayagüez
Marielle de león toledo
activist, writer and computer scientist
Marielle De León Toledo (she/her/ ella) is an activist, writer and computer scientist living in San Juan, Puerto Rico. For over 7 years, she has worked as a member of La Sombrilla Cuir as a spokesperson for LGBTQ+ rights. She has also worked with organizations such as Amnesty International Puerto Rico, AIDS United, Queers for Climate Justice, Sylvia & Christina Initiative, the 8M Coalition, among others, to make Puerto Rico a better, more inclusive place through education and activism. She has written for El Nuevo Dia Metro Puerto Rico the online feminist magazine Todas, and has been interviewed and collaborated with various local and international news agencies about trans issues facing Puerto Rico, inclusive language, and its implementation in feminist spaces in Puerto Rico. She ran as a candidate for Municipal Legislature for San Juan and will be taking office later this year, making her the first out trans person elected to office in Puerto Rico’s history.
Colgate University & NWSA Lesbian Caucus Chair
Dr. Dominique C. Hill (she/ her) is a scholar-creative and vulnerability guide invested in intergenerational dialogues, practices toward indivisible freedom, as well as creative and culturally-located methodologies. Hill’s written and performed scholarship interrogates twenty-first century Black girlhood with a focus on embodiment. In Hill’s scholarship, the body functions as a central way of knowing and site of unlearning and retooling.
Raised by three generations of women who know the power of prayer and libations, Hill’s living, art, and research is grounded in collectivity and imagination. Hill continues this intergenerational and spiritual work as a homegirl of Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a core collective member of Street Dance Activism, the divine guide of the 28 Day Global Dance Meditation, and as co-visionary of Hill L. Waters (HLW).
Virginia Commonwealth University
Dr. Julian Kevon Kamilah Glover (she/they) is a scholar and artist who graduated with honors from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, holds an MPA from Indiana University and earned a PhD in Black Studies from Northwestern University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genders, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the Department of Dance & Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University where their research focuses on Black/brown queer cultural formations, performance, ethnography, embodied knowledge, performance theory and Black futurity. They were awarded a Franke Fellowship at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, a Humanities Research Center fellowship (VCU) and their work appears in journals including American Quarterly, Feminist Formations, South Atlantic Quarterly, Souls, GLQ and Text & Performance Quarterly. Among their numerous awards, she was inducted into the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society at Yale University and is a longtime member of the ballroom scene. They have also worked with the Grammy award winning Swedish singer Robyn and appeared in the music video for the title track of her 2018 album Honey. A classically trained cellist, their creative work is multidisciplinary and engages sonic, visual, affective, written and kinesthetic registers with the aim of bringing viewers into critical dialogue with themselves towards psychic, spiritual and interpersonal transformation.
University of Michigan
Dr. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (he/him/él) is a Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Escenas transcaribeñas: ensayos sobre teatro, performance y cultura (Isla Negra Editores, 2018), and Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021), and coeditor of Keywords for Latina/o Studies (New York University Press, 2017). His books of fiction include Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (2009) and Abolición del pato (2013). Larry performs in drag as Lola von Miramar since 2010 and has appeared in several episodes of the YouTube series Cooking with Drag Queens. He is currently writing a book on contemporary Puerto Rican performance.
Universidad de Puerto Rico Mayagüez
Dr. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (he/they/él/elle) is a poet, editor, educator, and translator of trans experience. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the Premio Nuevas Voces, a Lambda literary award, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. He has coedited the anthologies Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019) and La piel del arrecife (La Impresora, 2023). The author of seven poetry books, Algarabía (Graywolf, 2025), his eighth collection, is a speculative trans epic.
This year he received a grant from Susan Stryker and the GLBT Historical Society to work on “We had nothing to lose”: The speeches and writings of Sylvia Rivera” along with Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jean Alberto Rodríguez, and Ariana Santiago Díaz. The outcome will be the publication of Rivera’s transcribed and translated speeches and writings. Dr. Salas Rivera lives in Mayagüez, where he currently teaches in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Puerto Rico.
Saturday, November 15
10:00 AM - 11:15 AM | Room 102A still here, still brave:
As NWSA President Heidi R. Lewis writes in “On the State of the Field and Related Concerns” (2024), her second presidential blog, “For more than 50 years, Women’s and Gender Studies and feminist artists, activists, and scholars have been at the forefront of examining the ways power is mediated by gender and sex, race and ethnicity, class, caste, nation and citizenship, age, and ability […] We have recovered and commemorated women’s and nonbinary folks’s contributions to academia, law, medicine, sport, politics, and other fields. We have insisted on the importance of studying gender-based and sexual violence, disparities in healthcare, pay gaps, and other inequities. We declared ‘the personal is political.’ We’ve taught the critical distinctions between gender and sex. We’ve studied the feminization of poverty. We’ve critiqued hierarchical binaries like man-woman and heterosexual-queer. We’ve learned how to necessarily differentiate between sexism and misogyny. We’ve studied rape culture. We’ve taught fat shaming. We’ve taught slut shaming. We coined intersectionality, the matrix of domination, and ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.’” During this presidential session, we will honor our pasts, reflect on our present, and prepare for our futures by celebrating our formidable colleagues at San Diego State College (now San Diego State University), who inaugurated the first Women’s Studies Program 55 years ago in 1970.
panelists:
Nadia E. Brown Georgetown University & NWSA Advisory Board Member
Frances B. Henderson, The University of Kentucky
Irene Lara, San Diego State University
Alexandra Pagán Vélez, Universidad de Puerto Rico Río Piedras
Elithet Silva-Martínez, Universidad de Puerto Rico Río Piedras
“In the fifty years since its inception, Women’s Studies has revamped and revitalized major disciplines in the academy. It has challenged curricular and pedagogical practice. It has disrupted the male-centered canon. It has altered or blurred the boundaries between disciplines. It has introduced the social construction of gender and its intersections with race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality as a major focus of inquiry.
— Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Persistence is Resistance: Celebrating 50 Years of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
franCes
The University of Kentucky
Dr. Frances B. Henderson, (she/ her) is a mother/scholar/activist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s studies at the University of Kentucky. Henderson completed her master’s degree in Africana Studies at Cornell University and her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. She began her career in academia at a liberal arts college in East TN, where she developed the college’s gender and women’s studies minor. In 2019, Henderson joined the GWS faculty at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include feminist pedagogy, gender, race and social movements. Henderson has published pieces in Feminist Pedagogy and Inside Higher Ed on feminist pedagogy, teaching as a Black woman in rural white spaces, and teaching ‘controversial concepts’ in the classroom. Her project, “Black Rural Lives Matter”, a qualitative study of anti-racist organizing in East TN, has been funded by The Louisville Institute, presented at NWSA and published in the journal Transforming Anthropology In 2025, Henderson won a University Of Kentucky Provost Outstanding Teaching Award and is president of WGS SOUTH, the oldest regional gender and women’s studies organization in the US.
Georgetown University & NWSA Advisory Board Member
Dr. Nadia E. Brown (she/her) (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is a Professor of Government, chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and affiliate in the African American Studies program at Georgetown University. She specializes in Black women’s politics and holds a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Brown’s research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women’s studies. While trained as a political scientist, her scholarship on intersectionality seeks to push beyond disciplinary constraints to think more holistically about the politics of identity.
Universidad de Puerto Rico
Río Piedras
Dra. Alexandra Pagán Vélez (she/ her/ella) is a poet, storyteller, and essayist. She is also a professor of Spanish at the School of General Studies at the University of Puerto Rico, where she coordinates Women’s and Gender Studies. She has published books of poetry: A mar, Otro duelo, Del Alzheimer y otros demonios (hybrid text) and Cuando era niña hablaba como niña as well as books of short stories: Horror-Real, Relatos de domingos and Amargo. She runs the blog Adicción a volar and incorporates her poetics and narrative work in both her pedagogical and community work.
San Diego State University
Dr. Irene Lara (she/her) has been a professor at San Diego State University (SDSU)’s Department of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and an affiliate of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Latin American Studies for 23 years. Aiming to take a decolonial healing, liberatory feminist, “bodymindspirit” holistic approach to all she does, Irene’s scholarship, teaching, and gender affirming mamihood is inspired by Xicana/x, Indigenous, Women of Color feminist knowledges, Anzaldúan thought, Curandera Praxis, and living in the Borderlands. Irene established CuranderaScholarActivism, a community engaged research and femtorship program, and convenes community dialogues as a co-founder of Panocha Pláticas: Healing Sex and Sexuality in Community and Xicana/x San Diego. She is the co-editor of Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives and Women in Culture: An Intersectional Anthology of Gender and Women’s Studies Currently, Irene is co-editing Anzaldúan Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning Con el Corazón con Rázon en la Mano co-creating “mynopantla” with her comadre-colleagues as a “sitio y lengua” (space/place and discourse) for decolonial feminist queer reframings of mynopause and gathering inspiration for her novella, “The Incredible Misadventures of a Xicana Wannabe Romance Writer” on her way to becoming a full professor.
Universidad de Puerto Rico
Río Piedras
Dra. Elithet Silva-Martínez (she/ her/ella) is originally from Yauco, Puerto Rico, a coffee-growing town in the south of the island, where she first experienced inequality and oppression, but also learned about resistance and lucha. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Social Work at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Her years as a social work student laid the foundation for her involvement in social movements for women’s rights. At the age of twenty-three, she began working as a social worker with women survivors of gender-based violence, including Dominican immigrant women. Years after, she moved to the United States to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Iowa. There, she also worked as an interventionist in a shelter for survivors of gender-based violence and collaborated with the OVW Campus Project.
During her time in the US, Eli taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Iowa School of Social Work and participated in research teams focused on gender violence. She conducted an ethnographic study with undocumented Mexican women, later published in professional journals in the United States and Mexico. This work earned her the Feminist Manuscript Award from the Council on Social Work Education, making her the first Puerto Rican woman in twenty-five years to receive this recognition. She subsequently joined Rutgers University as a researcher and professor, teaching master’s level courses and conducting studies on economic abuse. This work, published across the United States, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Colombia, contributed to legislative reform in Puerto Rico recognizing economic abuse as a distinct manifestation of domestic violence. Her passion for supporting survivors led her to co-found SIEMPRE VIVAS Metro with students and faculty at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. This initiative provides services, research, and survivor support, and has been highlighted by national and international media for using arts and writing to address gender violence.
Saturday, November 15
11:30 AM - 12:45 PM | Room 102A
Born in the city of Fez during the French colonial period in Morocco, Fatema Mernissi (1940-2015) went on to become one of the most well-known Moroccan feminists of her times. Along with oth er feminists of her generation, like Assia Djebbar and Nawal el Saadawi, Mernissi helped to intro duce readers across the world to the richness and complexity of postcolonial feminist thought from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). She embodied a form of feminist critique that centered subjugated and forgotten knowledges, was deeply rooted in the rich histories and heterogeneous lived realities of Morocco, and was informed by the dynamism and liberatory potentialities of the Islamic tradition which she reinterpreted through a feminist lens. In doing so, she contributed to decolonizing feminist epistemologies, challenged dominant ideas about gender and sexuality in Islam and the SWANA region, and troubled the secular normativity that prevailed in much feminist thought. She also spoke back to notions of Western superiority and was unapologetic in her critiques of Western hypocrisy. Coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of her death (2015) and the 50th anniversary of the publication of her first book Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society (1975), this Special Session commemorates her many legacies while reflecting on the continued significance of her insights on feminist knowledge, memory, history, exegesis, storytelling, resistance, dreaming, and the imagination for our feminist work today.
panelists:
Rosemary Admiral, The University of Texas at Dallas
Umme Al-wazedi, Augustana College & NWSA
Secretary
Nadia Guessous, Colorado College
Zakia Salime, Rutgers University
“But when your situation is hopeless, all you can do is turn the world upside down, transform it according to your wishes, and create anew.”
Fatema Mernissi,
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
Dr. Umme Al-wazedi (she/her) is Professor of English and Division Dean of Humanities at Augstana College and Secretary of the NWSA. She received her B.A. from Rajshahi University in Bangladesh and holds M.A. degrees in English from both Rajshahi University and Eastern Illinois University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Purdue University with a Women’s Studies Graduate Minor Certificate. Her teaching and research interests include postcolonial literatures (Asian, African, Caribbean, Polynesian, and Irish), British and Black British literature, Asian-American literature, feminism (“Third World,” Black British, and American), trauma theory, women and the “Third World,” “Third World” films and cultural studies, and translation theory. uMMe
The University of Texas at Dallas
Dr. Rosemary Admiral (she/her) is Assistant Professor of History at The University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of Living Law: Women and Legality in Marinid Morocco published in 2025 by Syracuse University Press, a history of the intertwined relationship between women and the Maliki school of Islamic law of North Africa. Her publications have appeared in Islamic Law and Society, the Journal of North African Studies Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender and Inside Higher Ed
Augustana College & NWSA Secretary
Rutgers University
Colorado College
Dr. Nadia Guessous (she/her) is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Feminist and Gender Studies department at Colorado College. An anthropologist by training but an interdisciplinary scholar in practice, her research and teaching interests include the transnational politics of gender and sexuality; religion and secularism; affect, power and subjectivity; memory and embodiment; and the decolonization of politics and knowledge. She is currently working on a book entitled The Tragedy of Progress where she explores how postcolonial secular feminism in Morocco has been shaped by the legacies of colonial modernity and conscripted by the civilizing logics of the war on terror. Guessous’ work has been published in numerous academic journals and publications including Souffles Monde; Hespéris-Tamuda Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society American Anthropologist; Confluences Méditerranée; The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies; Review of Middle East Studies; Jadaliyya; and Conditions She is the author of a study on women, gender, and political violence during the years of lead in postcolonial Morocco, which was commissioned by the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission. She is also a founding member of Thinking about the Decolonial in North Africa, a transnational and interdisciplinary research group committed to decolonizing the production of knowledge about the Maghrib.
Dr. Zakia Salime (she/her) is a Fulbright scholar, and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Sociology at Rutgers University. She was The Presidential Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Women Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University (2016-2017) and a Visiting Professor at the University Paris-8 Vincennes-Saint Denis (Spring 2016). She is the author of Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (Minnesota 2011) and co-editor of Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (Duke 2016). She is the Book Series Co-editor of African Religions, Social Realities (Ohio Press,) and is currently working on a book manuscript on gender and extractivism in Morocco, and co-editing Souffles-Monde, a Pan-African Journal and Platform.
35 years after the aMeriCans with disabilities aCt (ada): disability JustiCe as feMinist praCtiCe
Saturday, November 15 5:30 PM - 6:45 PM | Room 102A
This presidential session honors the thirty-fifth anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), especially the work of the (often under-recognized) activists who made the bill possible: including Yoshiko Dart, Chai Feldblum, Judy Heumann, Joyce Ardell Jackson, Johnnie Lacy, Sylvia Walker, and Pa trisha Wright. While the ADA marked a pivotal moment in civil rights history, legal protections alone have not dismantled the structural ableism that intersects with gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, and other systems of oppression. This panel explores disability justice as a feminist practice-one that challenges dominant frameworks of inclusion and instead centers collective care, interdependence, and radical accessibility. Panelists will address key questions: How do feminist and disability justice frameworks inform one another? How can feminist movements more meaningfully engage with disabled communities, particularly those most marginalized, such as disabled women of color, queer and trans disabled individuals, and those with chronic illnesses? Drawing on intersectional feminist and crip theories, lived experiences, and activism, this panel will advocate for a feminist practice that goes beyond compliance with legal mandates and instead fosters accessibility as a form of collective liberation.
Nirmala Erevelles, University of Alabama
University of Alabama
Wake Forest University & NWSA Member at Large
Dr. Kristina Gupta (she/they) is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University and NWSA Member at Large/Member Liaison. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of sexuality studies, feminist theory, feminist studies of science and medicine, and disability studies. She teaches courses such as “Sexual Politics in the U.S.,” “Gender and the Politics of Health,” and “Men, Masculinity, and Power.” She is currently working on a book project about asexuality, compulsory sexuality, and science. Her first book, Medical Entanglements: Rethinking Feminist Debates about Healthcare (Rutgers University Press, 2019), uses intersectional feminist, queer, and crip theory to move beyond “for or against” approaches to medical intervention. She is also a co-editor of Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader (The University of Washington Press, 2017), and her articles have been published in Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Journal of Medical Humanities the American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Feminism & Psychology among others.
University of Wisconsin Madison
Dr. Sami Schalk (she/her) is a professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined and Black Disability Politics both available open access from Duke University Press. Dr. Schalk is currently working on two new books about the creation and impact of pleasure spaces for marginalized people.
Kristina Gupta, Wake Forest University & NWSA Member at Large
Maria Rovito, Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Sami Schalk, University of Wisconsin Madison
Dr. Nirmala Erevelles is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the unruly, messy, unpredictable and taboo body – a habitual outcast in educational (and social) contexts. Erevelles asks: Why do some bodies matter more than others? In raising this question “why,” the tenor of her scholarship shifts from description to explanation to highlight the implications the exploitative social/economic arrangements have for making bodies matter (or not) in diverse historical and material contexts. Erevelles argues that disability as a central critical analytic can have transformative potential in addressing issues as varied as inclusive schooling, critical/radical pedagogies/curricula, HIV/AIDS education, facilitated communication, school violence, multicultural education, the sex curriculum, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Her insistence on an intersectional analysis foregrounds the dialectical relationship between disability and the other constructs of difference, namely race, class, gender, and sexuality and its brutal implications for (disabled) students in U.S. public schools and (disabled) citizens in transnational contexts. Additionally, transforming her theoretical leanings to committed praxis, she deploys the lens of disability studies to urge her students to think harder, deeper, and more courageously outside the confines of normative modes of education and social theory that only seek to discipline bodies rather than empower them.
Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Dr. Maria Rovito (she/they) is a disability justice scholar, medical humanities professor, and openly disabled faculty member at a STEM-focused health sciences college. Her interdisciplinary research explores the rhetoric of chronic gynecological pain, the history of medical misogyny and racism, and the cultural silencing of disabled bodies. A member of the NWSA Access and Inclusion Committee and the chair of the Reproductive Justice Interest Group, Maria has become a powerful advocate for disability access in academia, especially within institutions historically hostile to accommodations. She teaches courses on medical humanities, feminist disability theory, and reproductive justice, and is deeply committed to mentoring students with disabilities. Maria’s current book project, Redefining Endometriosis (Palgrave), blends archival research and autotheory to examine endometriosis and the gendered politics of pain. Her work foregrounds access not as an afterthought, but as the foundation for feminist futures.
“
I think people with disabilities are used to the world not being accessible and having to make things work out of nothing. You know, the world literally isn’t made to house us, it feels like sometimes. So we get to be really creative problem solvers and I think aren’t constrained to boxes, can kinda see pictures that other people can’t see.”
- Stacey Park Milburn, Disability Visibility Project
Black Feminisms in Canada and Beyond
Edited by Ezinwanne Toochukwu Odozor, Janelle Brady, and Njoki N. Wane
A rich tapestry of scholarly work and lived experiences from Black/African women, In My Sister’s House is the first book in an innovative new series, In Words of Our Own: Black Women and Being.
April 2026
Learn more at www.womenspress.ca
defininG ourselves on our own terMs: a Celebration of feMinist publishinG
Sunday, November 16
10:00 AM - 11:15 PM | Room 102A
This panel explores the evolution of feminist publishing through the lens of historical and contemporary efforts, with a particular focus on two pioneering presses, The Feminist Press and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Both emerged as radical responses to the lack of representation and space for marginalized voices in mainstream media, creating platforms that championed feminist thought, activism, and identity. While developing a Women’s Studies curriculum, Florence Howe struggled to find relevant texts for her writing students at Goucher College. So, a group of women gathered in her living room and founded The Feminist Press in 1970. During a phone call one decade later, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde discussed the lack of feminist texts published by women of color and decided to “do something about publishing.” So, they co-founded Kitchen Table with Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Helena Byard, Susan Yung, Ana Oliveira, Rosío Alvarez, Alma Gomez and Leota Lone Dog. Panelists with diverse publishing backgrounds will discuss how these presses made their work possible and enable them to continue pushing the boundaries of feminist thought and adapting to the rapidly evolving digital world. They will also explore how advanced technologies and multi-modal platforms, such as visual arts, podcasts, and zines, further their mission of enhancing accessibility, diversifying the landscape of feminist voices, and staying true to foundational values of inclusivity, intersectionality, and authenticity. Barbara Smith once said, “Our lives are not a project for others to work on. We will define ourselves on our own terms.” This panel is an opportunity to remember and honor that critical feminist principle.
Elizabeth Crespo Kebler, Universidad de Puerto Rico en Bayamón
Halimah DeShong, University of the West Indies
Nanda Dyssou Coriolis Company
Latoya Lee, California State University Fullerton & NWSA Member at Large
Xhercis Méndez, California State University
Fullerton
Universidad de Puerto Rico en Bayamón
Dra. Elizabeth Crespo Kebler (she/her) writes and teaches on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and feminisms in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her commitment to social justice and human rights using a transdisciplinary and transnational perspective is paramount as a teacher and feminist activist. Her work has honored alternative feminist publications starting with the Latina Lesbian History Project that published Compañeras: Latina Lesbians by Juanita Ramos in 1987, followed by her research and publications about feminist movements in Puerto Rico. Her most recent work is centered on preserving and documenting the history of feminisms in Puerto Rico in their local and global contexts in her web page and digital collection Archivo Documentos de los Feminismos Puerto Rico with Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, that features autonomous feminist publications from 1970 through 2010.
University of the West Indies
Dr. Halimah DeShong (she/her) is Senior Lecturer and University Director of the Institute for Gender & Development Studies at The University of the West Indies (UWI). Her teaching and activism centres race and gender justice. She is a former Vincentian Ambassador to the UN, whose work focuses on sexual and gendered violence, feminist methodologies, anti-colonial feminisms, and qualitative research. Halimah is editor/co-editor of Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender & Sexuality; COVID-19 and the Caribbean Volumes 1&2 and numerous special issues of academic journals. She has written and reviewed gender-based violence action plans and gender policies; designed curriculum on gender relations and gendered violence; created operational guidelines on gender and climate resilience; and was lead researcher and author of the qualitative component of Grenada’s violence against women WHO survey. Halimah is recipient of the 2024/2025 Principal’s Award for Excellence in Research and Public Service at The UWI, Cave Hill Campus.
dyssou Coriolis Company
Nanda Dyssous (she/her) is the founder and lead strategist of Coriolis Company, a multiaward-winning Los Angeles–based publicity and marketing agency working with academics, public intellectuals, and thought leaders. She holds BA and MFA degrees in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside, along with advanced certifications in digital marketing, traditional marketing, advertising, social media management, and leadership training. Through Coriolis, Nanda develops national and regional book publicity and marketing campaigns, provides advanced media training for both individuals and universities, and advises on long-term positioning strategies designed to expand authors’ visibility and influence. A specialist in working with BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled, and otherwise marginalized voices, she helps clients translate complex research and distinctive narratives into compelling, media-friendly ideas and secure platforms where their work informs, challenges, and shapes national and global conversations.
“
We chose our name because the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other.
- Barbara Smith, A Press of Our Own Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press
California State University
Fullerton & NWSA Member at Large
Dr. Latoya Lee (she/her) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at California State University, Fullerton and NWSA Member at Large. Dr. Lee received her B.A. and accelerated M.A. degree in Sociology from St. John’s University, and her Ph.D. in Sociology at SUNY Binghamton, where she was awarded a competitive diversity fellowship. As a scholar, her research focuses on the ways in which people of color use social media for political organizing, social transformation, the (re)making of value systems and resistant possibilities.
Tied to her research and experience, as a first-generation Afro-Caribbean woman, Dr. Lee is sensitive to issues of diversity and multiculturalism in the classroom and makes a concerted effort to encourage students to open their minds to new ways of seeing. To meet this end, her pedagogical approach promotes the idea that a new way of seeing is inseparable from reading a diverse body of texts as well as be(com)ing attentive to their own physical bodies, and how they differ from those of others.
California State University Fullerton
Dr. Xhercis Méndez (she/her/ella) is a Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cal State Fullerton and a founding member of the Collective for Justice, Equity and Transformation (CoJET), focused on transforming higher education policies and practices to address DEI gaps. Xhercis (pronounced Sir-Sis) is a member of the HuMetricsHSS team, funded by the Mellon Foundation, which promotes humane indicators of academic excellence and values-enacted practices in academia. A feminist philosopher and former research associate at Harvard’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program, her research explores the nonbinary and decolonial possibilities of Afrocuban Santería and trauma-informed responses to violence. Méndez also founded The Campus TJ Project, a consultancy that has trained hundreds of faculty, staff, and administrators nationwide to respond to systemic harm, racism, and gender-based violence through a transformative justice lens. The child of Boricua factory workers and a first-gen graduate, Méndez collaborates with those who believe in building a better world.
The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979
Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor
Domestic Nationalism
Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia
Chiara Formichi
sup.org | stanfordpress.typepad.com
Our NWSA Constituency Groups are member-driven spaces focused on facilitating networks of support, exploring scholarly and activist topics, professional standards within subsets of the discipline, and fostering community connections based upon shared socio-political locations.
Each year, Constituency Groups are able to sponsor General Conference Sessions, which allows each participating group to amplify scholarship and/or organizing work that reflects the commitments of each group and/or offer a space for facilitated Association-based organizing.
ClaiMinG our narratives: feMinist resistanCe in eduCational spaCes
Libraries & Archives Interest Group
Friday, November 14
8:30 AM - 9:45 AM
Room 102A
This proposal addresses the urgent need to fortify feminist and womanist solidarity and resistance in a rapidly changing socio-political landscape. It focuses on practical applications of feminist principles within educational and informational spheres, specifically through the implementation of pedagogical strategies that cultivate critical thinking, empower students to analyze power structures, and foster a deep understanding of feminist and womanist thought.
The roundtable will include interdisciplinary scholars ranging from public librarians, academic librarians, faculty, and administrators that have demonstrably bridged feminist theory and practice, illuminating the critical intersections between education, information, and feminist action. Topics include: curriculum design, feminist citational praxis, critical health information literacy, academic freedom, and book banning, and feminist leadership as a framework for navigating through reflection, dialogue, action, experience, and analyses of resistance and solidarity.
Our approaches are grounded in the understanding that feminist and womanist solidarity is not merely a theoretical concept but a lived practice. This work is about culture, about creating spaces of knowledge, and about actively reclaiming power through education, and information.
wGss in the CoMMunity ColleGe: affirMinG the urGenCy of our Mission
Community College Caucus
Friday, November 14
10:00 AM - 11:15 AM
Room 102B
This roundtable will discuss the political economies of community colleges and the current neoliberal cultural narratives that both praise and question the “value” of a community college education. These notions are at odds with the cyclical disinvestment community colleges have experienced and continue to be threatened by. This disinvestment and critique is magnified today in WGSS programming that is also under attack as not just “useless” but also as dangerous to the fabric of American culture because it pulls back the curtain on white heteropatriarchy at work today. We will each address our experiences of attack and resistance–as one example., the work many community college faculty do with older, adult women who are also mothers/caregivers experiencing a variety of overlapping social, political, and economic struggles attempting to earn a degree.
MovinG in Crisis as MusliM feMinists in the aCadeMy and beyond
Muslim+ Feminist Caucus
Friday, November 14
11:30 AM - 12:45 PM Room 102A
In this inaugural session for the Muslim+ Feminist Caucus, panelists reflect on the 2025 general conference theme as it applies to Muslim+ feminist scholarship, thought and praxis. Panelists explore how they, as Muslim+ Feminists, have engaged in, and articulate a feminist resistance in their research, teaching, and activism that draws on and is guided by an intersectional, decolonial, liberatory, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-Islamophobic, decentralized, and transnational feminist praxis. In doing so, panelists will offer insight on the personal and professional struggles of this praxis and work in the academy and beyond, especially as underrepresented Muslim+ scholars who play key roles in community-building, coalition-building, scholarly collaboration and political activism in regards to Palestine, Kashmir and other contexts in crisis.
disMantlinG the territoriality of patriarChal ColonialisM: squattinG as reparations in CaGuas
Puerto Rican Feminisms Interest Group
Friday, November 14
11:30 AM - 12:45 PM
Room 102B
Cultural theorist and literary historian Tao Leigh Goffee affirms that “Squatting is a political act of dissidence with climate implications.” Squatting as dissidence is gaining visibility in the last two decades in Puerto Rico as a movement of forced reparations against a colonial government endorsing policies that accelerate displacement and migration of poor Puerto Ricans. This panel presents the experiences of feminist and queer activists in the squatting movement in Caguas and San Juan. The panelists will describe the utopian places for community reunion and exchange where equality of all gender and races is a daily practice. In repurposing places for the community, these organizations are also repairing nature and the environment which were converted into commodities or things by colonialism-the thingification. They will discuss the strategies and challenges of recognizing, challenging and transforming heteronormative gender norms and private property.
Asexuality Studies Interest Group
Friday, November 14
4:00 PM - 5:15 PM Room 103A
While remembering asexual struggles and victories, it is important to recognize that ace communities have existed for decades, yet many ace stories and experiences go overlooked, untold, or ignored. This panel resists this epistemic injustice by discussing who we are, who we have been (or never got to be), and where we want to go.
The first paper investigates how the sociology of joy and the sociology of fucking have the potential to marginalize ace people by reproducing compulsory sexuality and argues that asexual perspectives can inform sexual politics that prioritize joy and consent. The second paper discusses ungendering, gender detachment, and compulsory gender, and considers gender detachment’s potential for radical resistance to gender. The third paper analyzes two case studies of people who identify as ace and were denied asylum in the Netherlands and the U.S. It explores the intersections of asexuality, illegibility, the nation-state, and homonationalist discourses. The last paper looks at how global asexuality studies may be useful in troubling the dominance of Western academic institutions and theoretical paradigms in the field of asexuality studies, as well as the challenges facing
laboratories of eMpire: reproduCtive inJustiCe in puerto riCo, Colonial leGaCies, and deColonial futures
Reproductive Justice Interest Group
Friday, November 14
4:00 PM - 5:15 PM Room 103A
The Indigenous Taíno peoples of Borikén have long been subjected to colonialist reproductive coercion and used as a laboratory for reproductive experimentation—practices rooted in a broader history of colonialist exploitation. This roundtable seeks to bring together scholars, activists, and community members to critically examine the ongoing impacts of colonial reproductive control in Puerto Rico and beyond.
Centeno will examine the coercive and duplicitous approaches to these reproductive health interventions. Using notions of sovereignty and settler colonialism from Indigenous studies and Africana Womanist ideology, this paper aims to show how colonizing powers create policies restricting reproductive health and thus self-determining behaviors, capturing how colonialism minimizes autonomy and choice.
Sowards and Schwartz-DuPre will propose relational understandings of embryos rooted in reproductive justice frameworks that draw upon Indigenous wisdoms rather than personhood approaches. This will allow us to move away from rhetoric that employs ownership/property frames for advocacy work in politics and ethics.
This session will create a much-needed space at NWSA to reckon with the historical and contemporary connections between colonialism, reproductive coercion, and state control of fertility, the erasure and displacement of Indigenous Taíno communities and their reproductive practices under colonial rule, including environmental devastation and racialized and class-based medical experimentation.
Trans/Gender Variant Caucus
Saturday, November 15
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM Room 102B
As international anti-trans social movements continue to generate ramifications for transgender communities, this panel seeks to question the mechanisms through which these movements operate, reason, and might be challenged. This panel focuses on a range of anti-trans movements that target inclusion within schools, participation in sports, parental support for trans youth, and feminist support for trans people, focusing in particular on the impacts of anti-trans advocacy within institutional settings. In addition to addressing the increasing circulation of anti-trans ideology, this panel seeks to explore possible routes through which feminist and trans advocates might formulate cohesive challenges to ideologies of exclusion.
eMbodied teaChinG today: a roundtable - sponsored session of the feMinist pedaGoGy interest Group
Feminist Pedagogy Interest Group
Sunday, November 16 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM Room 102A
Traditions of feminist and womanist theories, body criticism, and investigations around embodied knowing and experiential learning have long informed feminist approaches to teaching. Meaningful critiques of - as well as transformative expansions of - women’s, gender, and sexuality studies also may be understood to recall the body and corporeal realities, including postcolonialism, transnationalism, ableism, ageism, and transphobia, among additional movements and social issues. Among these many vital threads, today teachers and learners alike also navigate challenges of pandemic/ post-pandemic factors, the press of various technologies, and may live with the grief of war and global conflicts, all amid political scrutiny that in some cases directly impacts our professional capacities to teach and learn fully and freely. Through this roundtable, we seek to remind ourselves of traditions, practices, and approaches that serve as sources for feminist teaching and explore how we might more mindfully access, share, and connect these sources in the learning spaces and contexts in which we find ourselves at present. We are particularly curious about placing in conversation the institutional realities of 21st academic learning with insights from arts-based research and place-based learning, contemplative practices and contemplative methods of inquiry, and approaches to service learning and social justice work.
feMinist utopias world-buildinG throuGh writinG and publishinG
Publishing Feminisms Interest Group
Sunday, November 16th 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM
Room 102A
The overarching theme of the 2025 NWSA Annual Conference is An Honour Song: Feminist Struggles, Feminist Victories. The theme is motivated by the call to remember and respond to the question, “what do we do now?” Our sponsored session responds to this provocation by bringing 8 panelists together who are united in the recognition that feminist imagining, theorizing, writing and publishing (Nash 2019, 2013; Harker and Farr 2017; Tsing 2015; Weeks 2011) have always entailed the otherwise, the alternative and the utopian as practical and achievable world-building during contentious social and political times. Our panelists, who work within the professoriate as well as independent press, bring diverse expertise and perspectives to bear on the orientation toward the future-present of utopianism from Black feminist praxis, trans feminisms, crip theory and anti-/decolonial LGBTQ+ politics. The roundtable format extends the solidary proverb that “many hands make light work” into the space of the sponsored session by asking both attendees and panelists to dialogue about what can be achieved in keeping with utopia as motivation for what we do in life, work and politics.
The Author Meets Critics (AMC) series is designed to highlight authors of recent, cutting-edge scholarship, deemed to be important contributions to the field of WGSS. These texts highlight the myriad ways we enact feminist values, blend theory and praxis, stretch interdisciplinary boundaries, and expand feminist education. Authors engage their work with invited discussants to provide a variety of perspectives on how we might attend to the questions and ideations each text inspires.
Saturday, November 15
8:30 AM - 9:45 AM Room 102A
This book panel illuminates neglected archives and hidden voices of women filmmakers whose productions have resisted ethno-patriarchal hierarchies and forged solidarities across sexualized borders of nation-states, global capital, religion, language, caste and class. The forum discusses Esha Niyogi De’s monograph Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia (Illinois, 2024). This monograph asks: Can we write women’s creative labors into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia, accounting for how women access or breach the historically patriarchal and censorious infrastructures of film production? Using rare archival research and interviews to explore the question from a comparative perspective, the book weaves together stories of women’s agency in the industries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India: as stars, directors, and border-crossing film producers. This panel puts the author in conversation with scholars of South Asia and Muslim societies who specialize in transnational feminist cinema, women’s history, sexuality and film. The discussion will illuminate how the book expands the lens of transnational feminist film studies—for instance, by excavating women’s creative authority in the (under-researched) film industries of Muslim-majority Pakistan and Bangladesh, and by delving into the artistic/entrepreneurial agency of filmmakers from sexually marginalized “entertainer” castes and queer performance backgrounds. woMen’s transborder CineMa: authorship, stardoM, and filMiC labor
author:
Esha Niyogi De, University of California
Los Angeles
the
Saturday, November 15
10:00 AM - 11:15 AM Room 104A
Care at the End of the World brings a disability lens to bear on feminist-and queer-of-color literature in the aftermath of 1996 US welfare reform and the subsequent evisceration of social safety nets. Employing an intersectional disability framework Kim calls “crip-ofcolor critique,” this book demonstrates how radical disability politics and aesthetics can disrupt state-authored narratives about who deserves care. While the US state dismantled its systems of support by demonizing dependency, promoting figures like the welfare queen, the non-citizen immigrant, and the disabled moocher, writers like Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, Aurora Levins Morales, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha brought disability and dependency to the forefront of their literary dreams of liberation.
Care at the End of the World calls forth the critiques and possibilities in their representations of infrastructure—systems of education, transportation, sanitation, and healthcare. It argues that these representations work to recuperate disability and dependency, both highlighting the many support systems that enable survival and envisioning alternate infrastructural arrangements based in reciprocity and respect for vulnerable lives. Ultimately, this book maps the emergence of a crip counter-discourse of interdependency—one that examines the disabling effects of state infrastructural divestment while articulating a public ethics of care.
author: Jina B. Kim Smith College
Saturday, November 15
1:00
This session delves into a decolonial and feminist approach, tracking with the book Refusals and Reinventions: Engendering New Indigenous and Black Life Across the Americas with author Daniel Ìgbín’bí Coleman and invites critics. In Refusals and Reinventions, the author and artist-scholar-organizer considers his critical trajectories and participation in intersectional justice struggles in the US and Mexico, situating them within larger abolitionist and decolonial movements for Black civil rights and Native/Indigenous sovereignty. He identifies how Black and Indigenous people create, exist in, and reclaim many worlds—the pluriverse—through their artistic refusals and reinventions, the author thus contributes to a growing body of pluriversal thought, inspired by the Zapatista motto “a world in which many worlds fit.” Charting previously unrecognized connections among the creative struggles of Indigenous people in southern Mexico and Black people in the southern United States, the author draws on performance praxis, decolonial pedagogies, and Afro-diasporic and Native/Indigenous cosmologies to frame four case studies of people refusing racialized, gendered violences as world-making tools. In looking at creative responses among activists in Chiapas and North Carolina, the author uses transfeminist, Black feminist, and decolonial frameworks to address various subquestions. Each of the panelists will draw out particular areas of the book to speak to its decolonial, feminist, Black Studies, and Indigenous Studies interventions.
author: Daniel Ìgbín’bí Coleman Georgia State University
Sunday, November 16
11:30 AM - 12:45 PM Room 102A
Laurian Bowles’s Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra uses African and Black feminist theory and method in a carefully crafted study of the lifeworlds of kayayei, young women head porters in Makola Market who are “chronotopes of modernity who help assemble the racial and spatial logics of gendered trade.”
Headstrong reveals how women porter’s lives are intertwined with the racial transcripts of colonialism and slavery that undergird accumulation in Ghana. Bowles demonstrates how this precarious community, simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, reappropriates public spaces to produce private sanctuaries while negotiating queer intimacies and solidarities. In this Author Meets Critic session, scholars Serena Dankwa, Miriam Kilimo and Kwame Edwin Otu, draw on their expertise in queer self-fashioning, Black and African feminist politics, and racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa to engage questions of antiblackness within a racially homogeneous nation-state. They highlight the contributions Bowles’s offers in her careful exposition of the interplay between aspiration and anxiety to showcase how women’s familial and intimate networks mitigate harm and trauma, while also illuminating how porters reject victimhood and reimagine survival in Accra, emphasizing the role of queer intimacy and the reimagination of same-sex marriage as methods for joy and survival.
author:
Laurian R. Bowles, Davidson College
Selected Writings of Julia de Burgos
EDITED BY VANESSA PÉREZROSARIO
$39.95 paperback
Radiophonic Feminisms
Latina Voices in the Digital Age of Broadcasting
BY ESTHER DÍAZ MARTÍN
$34.95 paperback
I’d Just as Soon Kiss a Wookiee
Uncovering Racialized Desire in the Star Wars Galaxy
BY GREG CARTER
$34.95 paperback
Fugitive Anthropology
Embodying Activist Research
EDITED BY SHANYA CORDIS, MAYA J. BERRY, CLAUDIA CHÁVEZ
ARGÜELLES, SARAH IHMOUD & R. ELIZABETH VELÁSQUEZ ESTRADA
$34.95 paperback
World Making in Nepantla
Feminists of Color Navigating Life and Work in the Pandemic
EDITED BY GLORIA GONZÁLEZLÓPEZ, SHARMILA RUDRAPPA AND CHRISTEN A. SMITH
$34.95 paperback
Sideways Selves
Travesti and Jotería Struggles Across the Américas
BY PJ DIPIETRO
$34.95 paperback
Dos X
Disability and Racial Dysphoria in Latinx and Filipinx Culture
BY SONY CORÁÑEZ BOLTON
$34.95 paperback
Fleshing the Archive
An Intimate Genealogy of Chicana Knowledge Praxis
BY MARÍA EUGENIA COTERA
$34.95 paperback
Borícua Muslims
Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam BY KEN CHITWOOD
$34.95 paperback
Eating Grasshoppers
Chapulines and the Women Who Sell Them
BY JEFFREY H. COHEN
$29.95 paperback
Cosmosexuals
Screen Acting, Stardom, and Male Sex
Appeal
BY MARK GALLAGHER
$55.00 hardcover
The Lives and Deaths of Women in Ancient Pompeii
BY BRENDA LONGFELLOW
$55.00 hardcover
Mothership Connected
The Women of ParliamentFunkadelic
BY SETH NEBLETT
$34.95 hardcover
Why Alanis Morissette Matters
BY MEGAN VOLPERT
$24.95 hardcover
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman
BY NIKO STRATIS
$27.95 hardcover
30% off and free domestic shipping with code UTXNWSA online.
Offer valid through December 31, 2025.
NWSA In Praxis Workshops highlight new and dynamic scholarship that offers our field an exciting invitation – how do these new texts shift, expand, challenge, and call into question the confines of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies (WGSS)? We hope to amplify how this selection of work inspires curiosity in addressing “how might we” questions regarding our fields/ disciplines and inform actionable change in and outside of academia. Each session will feature rich discussion centered on each piece of scholarship with a focus on how we transpose these questions into praxis; authors and attendees are invited to explore how to process, teach, and adapt each text in their respective professional and personal engagement of feminist work.
pain into purpose:
dalit
Refusing Settler Domesticity
Fighting for the Puyallup Tribe
Friday, November 14
8:30 - 9:45 AM | Room 102B
Pain into Purpose is a groundbreaking exploration of Argentina’s Movimiento Negro (Black resistance movement). Employing a multi-year ethnography of Black political organizing, Prisca Gayles delves deep into the challenges activists face in confronting the erasure and denial of Argentina’s Black past and present. She examines how collective emotions operate at both societal and interpersonal levels in social movements, arguing that activists strategically leverage societal and racialized emotions to garner support. Paying particular attention to the women activists who play a crucial role in leading and sustaining Argentina’s Black organizations, the book showcases how Black women exercise transnational Black feminist politics to transform pain into purpose.
author:
Prisca Gayles
University of Nevada, Reno
Friday, November 14
4:00 PM - 5:15 PM | Room 102B
Dalits, who occupy a non-hegemonic, marginalized category in the caste hierarchy in India emphasize the importance of placing caste, along with class and other identity markers in feminist analysis in order to highlight the intersectional and expansive understanding of women’s experiences of oppression, activism, and freedom. I focus on Tamil Dalits as they are neglected in the scholarship on Dalit cultural production. Tamil Dalit feminist poets and their allies challenge literary expectations set for women poets as well as caste stigma. Poets Sukirtharani, Arangamallika, Umadevi, and Meena Kandasamy, and Tamil feminist allies, such as Malathi Maitri and Kutty Revathi challenge the literary tradition of Tamil poetry as well as expectations of women set by upper caste Brahmin culture by presenting their radical poems on themes based on their experiences and their witnessing of the trauma of violence on Dalit women’s bodies, thus placing caste and gender at the center of their work. Tamil scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Iyothee Thass and Periyar, whose writings on caste and gender have influenced Tamil Dalit feminist discourse in poetry and in our understanding of the role of caste in gender oppression.
author: Pramila Venkateswaran
Native Women’s Labor and Resistance in the Bay Area Outing Program
c aitlin Keliiaa
$30.00 pb
Waves of Belonging
Indigeneity, Race, and Gender in the Surfing Lineup
e dited b y lydia h e b erling,
d avid Kam p er, and Jess p onting
$30.00 pb
Caring for Caregivers
Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis
valerie Fran c is c o-
m en ch avez
$30.00 pb
Good Wife, Wise Mother
Educating Han Taiwanese Girls under Japanese Rule
Fang y u h u
$35.00 pb
SUNY Nassau save 30% at our
A Memoir
r amona b ennett b ill
$29.95 hc
From Forest Farm to Sawmill
Stories of Labor, Gender, and the Chinese State
s h uxuan z h ou
$35.00 pb
Oregon’s Others
Gender, Civil Liberties, and the Surveillance State in the Early Twentieth Century
Kim b erly Jensen
$30.00 pb
Queer World Making
Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art
a ndrew g ayed
$35.00 pb
Queer Data Studies
e dited b y patri c K Keilty
$30.00 pb
Botany of Empire Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism
b anu s u b ramaniam
$30.00 pb
Hacking the Underground
Disability, Infrastructure, and London’s Public Transport System
r aquel v el h o
$30.00 pb
Wide-Open Desert
A Queer History of New Mexico
Jordan b iro w alters
$30.00 pb
Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid
w illyc e Kim
$19.95 pb
Feminista Frequencies
Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley
m oni c a d e l a torre
$27.95 pb
Slapping Leather Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo
e lyssa Ford and r e b e cc a s c o F ield
$29.95 pb
Art, Activism, and Sexual Violence
e dited b y s ally l . Kitch and d awn r g il p in
$35.00 pb
Dancing Transnational Feminisms
Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice
e dited b y a nanya
c h atter J ea, h ui n iu w ilc ox, and a lessandra
l e b ea w illiams
$30.00 pb
Modified Bodies, Material Selves
Beauty Ideals in Post-Reform Shanghai
Julie e s tarr
$35.00 pb
Saturday, November 15 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM | Room 102A
Drawing on years of research and interviews with over eighty activists, abortion providers, medical researchers, lawyers, and people who have used abortion pills, Baker’s book is the first comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States—why it took so long for the FDA to approve the abortion pill mifepristone, why the agency unnecessarily restricted the medication for decades, why so few doctors offered abortion pills, and how the COVID-19 pandemic and, ironically, the reversal of Roe v. Wade enabled activists to finally wrench mifepristone from the tight control of legal and medical authorities.
To gain access to abortion pills, determined and courageous activists waged a decades-long campaign to establish, expand, and maintain access to abortion pills in the United States. Weaving their voices through her book, Baker recounts both the dramatic and everyday acts of their resistance.
Abortion pills are now playing a critically important role in post-Roe America, providing safe abortion access to tens of thousands of people living in states with abortion bans. Knowing the history of abortion pills is critical to guaranteeing continuing access in the future.
author: Carrie N. Baker Smith College
Sunday, November 16 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM | Room 202B
Since its emergence as an area of academic inquiry, Girlhood Studies has developed a seemingly organic intersection with the field of Media Studies, especially with the proliferation of new media technologies. Despite significant interventions related to issues of online privacy, media-based moral panics, and self-branding, scholarship about girlhood and media still needs more robust and sustained engagement with Black girls’ participation in digital media spaces and what they produce with digital technologies.
This session will offer an in-depth discussion of Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency in Everyday Digital Practice (Duke University Press, 2024) by Ashleigh Greene Wade. Black Girl Autopoetics takes a close look at Black girls’ digital content creation to explore four integral aspects of Black life: space-making, archiving, representation, and activism. In doing so, the book asks readers to consider what it means to understand Black life through the lens of Black girlhood. Black Girl Autopoetics positions Black girls as cultural producers, theorists, and critics in an effort to understand what looking at the particularities of Black girlhood can tell us broadly about digital media ecologies.
author:
Ashleigh Greene Wade University of Virginia
Each year, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), in coordination with different NWSA caucuses and publications, offers multiple awards for current members of the Association. We know it is paramount to celebrate new, emerging, innovative, and thought-provoking work across our membership; as we celebrate these contributions to the expanding field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, we hope you engage in each recipient’s work in meaningful ways. Please review our 2025 award winners in our conference app. a wards & r e C o G nition
Gloria e. anzaldúa book prize
2025 Recipient:
• Omer Aijazi, Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir
2025 Honorable Mentions:
• Loretta Victoria Ramirez, The Wound and the Stitch: A Genealogy of the Female Body from Medieval Iberia to SoCal Chicanx Art
• Banu Subramaniam, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism
alison piepMeier book prize
2025 Recipient:
• Anastasia Todd, Cripping Girlhood
2025 Honorable Mentions:
• Jess Whatcott, Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics
sara a. whaley book prize
2025 Recipient:
• Hemangini Gupta, Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India
2025 Honorable Mention:
• Jennifer Denbow, Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype
nwsa/university of illinois press first book prize
2025 Recipient:
• Vivian Deidre Rodríguez Rocha, Countertopographies of Care: The Rise of Care-Activism in the Movement For Women’s Lives in Mexico
lesbian CauCus award
2025 Recipient:
• Xun Ril Li, University of Toronto
2025 Recipient:
Gwendolyn Beetham, University of Pennsylvania
Nadia Brown, Georgetown University
Roksana Alavi, University of Oklahoma
Stephanie Andrea Allen, Indiana University Bloomington
Lorena Estrella LESTRELLA STUDIO
• Wei Si Nic Yiu, Work Smart, Not Hard: Chinese Women Massage Workers’ Lessons of Quietly Messing with Work
nwsa woMen of Color CauCus frontiers student essay award nwsa Graduate sCholarship
2025 Recipient:
• Robin Morris, Temple University
trans/Gender variant CauCus award
2025 Recipient:
• Yi-Fan Li, Pennsylvania State University, Anti-Trans Public Education Policy Implementation “Black Box” and Student Resistance through Youth-Led Participatory Action Research
Elora Halim Chowdhury, University of Massachusetts Boston
Aisha Durham, University of South Florida
Vivien Ng, University at Albany, State University of New York
Courtney Caroll, National Women’s Studies Association
Kristian Contreras, National Women’s Studies Association (Chair)
Joyce Adeola Jekayinoluwa, State University of New York at Buffalo
Teukie Martin, Syracuse University
David Ornelas, Texas Tech University
Maria Rovito, Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
Samrat Sharma, Pennsylvania State University
Courtney Carroll, National Women’s Studies Association (Chair)
Kristian Contreras, National Women’s Studies Association
María Cruz-Torres, Arizona State University
Vanessa Marie Fernández, San José State University
Alexandra Pagán Vélez, Universidad de Puerto Rico Río Piedras
Noralis Rodriguez-Coss, Gonzaga University
Sole Torres, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras
Rafael “Rafa” Ocasio, Agnes Scott College
Rosa Carrasquillo, College of the Holy Cross
Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler, Universidad de Puerto Rico
en Bayamón
Mariela Méndez, University of Richmond
Amaury Rijo-Sanchez, University of New Mexico
Yarimar Rosa-Rodríguez, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras
Noralis Rodriguez-Coss, Gonzaga University
Astrid Sambolin, Kent State University
Elithet Silva-Martínez, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras
Umme al-Wazedi, Augustana College
Melissa Fernandez Arrigoitia, Lancaster University
Gwendolyn Beetham, University of Pennsylvania
Agatha Beins, Texas Woman’s University
Benita Blessing, Association for the Study for Eighteenth Century Studies
Nadia E. Brown, Georgetown University
Siobahn Carter-David, Southern Connecticut State University
Durell M. Callier, University of Delaware
Melinda Chen, University of Oklahoma
Chris Cynn, Virginia Commonwealth University
Leslie Dinauer, Rhetoric Society of America
Gwen D’Arcangelis, Skidmore College
Lindsay Davis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, Alma College
Chantal Figueroa, Colorado College
Heather M. Finch, Belmont University
Quinn Foster, Emory University
Kristina Gupta, Wake Forest University
Andrea M. Hayes, Purdue University
Fatimah A. Hunter, Sister Song
Dominique C. Hill, Colgate University
Beenash Jafri, University of California Davis
Clare Jen, Denison University
W. Christopher Johnson, University of Toronto
Shahin Kachwala, State University of New York at Oneonta
Maria Russell Kenney, Asbury Theological Seminary
Chamara J. Kwakye, Michigan State University
Latoya Lee, California State University Fullerton
Mariela Méndez, University of Richmond
Brittney Miles, University of Illinois
Kenna Neitch, Miami University
Jessica N. Pabón, Independent Scholar
April Petillo, Northern Arizona University
Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, Rutgers University
Jessica Pruett, Kenyon College
Naomi Pueo Wood, Colorado College
Hiram Ramirez, Mount Holyoke College
Noralis Rodriguez-Coss, Gonzaga University
David Rubin, University of South Florida
Stina Soderling, Texas Women’s University
Caridad Souza, Colorado State University
Mairead Sullivan, Loyola Marymount University
Sabah Uddin, Bowie State University
Tre Wentling, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Lauran Whitworth, Agnes Scott College
Students will select the thesis or practicum option based on what best fits their professional goals Degree Plans
The Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder offers a Master of Arts in Gender and Sexuality Studies. This postbaccalaureate degree program centers intersectional, decolonial, transnational, and social transformation frameworks in the study of gender and sexuality. The program provides students an interdisciplinary education using a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches across the humanities and the social sciences, preparing students for academic work at the doctoral level and/or for careers in a wide range of related fields.
Funding Opportunities
Funding in the form of Teaching Assistantships and other resources are available
Our Values
Our faculty’s dedication to teaching and mentorship ensures that students receive a transformative education