Call for Papers

The English and Women’s and Gender Studies Departments at the University of New Hampshire invite proposals for the 14th Biennial Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference to be held at The University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH, July 17-19, 2025.

This year’s theme, “Nurturing the Feminist Revolution: A More Inclusive Future,” invites us to reflect on how we build on our history to nurture, learn from, and raise up emerging and underrepresented voices in our field.

Feminist scholars have long acknowledged care work as a revolutionary practice that increases inclusivity. Audre Lorde famously presented self-care as a radical practice for Black feminists. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch have offered us the framework of an “ethics of hope and care,” as a strategy for moving beyond disciplinary methodologies that can work against inclusion. Scholars like Cheryl Glenn, Andrea Lunsford, and Karma Chavez have challenged us to forge more inclusive and diverse histories both in the field and more broadly. Black feminist scholars like Kimberle Crenshaw, bell hooks, Shirley Wilson Logan, and Carmen Kynard have critiqued feminist movements and rhetorics as exclusionary, advocating for more explicitly intersectional and anti-racist practices in the field. In building on these calls in this conference theme, we hope to make space and care for one another. In doing so, we take inspiration from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who imagines care as “an ongoing responsive ecosystem where what is grown responds to need” (147). Care work, as a feminist practice, moves beyond just access and toward community and coalition building.

This conference builds upon the core feminist principles of collaboration and coalition-building to bring multiple generations of scholars in the field together to forge inclusive spaces that are conducive to more diverse futures for our discipline. The conference theme encourages us to reflect on how care work does or can inform our approaches to inclusivity–both as individual scholars and as a discipline. In bringing the ideas of revolution, nurturing, and inclusivity together in this theme, we hope that we inspire projects that offer critical examinations of our past, as well as those that look to the future. In other words, we hope this theme will inspire presenters to ask how we have moved the revolution forward through nurturing, care work, and inclusive practices, and how might we continue to do so?

In the aftermath of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the rise of draconian anti-LGBTQ legislation across the country, and the onslaught of anti-DEI measures in higher education, we find this a particularly timely moment to reflect on how we can actively nurture emerging, and marginalized voices. We also see this as a particularly timely moment for this reflection on the future of the field; the pandemic made clear existing inequities in higher education and many of us turned to more accessible practices in our teaching, research, and scholarship. As Gloria Anzaldua writes, “nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (109). Rather than return to “normal,” we hope that this conference provides us the opportunity to come together to imagine more diverse, crip, queer futures.

Imagining these futures can be revolutionary. And, as we look to the future, we build on a rich history of radical–revolutionary–feminist rhetorical scholars. Our conference’s theme is, in part, inspired by our location in New England. We hope that the conference will provide us with an opportunity to reflect on this location as a site of historical colonization and a campus committed to environmental sustainability. Our conference marks the first FemRhets held in New England, and the first to be held in the summer. Our hope is that conference participants will join us in honoring the vibrant indigenous peoples of our area, the Abenaki (made up of the Penacook, Winnipesaukee, Pigwacket, Sokoki, Cowasuck and Ossipee peoples). We hope that New England’s vibrant history encourages participants to explore the surrounding area and use that inspiration for future research.

To model the focus on nurturing emerging and underrepresented voices in the conference theme, we will build in opportunities in the conference to promote the work of graduate students as well as new and emerging scholars.

For instance, we will have a featured panel of graduate students held during a time that does not conflict with other panel presentations to encourage increased attendance. We will also offer an event during the conference in which new and emerging scholars can showcase their work. FemRhets remains committed to anti-racist, inclusive, and accessible conferencing and uses these principles in the proposal review. In the spirit of care work, we will continue the good work of our 2023 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference at Spelman College in hosting professionally facilitated restorative circles for our BIPOC attendees.

We invite a variety of proposal types (i.e., workshops, roundtables, installations, demonstrations, “how-to’s”, panels, and individuals) that explore how acts of nurturing and care promote more inclusive feminist futures for us all. To that end, we are calling for proposals that aim to address questions such as–but not limited to–the following:

• What feminist practices of nurturing do we engage in in our teaching, scholarship, administrative work, and/or self care? And, how do we see those practices as contributing to more inclusive futures for ourselves and others?
• What can “inclusion” look like as a feminist practice? In our methodologies, pedagogies, and activism?
• How can we transfer feminist and antiracist practices, theories, and methodologies into inclusive pedagogies? How can we approach teaching and mentorship as acts of inclusion in meaningful and thoughtful ways?
• How can feminist methodologies help us to reveal more narratives of community and inclusion?
• How can feminist research methodologies help us to tell transparent, inclusive, and representative histories of rhetoric/composition and feminism?
• How can queer methodologies help us to uncover a more inclusive theirstory?
• How can our “theirstory” help us to identify ways to be more inclusive in the future and open ways for traditionally silenced voices to be heard?
• How do current feminist practices nurture early scholars’ futures as mentors, and how might they be made more inclusive?
• How can we encourage coalition building between foundational and new, emerging scholars in the field?
• How do our pedagogies promote inclusive, crip, queer futures?
• How can we promote feminist change and inclusivity in our surrounding communities?
• How has technology, social media, AI, and other developing forces impacted grassroots and community feminist activism?
• What does sustainable feminism look like? How can we use sustainable feminism as a methodology for inclusive research and how can we practice it within our classrooms and in the community?
• How does collaboration during the writing process help us to shape a more inclusive discipline and body of research?

Session Types

We invite proposals for in-person sessions and pre-recorded virtual sessions. We encourage and are open to a variety of presentation styles, in roughly 75-minute segments, including but not limited to:

• INDIVIDUAL PRESENTATIONS – 75- to 100-word abstract, 250-word proposal (Note: we will group 3-4 individual presentations together to make a session of 75 minutes)
• PANEL PRESENTATIONS & PERFORMANCES – with 3 to 4 presenters – 150- to 200-word abstract, 750-word proposal
• ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS, with 4 or more presenters – 150- to 200-word abstract, 500-word proposal
• POSTER PRESENTATIONS- by individual or collaborative presenters (1 poster per submission) – 150-to 200-word abstract. Posters will be displayed during all three days of the conference, but presenters must be present for discussions during one set poster session time.
• SATURDAY ACTIONABLE WORKSHOPS by individuals or collaborative presenters in 2 hour increments: 150- to 200-word abstract, 500-word proposal, AND outline of proposed activities with foci on activism, antiracism, circle participation and facilitation, pedagogy, restorative practices, community engagement, and other topics that scholars are passionate to propose. 750-word limit for panel and roundtable proposals, or seminar session proposals

Submission Guidelines:

• 250-word limit for individual proposals
• 500-word limit for all other proposals

NOTE: Presenters are limited to two speaking roles but may participate in as many other participant roles as desired. Submissions will be blind reviewed. Abstracts must not contain any information that will identify presenters or speakers. Proposals should indicate if the presenter desires in-person or virtual consideration.

Submit your proposal by DECEMBER 4, 2024!