The Centre for Gender Studies’ biannual conference, “Gender and the Colonial”, will be hosted on 13-14 May at SOAS, University of London. We are currently accepting submissions for papers, panels and performances. The deadline for submissions is 31 January. Suggested topics and more detailed information can be found below.

We would be very grateful if you could circulate the invitation to colleagues, research students and networks.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Dr. Gina Heathcote

Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies and International Law

Chair, Centre for Gender Studies

SOAS, University of London

Gender and the Colonial

Call for Papers

The SOAS Centre for Gender Studies invites proposals for papers, panels and performances that interrogate, explore and / or challenge the relationship between gender and the colonial for the Centre’s biannual conference to be hosted, at SOAS, 13/14th May 2015. 

In a period where gender is increasingly deployed via international and national policy initiatives, the Centre invites scholarship that analyses the role of gender (performance, embodiment, histories, constructions, deviations) in the persistence and legacies of colonial tropes, as well as papers that complicate expected understandings and meanings of gender through the study of the colonial and vice versa. The Centre welcomes papers from across disciplinary spaces, including law, development studies, politics, anthropology, history, the arts, media studies, cultural studies, geography and beyond, as well as the intersection of disciplinary approaches. Papers that analyse colonial histories and continuities are invited, as are those which use the tools of either postcolonialism and/or gender and/or queer theory to re-evaluate the ways in which these continuities contribute to the closure of debates on colonial politics, narratives and understandings. 

Papers are sought which challenge and disrupt the re-enacting and telling of colonial power relations through the deployment of gender tools and activism. The Centre also welcomes papers that directly address methodological questions regarding temporal and geographical assumptions, that explore histories and representations of women’s and/or queer activism, that address legal regimes and legacies in colonial spaces and/or contemporary spaces of resistance, as well as interrogations of the legacy of colonialism in the stories told and re-told in the histories of colonial powers. 

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

- postcolonial and transnational feminist methods

- women’s activism within and women’s accounts of colonial and/or postcolonial spaces

-  gender within labour movements, social movements and other sites of resistance

- comparative and post post-colonial studies

- globalisation, imperialism and global governance

- study of the production of knowledge and resistant knowledge production

- queer theories and sexuality within the colonial / postcolonial /decolonial

The Centre for Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary, multi-Faculty teaching and research centre at SOAS and welcome submissions from diverse academic disciplines. For further information or to submit an abstract, email [log in to unmask]. All submissions should include a short CV, a 500 word abstract and title for the presentation. Panel proposals will also be considered.

Deadline for submissions is January 31st 2015.