Call for Presentations: Abolition

Call for Presentations: Abolition (April 15th, 2023)Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Graduate/Undergraduate Conference University of Pennsylvania 
Abstracts due December 20th, 2022
Ruth Wilson Gilmore states “Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons.” Abolition exists within the context of racialized, gendered, and ableist constructs of relating to one another as well. Angela Davis asks, “How can we produce a sense of belonging to communities that is not evaporated by the onslaught of our everyday routines?” Furthermore, Mia Mingus argues, “Any disability justice work should be in alignment and solidarity with abolition. And any abolition work should be in alignment and solidarity with disability justice.  Disability justice is abolition work and abolition work is disability justice work.” The context of abolition is not just a question of prisons or the prison industrial complex, but the very intricate ties people have to one another, the environment, labor, capital, and the uneven delineations of surveillance and control that stretch across the mundane and spectacular aspects of everyday life.
Queer, trans, and feminist imaginations across literature, art, geography, Indigenous studies, critical race theory, disability studies, queer of color critique, trans studies, and Black feminist theory have argued for abolition across the embodied, social, cultural, dystopian, and futurist realities of the networks that we move through daily. An abolitionist reality requires not only a re-orientation away from institutions and borders, but also requires a revaluation of labor, dependency, interdependency, as they relate to capital and exchange. What does an abolitionist future look like beyond utopian simplicity that considers the material realities of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, disability, and mobility?
This Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Conference aims to facilitate a discussion among graduate, undergraduate, and post-doc students at Penn and surrounding schools of what an abolitionist future looks like. We welcome abstracts from all disciplines and interdisciplinary conversations that share an interest in feminist, queer, and trans analysis.
The hybrid conference will take place April 15th 2023 and will feature undergraduate and graduate research by students across the University of Pennsylvania and surrounding institutions as well as a morning workshop and a keynote speaker. Participants will be asked to state their preference on in person or remote presentations. Remote presentations can be pre-recorded but must be captioned. All presentations, except for the workshop, will be available in hybrid form, with captioned text on Zoom for the duration of the day. The conference will end with a keynote from scholar Elias Rodriques.
Abstracts for papers and presentations can be submitted here
Please direct any questions to maeesk@design.upenn.edu or gswsconference23@gmail.com
 
Topics might include:
Black feminist worldbuilding Abolishing bordersPalestinian sovereigntyUrban food justiceCarceral themes in contemporary art or literatureSurveillance within the medical industrial complexSchool to prison pipelineSpeculative, dystopian, and utopian futurityPrison labor and its effects on late-stage capitalist market valuesCommunity building beyond the nexus of the familyDisability justiceTransformative justiceReproductive justice as an abolitionist frameworkEnvironmental catastrophe and the prison industrial complexRacialized strategies of incarcerationPotentialities of fugitivityCritiques of trans inclusive prisonsAbolitionist approaches to social practiceArchival studies beyond the institutionQueer and trans abolitionist futuresMedia surveillance of prison industrial complex within documentary televisionCommunity based approaches to abolitionist praxisSex work, care work, and the valuation of labor & dependency