The Call - WSC

Greetings ORWAC members! 

I hope that this email finds you well and that your semesters are wrapping up smoothly.  I want to remind you about the preconference that ORWAC is sponsoring at WSCA this year – the deadline to submit a position paper is January 1.  The theme of the preconference is feminist inquiry in the discipline. Feminism has been part of the academy for 40 years; and the preconference will be organized around six questions designed to reassess its nature and role in our discipline.  We would love for you to join us and we would appreciate it if you spread the word to your colleagues and graduate students.  Interested participants are invited to submit a short position paper on one of the six questions to Karen Foss by January 1, 2016.  Please see the attached invitation for more details and contact Karen Foss at KarenFoss4@gmail.com with any questions.  Thank you so much!

An Invitation to Participate

The ORWAC Gender Preconference: Feminist Inquiry in the Communication Discipline

ORWAC invites your participation in a preconference at the Western States Communication Association from 12:00-5:00 on the Saturday, February 27, 2016. The preconference will be modeled on the “Gender Conferences” that were held annually in the communication discipline in the 1980s and 1990s. At these small conferences, there were no formal paper presentations. Instead, participants wrote short position papers on questions developed around the conference theme and came prepared to discuss that question with others who had written on that question.

The theme for the preconference will concern feminist inquiry in the discipline. Feminism has been part of the academy for 40 years; it seems a good time to reassess its nature and role in our discipline.

The preconference will be organized around the following questions:

1.     Defining Feminism:  How do you define feminism?  What does it mean to be a feminist—in the field of communication, in academia, and in general?  Are there acts that are feminist and acts that are not?  What are feminist principles?  Can someone be a feminist simply by being a woman who realizes her full human potential in the world?  Must she consistently act politically, and, if so, what does that mean?  Do we still need the label feminist to describe our orientation to the world?

2.     Assessing Feminism:  What do you see as the current status of feminist research within the communication discipline?  Is a feminist perspective on the decline in our discipline?   Has a feminist perspective been integrated into the discipline?  What evidence is there for whatever view you take on the status of feminism in our discipline? How can feminism be made fun again?

3.     Articulating the Silences:  What are you interested in discussing in terms of feminism that you have felt couldn’t be discussed?  Are there strictures within the communication discipline or within feminism that make you feel that you can’t say certain things?  How would a discussion of this “unspoken” topic change our perspective on or research about feminism and communication?

4.     Asking New Questions:  What question about feminism and communication would you like communication scholars to ask?   What article from a feminist perspective would you most like to read in our journals?

5.     Living Feminist Lives:  How can our lives as academic feminists be made more satisfying and coherent?  What does it mean to live as a feminist? 

6.     Teaching as a Feminist:  What constitutes feminist pedagogy?  Is it all that different from other kinds of good teaching?  Is it contradictory in any ways to good teaching?  What are the results of feminist pedagogy in our classrooms?  How can we become more feminist in our pedagogy?

The following coordinators will be leading the preconference: Lisa Flores, University of Colorado Boulder; Stacey Sowards, University of Texas, El Paso; Laura Hahn, Humboldt State University; Marnel Niles Goins, California State University, Fresno; Sonja Foss, University of Colorado Denver; and Karen Foss, University of New Mexico. 

To participate in the preconference, write a short position paper (2-4 doubled-spaced pages) on one of the questions, and submit it to Karen A. Foss (KarenFoss4@gmail.com) by January 1, 2016. By writing a position paper, you may be able to secure travel funds from your university for the convention. Your paper will be circulated in advance to other participants who wrote on the same question so that all members of your discussion group will have advanced knowledge of the perspectives of the other group members.

If you have questions about the preconference, please contact Karen Foss at KarenFoss4@gmail.com or 505-379-0459.