2014 Berkshire Conference on Women's History Themes Histories on the Edge, May 22-25

2014 Berkshire Conference on Women's History Themes Histories on the Edge
University of Toronto: May 22-25, 2014 Proposals due Jan 15, 2013

For the first time in its history, the Berkshire Conference on Women'’s History (also known as the “Big Berks”) will be held outside of the United States, at the University of Toronto, on May 22-25, 2014. The major theme of the conference is Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche.

Our theme reflects the growing internationalization of this triennial conference. It recognizes the precariousness of a world in which the edged-out millions demand transformation, as well as the intellectual edges scholars have crossed, re-created, and worked to bridge in the academy and outside of it. We invite all modes of critical thinking and work that represents a wide range of historical methodologies. In addition to established historical approaches and sources, we seek sessions using other evidence, such as visual and material artifacts, sonic objects, oral traditions, and affective archives. We encourage methodological risk-taking and hope for a mix of established and newer approaches. We especially invite conversations across centuries, cultures, locales, and generations. We welcome media panels that bridge historical and contemporary work related to art, image, film, and other types of cultural production and cultural institutions.

The conference in Canada prompts conceptual, historical and analytic engagement with critical edges – sharpening, unsettling, de-centring, decolonizing histories in a global context. Edges are spatial: impenetrable borders, stifling boundaries or protective borders and spaces of smooth entry. Edges evoke the creative and the avant-garde.
Entangled in the idea of edges are rough encounters, jagged conflicts as well as intimate exchanges. It speaks to the alternative spaces the “edged-out” have carved for themselves and to efforts made to create a common ground, or commons, on which to make oppositional histories.

As a nation-state shaped by imperialist histories and its own colonial dynamics, past and present, Canada itself sits on the edge of a powerful if, perhaps, waning American empire. Like other white settler societies, it is a colonial state that has operated through dispossessing First Nations peoples, guarding the edges of white citizenship, and endorsing patriarchal models of assimilation; yet, this history unfolds and is resisted in myriad ways. Its historical trajectory, on the edges of empire, includes colonization first by the French with the resulting ongoing Francophone presence, and later the British. Its distinctive features include socialized medicine, same-sex marriage, and official but contested multiculturalism. On Anishinabe land, Toronto, a creative, cosmopolitan, and contested city, is both “home” and “elsewhere” for many of its diasporic residents. What better place to consider edges as sites of hope, excitement, and possibility but also of danger, displacement, struggle, and exile?

Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche invites contributions from the edges because change so often emerges from such sites, however slowly, painfully or partially. Many scholars who write about the “edged-out” seek to talk back to the powerful or challenge the empowered by listening to others. This conference is interested in de-centring US scholarly dominance by inviting histories of the Caribbean and Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, and Indigenous, francophone and diasporic cultures around the world. We welcome papers that destabilize the white, able-bodied, liberal citizen subject through focus on bodies and objects on edges of all kinds. The theme also invites work that queers gender and sexual binaries. How can we historicize emergent, residual, and ongoing gender constructs such as 'masculine' and 'feminine' as well as gender performances, sexual practices, and social identifications that challenge binary modes of gender and sexuality?

Our theme encourages critical reflection on how gender, as analytic category, material embodiment, cultural resource, or signifying system works in many ways. Gender has its many ragged edges: where private and public spheres have been defined and redefined; where class, gender, race, ethnicity, nation, kinship, sexuality, and ability/disability have interacted; where masculinities and femininities have been constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed. So, too, is gender on the edge of debate: a term in need of scrutiny to expose its uses, contradictions, strengths, and weaknesses.

The theme respects feminist theory and praxis as a critical stance in need of constant interrogation. Western forms of feminism, for instance, have long faced challenges from in and outside its borders. We invite work on non-western and other feminisms and scrutiny of feminisms within the context of historically shifting global power relations and international alignments. The conference seeks to operate at the edges by engaging anti-racist, anti-colonial, and other critiques. It provocatively asks if “mainstream” feminism can reinvigorate its critical edge. Should we, as scholars, however we are positioned, seek to destabilize the centre and authorize the margin? Or sharpen our critique in a world that, now, as so often in the past, stands seemingly on the brink?

Please submit proposals to one of the 2014 subthemes (and note a second choice):

Borders, Encounters, Conflict Zones, and Memory Empires, Nations, and the Commons Law, Family, Courts, Criminality, and Prisons Bodies, Health, Medical Technologies, and Science Indigenous Histories and Indigenous Worlds Caribbean, Latin America, and Afro/Francophone Worlds Asia, Transnational Circuits, and Global Diasporas Economies, Environments, Labour, and Consumption Sexualities, Genders/LGBTIQ2, and Intimacies Politics, Religion/Beliefs, and Global Feminisms

*A detailed Call for Papers will follow; the logistics of inviting global speakers explains early due date. For questions, write:
bcwh@utsc.utoronto.ca or visit the Berks website at http://berksconference.org