WOMEN'S CENTER STANDING COMMITTEE
PRE CONFERENCE
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 11
Download the Women's Center Pre-Conference CFP
The Women’s Centers Committee host a daylong session that offer important networking and professional development opportunities forwomen’s center administrators on Thursday, November 11. The pre-conference include a registration fee in addition to the general conference registration. This fee includes morning coffee/pastries and lunch for those attending the pre-conference.
PROPOSALS ARE DUE MARCH 8
For more information about the NWSA 2010 Women’s Centers Committee Pre-conference, please contact Lysa Salsbury (lsalsbur@uidaho.edu) or Michelle Issadore (mii206@Lehigh.edu), Pre-conference Planning Committee co-chairs.
Download the Women's Center Pre-Conference CFP
NWSA Women’s Centers Pre-Conference
The NWSA Women’s Centers Committee invites proposals for its Pre-Conference, to be held the day before the NWSA conference. This daylong event offers Women’s Centers professionals, student leaders, and women’s studies faculty an opportunity for professional development as well as a supportive environment in which to explore the successes and challenges of our work.
The theme for this year’s NWSA conference, Difficult Dialogues II builds on conversations that began in Atlanta at the 2009 conference.
NWSA 2010 identifies several thematic areas in which ongoing and new difficult dialogues across differences are urgently needed:
- Indigenous Feminisms: Theories, Methods, Politics
- Complicating the Queer
- The Politics of Nations
- “Outsider” Feminisms
- The Critical and the Creative
While we welcome proposals that align with the Difficult Dialogues II themes, we strongly encourage you to consider submitting proposals that purposefully address and provide practical ideas and solutions to current challenges and needs faced by Women’s and Gender Centers and our work on campus, either within or beyond the context of these parameters.
In keeping with the NWSA focus on intersectionality and the need to engage in unmasking the silences of race and class, gender and sexuality, we also emphasize the importance of keeping these issues at the forefront of our discussions. To this end, we particularly encourage submissions for workshop sessions that utilize new frameworks and/or directions to both directly and indirectly address this topic. We also encourage workshops that expand our understandings of women’s centers as intersecting with global feminisms.
Based on feedback from 2009 conference participants, other areas of interest to potential attendees include, but are not limited to:
Feminist Leadership Models
- How does gender play into leader effectiveness?
- How do we actively model principles of feminist leadership on our campuses (mentorship, work/life balance, allowing space for multiple voices to be heard)?
- How can Women’s Centers be active in helping to create more opportunities for women to empower themselves to develop their leadership potential?
- How do Women’s Centers staff and students working in coalition with campus multicultural and LGBTQ centers navigate the intersection of race, ethnicity and gender?
Campus Climate
- How can Women’s Centers respond effectively to issues of covert exclusion, marginalization and discrimination on our campuses?
- In what ways has your center helped to empower women and other marginalized groups in attaining a voice during critical confrontations and conversations?
- What tools have been used effectively at your institution to assess campus climate for women and LGBTQ individuals?
Best Practices
- What are some transformative practices in your work that actively challenge “outsider” marginalization and seek to build coalitions and collaborations?
Working with Women's Studies
- Women’s Centers are often regarded as the co-curricular arm of Women’s and Gender Studies in the Academy. In what ways are we models for the academy? How do we foster deeper and more productive relationships with Women’s and Gender Studies?
- How are Women’s Center staff involved in the classroom, via teaching, guest lecturing, and providing service learning opportunities, internships, research resources, and more?
- In what ways do we provide models or partnerships for Women’s Studies as campus agencies for “civic engagement”?
Assessment
- How are we ensuring that underrepresented voices are heard through assessment?
- How are we navigating the difficult step of implementing our findings?
Working in Student Affairs
- How are we reaching out to Student Affairs colleagues and including them in our mission, via collaboration and partnership?
- What are some of the ways that Women’s Centers’ collaboration and partnership have effected changes within Student Affairs?
- How do we encourage other offices to infuse their work with social justice, with support and guidance along the way?
Proposals for sessions that showcase solution-driven strategies, best practices, changing contexts, and/or new directions in the above-mentioned areas are encouraged, although proposals on other topics will also be considered. Panels and facilitated roundtable discussions welcome. Interactive sessions are especially encouraged. Guidelines for proposal submissions may be found at: http://www.nwsa.org/conference/steps.php. Please remember to remove any identifying language from the text of the proposal. In order to review proposals by a fair and unbiased process, we endeavor to make decisions without knowing the identity of the author, nor the institution in question.
PROPOSALS ARE DUE MARCH 8
For more information about the NWSA 2010 Women’s Centers Committee Pre-conference, please contact Lysa Salsbury (lsalsbur@uidaho.edu) or Michelle Issadore (mii206@Lehigh.edu), Pre-conference Planning Committee co-chairs.
For more information on the NWSA Women’s Centers Committee, please visit http://www.nwsa.org/centers/index.php or contact Rebecca Morrow (morbecca@isu.edu) or Candace Rosovsky (crosovsky@gmail.com), Women’s Centers Committee co-chairs.