Foundational Pre-Conferences

The PAD and WCC Pre-Conferences warrant an additional registration fee for attendees and can be completed during your general conference registration.

Program Administration and Development (PAD) Pre-Conference

Thursday | 8:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M. | $150.00 USD

The registration window for our PAD Pre-Conference begins with the opening of our early bird conference registration and closes in the first weeks of the fall semester.

The Program Administrators Caucus first met at the 1983 NWSA Annual Conference and became the Program Administration and Development Committee in 2006. The PAD Committee consists of women's studies program administrators (chairs, directors, coordinators) whose programs, departments or other academic units are member institutions of NWSA. This body is convened once a year for a Business Meeting at the annual NWSA Conference and is sustained by the PAD Community Hub. The PAD Committee is a standing committee in NWSA specifically designed to represent the interests and needs of administrators of women's studies programs and departments to the Governing Council of NWSA and to assist NWSA in meeting the needs of women's administrators and their departments and programs.

The first PAD Pre-Conference was held at the 2000 NWSA Annual Conference. The PAD Pre-Conference provides administrators with ideas, strategies, and approaches to both strengthen and grow WGSS programs in hard times. These include: supporting diverse leadership, building coalitions across campus and across town, fundraising, battling backlash, making external reviews successful, incorporating service learning requirements, and more.

In 2000, the PAD Committee initiated the Women of Color Leadership Project (WoCLP). The WoCLP is now jointly sponsored by the NWSA Women of Color Caucus (WoCC), Program Administration and Development Committee (PAD), and the Women’s Centers Committee (WCC) in conjunction with the PAD and WCC Pre-Conferences.

Women’s Centers Committee (WCC) Pre-Conference

Thursday | 8:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M. | $150.00 USD

The registration window for our WCC Pre-Conference begins with the opening of our early bird conference registration and closes in the first weeks of the fall semester.

Beginning as the Women's Centers and Services Caucus, the Constituency's first meeting was at the 1984 NWSA Annual Conference, eventually becoming the Women's Centers Committee in 2006. The WCC held its first Pre-Conference at the 2002 NWSA Annual Conference. NWSA recognizes that "women's studies" is broader than what happens in the classroom as campus-based women's centers have a long history of working together with women's studies to transform the curriculum, the campus environment, and society at large. NWSA acknowledges women's centers as chief out-of-class feminist educators and encourages participation in the national organization.

The Women's Centers Committee of NWSA provides an opportunity for women's center directors, staff and others to gather and share information, ideas, challenges, successes and support through its Annual Pre-Conference. This space serves as one of coalition building, professional development, and alchemy as Women's Centers staff work to address socio-political issues that impact their sites of learning, the field as a whole, and our interpersonal lives.

Along with the Program Administration and Development Committee (PAD) and the NWSA Women of Color Caucus (WoCC), the Women’s Centers Committee (WCC) jointly sponsors the Women of Color Leadership Project (WoCLP) in conjunction with the PAD and WCC Pre-Conferences.

Women of Color Leadership Project (WoCLP)

2025 Pre-Conference Opportunities

The following opportunities are the fruit of collaboration among members of the Association. We are excited to leverage the expertise of our Puerto Rican Feminisms Interest Group to offer tailored professional and personal development that speaks to our 45th Annual Conference theme and the geopolitical realities of our conference site - Borikén. Our 2025 Institute on Feminist Leadership Praxis (FLP) is curated by Hiram Ramirez, NWSA Treasurer and Cristina Alcade, Women's and Gender studies scholar and anthropologist.

🇵🇷 Beyond Colonial Constraints: Cuir Feminist Praxis as Rupture and Healing across the Archipelago

Thursday | 8:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M. 

This pre-conference is application-based and is jointly hosted by our colleagues anchored at the University of Puerto Rico. Attendees can expect to engage in sessions held on campus at the University of Puerto Rico.

Across the archipelago, Puerto Rican activists apply decolonial feminist and cuir strategies to challenge violent liberal and conservative constraints. Led by archipelago-based organizers, artivists, and scholars, the panels and workshops in this pre-conference focus on building transformative paths towards sustainable healing, connection, and liberatory worlds.

This development experience is rooted in Puerto Rican Feminist art, scholarship, practitioner-informed interventions. and community-based knowledge production. The NWSA, therefore, welcomes applications from folks interested and committed to generative collaboration and action within and outside of their formal education spaces!  Please contact the National Office with any clarifying questions.

What to Expect | Enacting Puerto Rican Feminisms

We're proud to offer a space framed by the amalgamation of facilitated dialogue, multimedia engagement, and collective reflection in cultivating tools to not only understand Puerto Rican Feminisms intellectually, but also apply and embody its principles in participants' interpersonal, academic/professional, and community work. Curious about this Pre-Conferences' scope and design? Here are examples of two sessions: 

📌 Escaping Normativity through Cuir and Feminist Activisms 

This panel brings together activists/artivists, organizers, and scholar-practitioners to examine the concrete ways queer and feminist movements challenge and escape the hegemonic structures of Puerto Rican society with visions for queer and feminist resistance. Looking at diverse sites of resistance, we highlight how gender and sexual minorities navigate crises such as economic collapse, climate catastrophe, and gender-based violence. Speakers will share insights that think beyond LGBTQ+ studies towards a queer of color critique, through queer-led protest methodologies, queer parenthoods, trans initiatives, and transnational solidarities, demonstrating how queer and feminist activisms reconfigure kinship, labor, pleasure, and survival outside the constraints of cisheteropatriarchy, homonormativity, and neoliberal governance.

📌 Knowledge, Ruptures and Healing: Reflections and Praxis in Ancestral Land

This panel takes a reflexive and prospective look at the ways in which Puerto Rican feminisms - from the archipelago and beyond- turn to ancestral knowledge to heal colonial wounds. For this, it has been a necessary step to create essential epistemic ruptures of analytical concepts and their hold upon us as a people, including how coloniality of power, gender and being has operated in our spaces. We gather perspectives emerging from distinct standpoints to envision how this rupture can be sustained, and what kind of future we must move towards in an effort towards liberation from colonial imposition. 

Due to the interactive nature of this event, participation is limited, and selection will be based on applicants' alignment with the event’s goals and objectives. Please note, portions of this pre-conference will be conducted in Spanish; upon acceptance, attendees must complete a one-time registration fee that is separate from our Annual Conference registration process. Please note that applications close August 1st.