“Gendered Labors and Transnational Solidarities”
March 5–7, 2025
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Submission due date: Sunday, October 20, 2024, at 11:59 pm PDT
The UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center invites proposals for our 35th annual Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference (TG25).
This year’s conference theme, “Gendered Labors and Transnational Solidarities” highlights the rich repertoire of organizing strategies as well as contemporary and historical examples of campaigns led by precarious workers around the world. We invite proposals that employ a transnational feminist lens and that consider how workers have persisted in challenging injustice and demanding dignity by forming alliances across local, regional, and transnational contexts. We seek to bring together feminist, queer, and BIPOC scholars, artists, and organizers to reflect upon the meanings of labor solidarity and care to imagine a more livable society.
Workers have long been united in transnational solidarities. The urgency of transnational solidarities has increased in the wake of late-twentieth-century globalization, which has reshaped workers’ migration pathways, conditions of labor, and activism. Financialized capitalism has led to new labor regimes that disproportionately rely on a feminized and racialized workforce. The rise in low-paid contingent service work and outsourced manufacturing work has been accompanied by erosion of labor laws and social safety nets. Furthermore, stringent immigration regimes are exacerbating the precarity and labor exploitation of immigrant women of color and poor women in the Global South. However, these precarious workers have also been on the frontlines of labor organizing. For example, even though domestic workers have long been considered “unorganizable” because many lacked documentation status and worked in private households, domestic workers’ leadership has been central to expanding labor rights at both national and inter-governmental levels. In 2011, their efforts led to International Labour Organization Convention 189, the first global treaty establishing labor standards for domestic workers. In addition to demanding dignity on the job, precarious workers have also organized for social justice more broadly. Recently, Hyundai construction workers in South Korea began striking in solidarity with Palestinian people, calling attention to the connections between labor, settler colonialism, war, and ongoing effects of empire. Workers have also addressed injustices based on race, sex, sexuality, and citizenship status across local, regional, and international scales. We invite works that examine labor organizing through a transnational feminist lens, centering innovative strategies and campaigns workers have been building to forge solidarities across different parts of the world.
Possible questions for engagement include:
- How does a transnational feminist lens apply to labor organizing? How do categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, dis/ability and citizenship status, among others, affect how labor is defined and how workers organize?
- How have histories and ongoing struggles around settler colonialism, war, slavery, and unequal economic development shaped labor movements?
- How have workers who have been historically excluded from labor protections – such as workers in factories/sweatshops, households, and agriculture, and now most recently in gig work – organized transnationally? What is the significance of the scale of their organizing efforts?
- What is the role have unions played in transnational labor feminisms? What other alternative strategies have women workers and other precarious workers employed to organize?
- What possibilities and challenges have precarious workers found in international organizations, institutions, and laws?
- What are the relationships between family and work? How do family relationships shape labor migration as well as precarity workers face? How do workers navigate the often gender-specific burdens of financially supporting the family? How have workers formed alternative communities/kinship networks of support?
- How have workers, organizers, scholars, and artists conceptualized care through organizing? How do labor organizers navigate some of the tensions and fissures within organizing spaces (e.g. burnout, conflicts, and navigating financial situations)?
- What are the political implications of defining care? What are some examples of caring activities that go into organizing?
- How do caregivers, consisting mostly of workers experiencing precarity because of gender, immigration status, race and ethnicity etc., also receive care?
- What are some ways in which society as a whole can reciprocate the labor of care that is already foundational to the survival and well-being of community members around the world?
- How can researchers amplify workers’ own voices and stories rather than imposing top-down solutions? What are some examples of research centering workers?
- How do workers build solidarities with one another? How do they integrate the concepts of mutual aid and care?
We encourage applicants to think within, alongside, beyond, and perhaps against the following topics as they consider the shape and content of their prospective participation in TG25:
- Historical and contemporary forms of social movements
- Queer and LGBTQIA organizing
- Maquiladora activism in the US/Mexico border
- Law and protection
- Anti-sweatshop movements
- Local, regional, and global practices of activism and organizing
- Transfer of economies, objects, and people
- Local, regional and global development projects
- Community building
- Kinship and family
- Affective economies and labor
- Sex work
- Immigration and citizenship
- Care and social reproduction
- Settler colonialism, war, and dispossession
- Environmental degradation
- Critical refugee studies
- Migration and gender
- Cultural productions and performance
- Disability and curative violence
- Aging and care homes
- Embodied practices of healing
Graduate students have two ways to participate in this conference:
1. Hybrid workshops for works-in-progress on Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Participants will workshop works-in-progress in closed online sessions either via Zoom or in person at the UCLA campus on Wednesday, March 5, 2025. Each workshop will include up to four graduate students, a faculty moderator, and up to three observers from other workshops, who will read and provide detailed feedback and questions for each submission. All participants will be asked to read or view each other’s submissions in advance. Participants will then convene with a faculty moderator who will offer constructive feedback and facilitate discussion around each submission.
All workshop participants will be required to submit the final version of their work-in-progress (not to exceed 20–25 double-spaced pages) by Sunday, February 2, 2025, for pre-circulation among their co-participants and faculty moderator. Please only submit your work for a workshop if you are prepared to have a final draft ready for circulation by this date.
2. In-person presentations on Friday, March 7, 2025
Participants who submit a proposal for work that will be completed a month before the conference date will give a public presentation of their finished projects at a panel on the UCLA campus on Friday, March 7, 2025. In addition, participants will take advantage of other in-person activities offered at the conference.
We welcome a range of submission formats from graduate students, including scholarly papers, works in hybrid critical/creative genres (e.g., multimedia projects, performance, experimental forms of academic writing), and film/mixed media. In celebration of embodied practices of healing led by workers’ organizations, worker-centered artwork would fit particularly well for this year’s call.
Submission Guidelines
Eligibility
Registered graduate students from any institution are eligible to submit abstracts or synopses of scholarly papers, works in hybrid critical/creative genres (e.g., multimedia projects, performance, experimental forms of academic writing), or film/mixed media to present or workshop. Applicants cannot submit multiple proposals and must choose if they will present completed works or works-in-progress. Only one submission per applicant will be considered.
Please only submit if you are available for the full day, since we cannot confirm which time the panel/workshop will be until later in the planning process.
Submissions of works that are collaborative or co-authored with other students are welcome.
Unpublished submissions are preferred. Recently published and forthcoming articles will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Submissions that are not directly related to the theme, “Gendered Labors and Transnational Solidarities” will not be considered.
Due date for Abstract/Synopsis Submissions: Sunday, October 20, 2024 at 11:59 pm PDT.
Applicants whose submissions are accepted will be notified by Friday, December 6, 2024.
Application Materials
All proposals must be submitted using the online application form.
Only complete submissions received by the due date will be considered.
Scholarly Paper, Dissertation or Thesis Chapter, or Article Draft Application Requirements:
1. Abstract (max. 250 words) of work to be presented/workshopped that includes: (1) a thesis/research question, (2) methods, (3) theoretical framework, and (4) conclusions or anticipated conclusions.
2. Works Cited or References List (1 page maximum)
3. CV (2 pages maximum)
Film/Mixed Media or Hybrid Critical/Creative Genres Application Requirements:
1. Film/Media Synopsis (2 double-spaced pages maximum) of work to be presented/workshopped that includes: (1) a research question or thesis, (2) description of format, (3) discussion of theoretical framework, methodology and process, (4) explanation of your argument and evidence, and (5) conclusions or anticipated conclusions. If your piece is co-created with other students, please make this clear.
2. CV (2 pages maximum)
3. Link (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) where Film or Mixed Media can be viewed. Total run-time should not exceed 20 minutes. Note: our submission platform does not have capacity to hold media files.Please insert links into your synopsis.
Questions?
Contact Thinking Gender Coordinator Da In Choi at thinkinggender@women.ucla.edu.
