Important Dates:
1.  March 31, 2014: Initial registrations must be submitted online.
2.  April 30, 2014: Registration must be paid in full.  No refunds will be given after this date.  You must contact us before this date to request a refund.
3.  May 31, 2014: Final papers must be uploaded in the registration form.

Thinking Transnational Feminisms is a collaborative five-day summer institute organized by and for feminist scholars who are engaging the transnational as a process, a critique, a paradigm, and/or a characteristic of social movement in their scholarship to make sense of these multiple, sometimes contradictory, approaches and concepts.  We invite graduate students, emerging, and established scholars to join us in exploring and sharpening our understanding of where the field of “transnational feminisms” is and where it is going by sharing and critiquing each others’ work in progress.

This institute will build the field of transnational feminisms by producing a sustained conversation and providing mentorship to produce a denser, more shared sense of what we mean when we use the terms of this quickly growing but contested field. We will revisit the goals of transnational feminist critiques and evaluate the current state of transnational feminist research.  In doing so, we seek to capture the radical potential of a transnational feminist critique that does not reproduce the inequalities of power inherent in international relations and the global economy.  Instead, we hope to intervene and propose alternate models for transnational projects of social justice globally.

We welcome established and emerging scholars from various institutions and disciplinary locations who are working at the borders (both physical and epistemic) of feminist theorizing.  We especially invite non-U.S. based scholars to participate in this institute to contribute to the work of decentering U.S. academic practices in thinking through transnational feminist knowledge production and engagements.   Our goals are to facilitate dialogue on transnational feminism’s potentialities and continued erasures, as well as the possibilities of models for coalition building among feminist activists across nation-state borders both locally and globally.  The institute will feature two types of sessions:

Paper workshops that help authors refine their research and writing and advance our collective understanding of transnational feminism.  We envision limiting these sessions to 24 authors to facilitate in depth engagement among all institute participants.
Roundtables that tackle “big” issues in transnational feminism.  Roundtable themes that we plan to explore may include:
Geographic Metanarratives:  How does the geographic orientation of scholarship influence the study and praxis of transnational feminism?
Methodologies:  As scholars, how do we “do transnational feminism”?
Practices, Styles, and Spaces:  What key infrastructures have shaped transnational feminism?
The Stakes:  How do the perspectives offered in transnational feminism influence our core analytical categories and insights as scholars?
The “Body” Politic:  How does interrogation of the nation-state and its practices inform transnational feminism in discussions of immigration, sexuality, and bodily forms of discipline and pleasure?
Indigenous Transnational Feminisms:  What does feminism mean for indigenous peoples whose lived experiences often are shaped by differential relations to the nation state? How does the idea of the transnational operate across borders between indigenous nations and settler colonial nation-states?
Labor, Transnational Capital and Feminist Futures:  What can we learn and reclaim by reassessing transnational feminist socialist projects of the past and present? Where and how have the “red roots” of American feminism grown?   How do different imaginings of labor and justice shape and constrain cross-national, cross-industry and/or cross-issue activism?

Fragrance Free Policy
We ask that, in the interest of supporting our colleagues with sensitivity to alcohols and scent, that perfumes or fragrances NOT worn by participants in this workshop series. Perfumes and fragrances (including scented lotions) can negatively affect people with multiple chemical sensitive syndrome (MCS), asthma, and/or autoimmune disorders. For every 100 people in America, there is an average of 10 with asthma, 20 with an autoimmune disorder and/or 12.5 with MCS.