Graduate Conference
Graduate Student Conference
Annual Grad Student Conference Keynote: Dr. Lina-Maria Murillo, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Sovereign Pride: Decolonial Pathways to Liberation
✨33rd Annual Emerging Scholarship in Women's and Gender Studies Graduate Student Conference, at The University of Texas at Austin.✨
Tuesday, March 24th and Wednesday, March 25th 2026
This year’s conference “Sovereign Pride: Decolonial Pathways to Liberation” is dedicated to examining struggles for resilience, collective empowerment, and liberatory futures in the United States. This conference will center immigrant and Indigenous voices while creating space to envision feminist coalition building amid the political and social challenges of our moment, including intensified authoritarianism, systemic racism, and the continued rise of fascist ideologies.
“Sovereign Pride” evokes both the assertion of sovereignty over bodies, lands, cultures, and narratives, as well as communal pride forged through resistance to domination. We welcome work that centers the embodied, historical, and contemporary realities of Indigenous nations, diasporic communities, displaced peoples, and migrants whose experiences illuminate the ongoing legacies of colonialism and empire.We also encourage submissions that grapple with the shifting political landscape of the United States, including the dynamics of organizing, solidarity, and feminist coalition building under the Trump administration and in response to resurgent far-right movements. How do communities cultivate collective safety, creative resistance, and transnational solidarities in times of heightened repression? What liberatory possibilities emerge when we understand struggles against patriarchy, racism, xenophobia, and settler colonialism as interlinked?