Call for Submissions

The Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Mississippi is pleased to announce its 26th Annual Isom Student Research Conference (ISRC). The ISRC is scheduled to take place from Wednesday, March 25, through Friday, March 27, 2026, on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

History is not a distant past from which we have moved on from to never return and over which we have no agency. History can also be an empowering mode of resistance, a tool with which people can develop productive and active relationships with their present selves framed through struggles of the pasts to which they feel connected. The UN 1975 World Conference on Women is indeed one of these significant moments in which women of “different various nations, educational levels, cultures, and classes” debated various “women’s issues.” While these gendered issues might have seemed mutually exclusive at the time, we have come to understand them as inextricably linked to one another as conversations happen through disagreement and debate. The media representation of the 1975 conference and “women’s issues” more broadly have often framed such struggles within stereotypes such as “catfights,” which work to minimize imperative debates to mediated spectacle. However, as Jocelyn Olcott explains in International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History, these conflicts united these different women in their “commitment to free inquiry and vigorous debate.”

The 1975 conference’s debates provide fertile grounds from which we can learn and grow, especially from within the present sociopolitical moment we find ourselves. For one, we may gain the tools to better understand and address the ways that legislation limits the productivity of gender as an analytical framework with which to understand our connections to our pasts, presents, and our potential futures. The 1975 conference suggests the importance of addressing “women’s issues” and other social justice issues from an intersectional perspective. It is clear that women are vastly different from one another depending on their social positionalities (racial, cultural, sexual, economic status, etc.), which in turn informs the issues at stake for these different groups of women. What may be a priority issue for a middle-class, heterosexual, white woman can be starkly different for other women from more marginalized communities, especially at a time when queer folks, women of color, and poor women are being actively targeted and harmed through new legislation. The debates and conflicts that arise from individuals’ differences are not divisive; instead, they are constitutive of what Olcott calls a “transformative movement” (229). Therefore, intersectionality as a structural framework within which to understand and navigate divergent perspectives is essential to collaboration between different groups of women. Considering that various social and political groups continue to adduce “women’s issues” under the guise of “protecting women,” to promote their particular ideological stance (such as anti-trans, “pro-family,” and anti-choice groups), it is imperative that social justice feminists continue to define, outline, and discuss the work that will genuinely address advances for women and other marginalized genders.

In response to the current political environment, this conference is interested in generating discourse about the ways that we can learn from the spirit of debate at the 1975 World Conference on Women. Possible conference topics include the relationships between the past and present, issues of and approaches to intersectionality, the appropriation and/or reduction/stereotyping of women’s issues, and other crucial debates that can be understood through the lens of productive disorder. We encourage participants to discuss issues such as the roles/modes of activism/activist movements, lesbian rights, women’s work rights, human/labor rights issues, reproductive justice issues, bodily autonomy, voluntary motherhood, the right to vote, and more. We are also interested in the analysis of how pop culture has addressed the aforementioned topics.

Submission deadline is December 21, 2025.  A small number of domestic travel grants will be made available to non-UM students.