Our present conjuncture demands urgent engagement with the now of gender. Authoritarian resurgence, border militarization, algorithmic
governance, climate precarity, and uneven recoveries from overlapping pandemics shape how gender is lived, and resisted across diverse contexts: from settler colonial democracies to postcolonial nation-states and stateless territories. Anti-trans legislation, family policing, and reproductive surveillance intensify biopolitical control, while migration regimes, humanitarian aid economies, and asylum adjudication render certain genders and kinship forms precariously provisional. Transnational circuits of care work, remittances, and global health policies further illuminate how gendered life is governed, valued, and made disposable. This conference asks: How is gender timed? How is it accelerated, slowed, suspended, or foreclosed by transnational assemblages of state power, capital, medicine, media, and law?
How do global circulations of labor, war, and humanitarianism synchronize or fracture the temporalities of gendered life? Conversely, how do communities craft counter-temporalities of care, refusal, creativity, and futurity in the face of crisis?

We welcome works on the following topics (but not restricted to them):

Temporalities of gender and embodiment

Migration, diaspora, and border regimes

Biopolitics, necropolitics, and health

Citizenship, democracy, and legality

Work, labor, and economies of time

Technologies and media

Ecologies and environmentalisms

Aesthetics and affect

Education and publics

public humanities

community pedagogy

Penn State Graduates in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Conference (Hybrid Confernce)
Venue: Pasquerilla Spiritual Center, Penn State, State College, PA 16802
Dates: Tuesday, March 3 and Wednesday, March 4, 2026

please submit abstracts using the following link: https://forms.gle/iNGHHQA32xcz6m2J8

Gender, NOW is a multidisciplinary conference inviting scholarship across the humanities, social sciences, arts, and education. We center temporality as a lens through which to interrogate politics, migration, embodiment, and biopower. We welcome work that examines how bodies and identities are made legible or illegible across time; how archives, memory, and speculation reconfigure pasts and
futures; and how trans, queer, feminist, Indigenous, diasporic, decolonial, and Global South frameworks interrupt linear narratives of progress and belonging. We especially encourage submissions that bridge scholarship and practice, including community-based research, collaborative methods, and creative or experimental forms. We invite submissions from all scholars and practitioners, with particular attention to graduate and undergraduate students and first-time presenters in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and allied fields. 

We welcome: Individual papers, panels, workshops, roundtables, creative, artistic, or hybrid/experimental formats

Submission Components
Abstract: 250 words
Panel Proposal: 350 words
Short bio: 100 words (name, pronouns if desired, affiliation, city/state, email)
Keywords: up to 5
Accessibility/AV needs (e.g., captions, ASL, fragrance-free seating, quiet space)

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, February 10, 2026
Notification of acceptance: Tuesday, February 18, 2026