2025 Call for Papers (Draft)
We invite presentations for the 6th Annual Arizona Feminist Philosophy Graduate Conference (FemPhilAZ 2025), to be held on [conference dates] at the University of Arizona with a hybrid in-person/Zoom option for all sessions. Our keynote speakers this year are [keynote speaker 1] and [keynote speaker 2].
The conference is free to register and open to all. We will receive submissions until [submission due date]. Past programs can be found at https://femphilaz.com, with the caveat that we are always in search of approaches, themes, traditions, and voices not well represented in previous iterations of the conference.
What we are looking for: We construe feminist philosophy broadly to cover theoretically-oriented interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, history of feminist thought, creative/artistic feminist philosophical work, and all areas of contemporary feminist theory (feminist political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of art, etc.) and its many intersections (including but not limited to trans/queer feminism, transnational feminism, Indigenous feminism, critical race feminism, ecofeminism, feminist migration/border studies, feminist legal studies, feminist disability studies, feminist science/technology studies, and feminist animal studies).
We encourage interventions that go beyond merely interpreting, explicating, critiquing, applying, or amending existing views, and favor submissions that are not afraid to take risks, grapple with the big normative, analytical, practical, and methodological questions, and provoke new ways of seeing, thinking, and theorizing.
If you would like to attend the conference but do not have work ready to submit at this time, please reach out to us at the email address below and indicate a willingness to be considered as a commentator or chair (please remember to give us a sense of your background and interests!).
- An anonymized version of your paper (up to 3,000 words) or creative/artistic work (suitable for a 20-minute presentation); and
- A separate cover letter stating (a) the title of your presentation, (b) your name, (c) your email, (d) your institutional affiliation (if any), and (e) four to six keywords.
Our selection process this year will be triple-anonymous. The authors will be known to only one co-organizer who will manage the submissions. Every submission will first be reviewed anonymously by two of our philosophy graduate students and/or faculty members at the University of Arizona. The co-organizers will then together decide on a conference program anonymously as well. You will receive an email acknowledgment within a couple of days after submission closes and will be notified of our decision by [due date for decisions]; we are hoping to pass on brief feedback from the reviewers. For reference, our instructions to reviewers can be found here.
Unaffiliated scholars/artists without a terminal degree (e.g., PhD, JD, MFA), as well as undergraduate students, are also welcome to submit. Co-authored submissions are eligible so long as none of the authors has received their terminal degree at the time of submission, except that graduate students pursuing joint degrees (e.g., PhD-JD) are always eligible. With apologies, we will not consider submissions from students currently enrolled in any academic or professional programs at the University of Arizona; we encourage you to volunteer as a commentator or chair instead (please see instructions above).
What we are doing to make FemPhilAZ accessible: As with previous years, FemPhilAZ 2025 will take place with an all hybrid in-person/Zoom format; we have no registration fees. We expect to be in a position to help offset travel costs for speakers (and possibly commentators and chairs) with the limited funds we hope to raise, and we are happy to help arrange temporary housing with graduate student hosts (if so desired).
For accessibility reasons, we ask all in-person attendees to wear N94/N95 or similar masks, which will be available at no cost from the registration table. Speakers and commentators will be requested to upload, by at least the night before the start of the conference, presentation materials to a confidential shared folder circulated to all conference participants. The conference venue itself is accessible by wheelchair and is housed in a building with a nursing room (incl. a refrigerator) and a gender-neutral/accessible bathroom; we will make a quiet room available throughout the conference as well. Lastly, all food provided will be vegan/vegetarian, and we will collect information about additional dietary restrictions prior to the start of the conference.