(Re)making the World
A “How-To” Conference on Feminist, Crip, and Decolonial Worldmaking
25th Southern Connecticut State University Women’s & Gender Studies Conference
April 17–18, 2026
Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT
In As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes:
Resurgence is not a metaphor. It is the flight out of settler colonialism, towards something we have been taught is impossible.
This conference takes Simpson’s call for radical resurgence seriously — positioning “how-to” as a feminist practice, politic, and theorizing.
The 2026 SCSU Women’s & Gender Studies Conference invites communities to gather for a feminist, crip, and decolonial practice of refusal, survival, and worldmaking.
In an era of rising authoritarianism, climate catastrophe, and technological dispossession, we ask
- How do we refuse extractive systems of labor, knowledge, and identity?
- How do we create alternative economies of care, access, justice, and decolonial business?
- How do we unlearn oppressive epistemologies and forge liberatory practices?
- How do we crip, queer, Indigenize, and decolonize institutions not built for us?
- How do we resist algorithmic bias, surveillance capitalism, and technocratic ableism?
- How do we (re)imagine feminist futures?
The 2026 conference offers a space to explore the pedagogies, practices, and possibilities embedded in the question of “how to?” across disciplines, communities, and movements. We seek proposals that move beyond critique to praxis — embracing failure as pedagogy, interdependence as resistance, and joy as a radical act.