Every year, 4W collaborates with the UW System Women’s & Gender Studies Consortium to host an annual conference around women and wellbeing. This conference brings together students, scholars, activists, and community members from across Wisconsin and around the world. Past themes and notable speakers are listed below.
CONFERENCE 2021
RESISTANCE AND REIMAGINATION: GENDER, CHANGE, AND THE ARTS
PLEASE JOIN US APRIL 8-10, 2021 FOR RESISTANCE AND REIMAGINATION: GENDER, CHANGE, AND THE ARTS! Join us April 8-10, 2021 for a fully virtual conference focused on the integration of the arts into our work as a path toward knowing, resistance, and imagination. This year’s theme encourages a feminist lens to argue against a separation amongst art, politics, activism, and epistemology. With the help of the arts, we can envision how to deconstruct, decolonize, and reimagine life and society. Creative work can be seen as an end in itself and as a feminist tool of inquiry, knowledge production, and critical resistance.
This year we will feature virtual posters, art exhibits, and roundtables discussions that consider the arts as a site of inquiry, pedagogical practice, methodology, activism, exploration, and social transformation. Our keynotes and plenaries similarly include conversations with scholars, students, activists, artists, civil society leaders, and community members who consider the arts as a site of inquiry, pedagogical practice, methodology, activism, exploration, and social transformation.
View the 2021 Keynotes and Plenaries
Click here for more information.
“The Summit is a wonderful event. It serves...as a place where applied feminism comes together with academic Gender & Women’s Studies in the attendance and presentations of community activists and field scholars...I am proud to be a part of this community of scholars, faculty, students, and activists.”
—2017 ATTENDEE
2019: “Transformative Education: Then. When? Now!”
This conference celebrated the 150th anniversary of women to graduate from UW-Madison, recognizing the great achievements women have made in academia and addressing challenges and shortfalls that still remain.
2017: “Transformative Education: Equity, Sustainability, Empowerment”
The 2017 conference explored challenges and triumphs related to women’s education and wellbeing, aiming to foster equitable teaching, research, and scholarship at the intersections of class, gender, race, sexuality, ability, age and other axes of identity.
2018: “Our Bodies, Our Earth: Voice, Violence, and Peacemaking”
The 2018 conference featured international, national, and regional scholarship addressing a range of local and global challenges to women’s lives, leadership, and wellbeing, such as intimate partner violence and exploitation of indigenous populations around the world.
2016: “Wellbeing and Empowerment: Wisconsin and the World”
This conference marked the first annual conference summit and featured two renowned women leaders: Donna Shalala, former UW-Madison Chancellor, President of the Clinton Foundation, and Secretary of Health and Human Services; and Dr. Terarai Trent, international humanitarian and scholar.