SSAWW 2021 Conference November 4-7, 2021
Royal Sonesta Harbor Court Hotel, Baltimore, Maryland
American Women Writers: Ecologies, Survival, Change
“Ecologies, Survival, Change” celebrates the many women across the Americas whose creative work fosters survival and envisions change by exploring the systems in which we live, labor and love. Toni Morrison is our touchstone: her works powerfully remind us that humans, however implicated in damaging structures, can also resist them through networks that sustain and transform.
We offer the term “ecologies” to signify the dynamic, interlocking systems that make up our world, from networks of family and friends to entrenched processes of environmental exploitation to hierarchies of race and gender. Material and discursive, natural and human created, entrenched and emergent – ecologies integrate diverse, even conflicting, values and effects. As the novel coronavirus demonstrates, global pandemics and other crises make many ecologies hyper-visible, calling attention to the sustenance which some provide while exacerbating the destructiveness of others.
Our conference embraces the capacity of creative work to represent existing ecologies and to imagine alternative ones. While we encourage papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops that explore our theme, however, our 2021 conference is not restricted to them. As always, we encourage panel proposals from affiliated societies. As we meet in Baltimore for the first time, we also welcome contributions that highlight the city’s women writers and artists, organizers and organizations.
In the spirit of creating ecologies that sustain us, the 2021 conference will offer numerous opportunities for community-building and personal and professional flourishing: workshops, mentoring, and brainstorming sessions for colleagues at all stages, from graduate students to retirees; opportunities for meditation and exercise; meetings with journal editors; roundtables and discussions about distance teaching and learning. We will also unveil the SSAWW Digital Recovery Hub, a network of scholars grounded in diverse feminist methods which provides resources for digital project consultation and technical assistance for scholars engaged in the recovery work of American women writers.
While we’re planning a face-to-face conference for November 2021, we are monitoring the ongoing situation with COVID-19 and will prepare contingencies as the situation continues to evolve
Proposals for panels, roundtables, and individual papers are to be submitted no later than February 1, 2021. Details on proposal submissions will be forthcoming. Please check this space and the SSAWW listserv for future updates on our 2021 Triennial Conference.
