Women in World-Literature
Climate, Crisis, and Contagion
19th and 20th June 2025

Hybrid and in-person at the University of Warwick/hubs

This hybrid conference follows 2022's ‘Women in World(-)Literature’ which was also held at the University of Warwick.

'Women in World-Literature: Climate, Crisis, and Contagion', urgently attends to questions about how the ecological and health impacts of the world-system are implicated by gender. Climate crisis is changing everything about how we relate to each other - from gender, racial, and labour relations, to how we conceive of borders. At the same time, scholarship, the UN, and UNESCO all agree that contagion and climate crises disproportionately effects women (Del Boca et al. 2020; Power 2020; Milford Morse and Anderson 2020; UNESCO 2022). According to a 2022 UNESCO report ‘it is estimated that 158 million women and girls are pushed into poverty as a direct result of climate change, 16 million more than the total number of men and boys’, thus it is urgent to consider how global access to resources influences the shape of contemporary culture.

This conference therefore asks: how does world-literary and world-systems thinking change when we foreground gender in our analysis of global and local crises, climate collapse, and contagion? How might attending more keenly to women's experiences and cultural production as "peripheral" agents actually upset and usurp capitalism's insistence on exchange value, and what does this offer us as an imaginary to circumvent crisis-capitalism and scarcity thinking? This conference aims to open up new routes to understanding the patriarchal world-system and how we might imagine better ways to live through this epoch of collapse. Such ways of living might focus on the interconnectedness of all people with the environment and with one another. Moreover, the inclusivity at the heart of the conference aims to show how a supportive environment of care, which refuses scarcity mindsets, generates new and unexpected collaborations, outputs, and ideas.

This Call for Papers invites abstracts for 20 minute papers, panels (4 papers max.), workshops (1 hour), and creative interventions (e.g. short films, art, performance) which respond to (as potential starting points):

• Complicating and exploring the term “crisis” as it pertains to gender
• Women and contagion
• Women’s work during crises
• Apocalypse; past epochs of collapse
• Climate and Gender
• Women’s health; women as health workers
• The gendered impact of COVID-19, HIV AIDs, and other pandemics/epidemics
• Bodies and/as resources
• Indigenous climate theory and practices
• Survival and annihilation; hope and defeat
• Extractivist capitalism and gender
• Experiments, vaccinations, and denialism
• Or, any other topic which foregrounds women in climate, crisis, and/or contagion.

To welcome participants from all over the world this will be a hybrid event taking place across online and in-person platforms. If you would be interested in hosting an in-person hub at your institution please get in touch.

In your submission, please include the following (for each participant if submitting a panel):

• Name & pronouns
• Institutional Affiliation (if applicable) & Short Bio (100 words)
• Title of Paper
• Abstract (max 300 words)
• Preferred participation (online or in person - final decisions to be made later)
• Time zone (for online participation)

We are committed to making the event as widely accessible as possible. We welcome submissions from participants at any and all stages of their academic career, from any discipline, alongside practitioners and artists of all stripes. If you would like to discuss a potential paper, panel, or other idea with us ahead of submission please feel free to get in touch.

Please note that this is a trans inclusive event.

Join us on Twitter: @WomeninWorldLit and check out our homepage for news about hubs, bursaries, and the WIWL Network Launch!

Organiser: Dr Roxanne DouglasLink opens in a new window