CFP: 5th Roundtable for Black Feminist and Womanist Theory / 2024 FEAST Conference on Audre Lorde

The 2024 Roundtable for Black Feminist & Womanist Theory will be held in connection with the 2024 conference of the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) on Oct. 31 to Nov. 2, 2024 as a hybrid conference, with in-person events taking place at the University of Rhode Island.

The Roundtable is a venue for scholars, activists, and artists across disciplines and professional trajectories to share work highlighting intellectual contributions of Black women, femmes, and non-men throughout the African diaspora. The aim of the conference is to create a working space for participants of various backgrounds to receive feedback on their projects that will enrich Black feminist and womanist traditions.

Concurrent with the Roundtable, FEAST will hold its 2024 meeting on Audre Lorde's thought and philosophical legacy. Audre Lorde’s insights have imprinted themselves deeply into much intellectual work and activism over the past 45 years, but in the academy, her words are still too often merely invoked rather than engaged with in depth. FEAST invites papers that engage deeply and searchingly with Lorde’s thought, examining the frameworks she developed and exploring how they can travel and illuminate our lives, philosophical questions, and political struggles.

FEAST welcomes all work that builds on Lordean themes, including questions of emotion and affect, coalitional politics and movement building, political and epistemic powers of sensuality and spirituality, multiplicitous selfhood and self-definition, revolutionary self-care and care of others, Black feminist and queer socialism and internationalism, disability and biopolitics, ecological crisis and survival, pedagogy and parenting, poetry, and the project of “giving name to the nameless.”

For work to be considered for the conference, please submit an extended abstract of 750–1000 words (2–3 pages), as well as a works cited/bibliography (not counted toward the word limit). Your submission should also include a brief biography (100–150 words).

Proposals for both the FEAST Audre Lorde stream and the Roundtable in general should be submitted over the web at https://tinyurl.com/LordeBFWT.

No fee is planned for the conference, but presenters on the FEAST stream with institutional funding will be asked to become members of FEAST.

Please direct questions to either Caleb Ward at [email protected] (FEAST) or to K. Bailey Thomas at [email protected] (Roundtable for BFWT).

The program committee for the 2024 FEAST conference is:

Caleb Ward (University of Hamburg) (co-chair)
K. Bailey Thomas (University of Rhode Island) (co-chair)
Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside)
Qrescent Mali Mason (Haverford College)
Tara Mastrelli (Stony Brook University)
Amber Jamilla Musser (CUNY Graduate Center)
Andrea Dionne Warmack (Ursinus College)

About the Roundtable for BFWT

The Roundtable was founded in 2019 as a working space for scholars, artists, activists, and theorists of various backgrounds to enrich Black feminist and womanist traditions throughout the African diaspora. This will be its 5th annual conference.

About FEAST

Founded in 1999, the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory is a professional organization dedicated to promoting feminist ethical perspectives on philosophy, moral and political life, and public policy that centers decolonized, intersectional, and interdisciplinary approaches. Its aim is to further the development and clarification of new understandings of ethical and political concepts and concerns, especially as they arise out of feminist concerns regarding underrepresented and marginalized women — including BIPOC, Third World, disabled, and LGBTQIA — as well as those arising from marginalized identities and marginalized issues. The organization seeks to create spaces to interrogate and address the philosophical and practical underpinnings of white privilege and racist violence in its many forms, including in feminist theory and practice.