Foundational Pre-Conferences

Program Administration and Development (PAD) Pre-Conference

Thursday, November 14th, 2024 | 8:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M. EST

Registration window for the 2024 PAD Pre-Conference is May 1st - August 30th

The Program Administrators Caucus first met at the 1983 NWSA Annual Conference and became the Program Administration and Development Committee in 2006. The PAD Committee consists of women's studies program administrators (chairs, directors, coordinators) whose programs, departments or other academic units are member institutions of NWSA. This body is convened once a year for a Business Meeting at the annual NWSA Conference and is sustained by the PAD Listserv. The PAD Committee is a standing committee in NWSA specifically designed to represent the interests and needs of administrators of women's studies programs and departments to the Governing Council of NWSA and to assist NWSA in meeting the needs of women's administrators and their departments and programs.

The first PAD Pre-Conference was held at the 2000 NWSA Annual Conference. The PAD Pre-Conference provides administrators with ideas, strategies, and approaches to both strengthen and grow WGSS programs in hard times. These include: supporting diverse leadership, building coalitions across campus and across town, fundraising, battling backlash, making external reviews successful, incorporating service learning requirements, and more.

In 2000, the PAD Committee initiated the Women of Color Leadership Project (WoCLP). The WoCLP is now jointly sponsored by the NWSA Women of Color Caucus (WoCC), Program Administration and Development Committee (PAD), and the Women’s Centers Committee (WCC) in conjunction with the PAD and WCC Pre-Conferences.

Women’s Centers Committee (WCC) Pre-Conference

Thursday, November 14th, 2024 | 8:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M. EST

Registration window for the 2024 WCC Pre-Conference is May 1st - August 30th

Beginning as the Women's Centers and Services Caucus, the Constituency's first meeting was at the 1984 NWSA Annual Conference, eventually becoming the Women's Centers Committee in 2006. The WCC held its first Pre-Conference at the 2002 NWSA Annual Conference. NW5A recognizes that "women's studies" is broader than what happens in the classroom. NWSA acknowledges women's centers as chief out-of-class feminist educators and encourages participation in the national organization.

Campus-based women's centers have a long history of working together with women's studies to transform the curriculum, the campus environment, and society at large.

The Women's Centers Committee of NWSA provides an opportunity for women's center directors, staff and others to gather and share information, ideas, challenges, successes and support. The Women's Centers Committee sponsors an annual pre-conference event as well as sessions during the NWSA Annual Conference.

Along with the the Program Administration and Development Committee (PAD) and the NWSA Women of Color Caucus (WoCC), the Women’s Centers Committee (WCC) jointly sponsors the Women of Color Leadership Project (WoCLP) in conjunction with the PAD and WCC Pre-Conferences.

Each year, NWSA in coordination with the NWSA Women's Center Committee gives multiple awards to deserving programs and people working in women's and gender equity centers (WGEC). The awards include the Coalition Builder, Feminist Change Agent, Mentorship, and Outstanding WGEC Program Awards. You can find more information about the awards here.

If you are interested in submitting to the 2024 WCC Pre-Conference you can submit your panel proposal here. 

Women of Color Leadership Project (WoCLP)

2024 Pedagogical Institute on Teaching Gender and Sexual Justice in Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Communities

In our commitment in providing resources regarding the occupation of Palestine and the increasing colonial violence that we are witnessing from the seat of empire (here on Turtle Island), the Association is working to repair and heal our relationship with the organizers of the Constituency Group, Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine, to design and implement programs and interventions that align with our Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) policy. For the 2024 Annual Conference, we are excited and passionate about collaborating on a Pre-Conference Institute. Attending the 2024 Pedagogical Institute requires additional (ie. separate) registration once accepted into the Institute's cohort.

The focus of the 2024 Pedagogical Institute is “Decolonizing Feminism and Resisting Settler Colonialism: Palestine Is a Feminist Issue”

Pre-Conference Description: This Pedagogical Institute for Teaching Gender and Sexual Justice in Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Communities could not come at a more urgent time. Indeed, educators, scholar-activists, and organic intellectuals within and outside the academy urgently need to come together in a transnational and truly anti-colonial feminist space to co-learn framing, pedagogical praxis, use of class material, and exercises as well as strategies to uphold our collective (and individual) academic freedom against deepening repression and fascism within and outside our classrooms. These repressive structures by the state and the neoliberal university are designed to promote a white supremacist, Eurocentric, and Zionist curriculum that is designed to erase Palestinian narratives, silence advocates for Palestine freedom, criminalize Palestine in academic spaces and curriculum, and violate academic freedom with impunity.

Part of Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice, the Pedagogical Institute for Teaching Gender and Sexual Justice in Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Communities, initiated and designed by Dr Rabab Abdulhadi and adopted and collectively developed by Feminists for Justice in and for Palestine (F4JP), is grounded in historical and contextual understandings of colonialism/settler colonialism/neocolonialism, racism, exclusion, displacement, war, and imperialism both theoretically and pedagogically. It engages in the praxis of foregrounding, validating and centering the lived experiences of marginalized and colonized communities while simultaneously uplifting and mobilizing resilience and resistance strategies toward social transformation. 

The Pedagogical Institute for Teaching Gender and Sexual Justice in Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Communities will explore how such dialectical and interconnected conceptual framing intervenes in and outside formal and informal classrooms, the streets, community spaces, prisons, and detention centers to arrive at transformative and non-exceptionalizing visions of justice, dignity, and peace for all our communities. Here we invoke the urgency of consistent critical analyses of the connections between movements for Black Lives, abolition, reparation, and repatriation/rematriation/Land Back on Turtle Island. We simultaneously reject xenophobia and the invented dichotomy between “foreign” and “domestic” and connect the liberation of Palestine with that of Kashmir, Okinawa, Guam, Philippines, Puerto Rico, and all other colonized and occupied lands on the basis of the indivisibility of justice.

We know that one day is never enough to fully engage in sufficient critical study and analysis. As such, we see this first full-day NWSA Pedagogical Institute for Teaching Gender and Sexual Justice in Arab, Muslim and Palestinian Communities (the first half-day institute was in 2018 in Atlanta), encompassing multiple co-learning pedagogies, class material (text, genre, inter- and multidisciplinary, etc.), and facilitators, is geared toward formal (high school and college) and informal educators who might be well-versed in gender and sexuality studies but are not as familiar with Arab, Muslim and Palestinian communities and/or what feminist solidarity entails.  

Institute Director: Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, PhD, Director and Senior Scholar, Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies, San Francisco State University, organized in collaboration with the NWSA Constituency Group Feminists for Justice In/For Palestine. 

Apply Here