The 2026 Women’s & Gender Studies Conference — “(Re)making the World: A “How-To” Conference on Feminist, Crip, and Decolonial Worldmaking” — will take place on the Southern Connecticut State University campus on Friday and Saturday, April 17 and 18, 2026, and will feature a keynote address by Dr. Nirmala Erevelles, professor of social and cultural studies in education at the University of Alabama.
In its invitation for proposals, the 2026 conference committee offered a space to explore the pedagogies, practices, and possibilities embedded in the question of “how to?” across disciplines, communities, and movements. The committee sought proposals that move beyond critique to praxis — embracing failure as pedagogy, interdependence as resistance, and joy as a radical act.
This year’s conference theme spotlights a new minor program in Critical Disability Studies being offered to undergraduates at Southern. Philosophy Professor Heidi Lockwood, co-coordinator of the program with English Professor Rachel Furey, said that keynote speaker Erevelles’ scholarship speaks directly to the feminist, crip, and decolonial commitments that animate both the conference and the minor.
“We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Nirmala Erevelles to campus — and to host conference presenters from 18 states and six countries,” Lockwood said. “The 2026 WGS Conference is closely connected to Southern’s new Critical Disability Studies minor, Connecticut’s first undergraduate program of its kind. Dr. Nirmala Erevelles’ keynote reflects the shared focus on disability justice and feminist, crip, and decolonial approaches to understanding power, access, and inclusion.”
The conference is being organized by a team of faculty and staff, led by three co-chairs: Lockwood; Kauther Badr, professor of management; and Yi-Chun Tricia Lin, professor and chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.
The conference will be held in the SCSU School of Business Building (10 Wintergreen Avenue, New Haven, Conn.). See the SCSU interactive map here.
Conference registration is now open; information is available here.
For over three decades, since 1991, the feminist collective at SCSU has been hosting continuously conferences that reach across communities and bring together activists, academics, artists, and feminist practitioners from diverse backgrounds for a feminist feast.
About Nirmala Erevelles, Ph.D.
Dr. Nirmala Erevelles is a professor of social and cultural studies in education at the University of Alabama. Her teaching and research interests lie in the areas of disability studies, critical race theory, transnational feminism, sociology of education, and postcolonial studies. Erevelles uses a materialist intersectional analysis to foreground the dialectical relationships between disability and race, class, gender, and sexuality and its brutal implications for (disabled) students in U.S. public schools and (disabled) citizens in transnational contexts.
Erevelles has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals in education and in the humanities. Her book, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Towards a Transformative Body Politic was published by Palgrave in November 2012 and was awarded the Critic’s Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript tentatively entitled “Cripping Empire: Theorizing Intersectionality as if Black/Brown/Disabled Lives Matter.”
