Past Conferences
Interrogating Intersectional Masculinities
Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender
October 17-20, 2019
Cincinnati, Ohio
For more than four decades, OSCLG has brought together students, scholars, activists, artists, and practitioners interested in gender and language and committed to feminist principles.
Masculinities have functioned, over that time, as a consistent object of critique, debate, conversation, and rumination–sometimes marked explicitly as such, but most of the time functioning in the background of analyses that center feminisms, women’s experiences, and critiques of femininities. OSCLG 2019 proposes bringing masculinities into sharp focus as the conference theme–not to displace scholarship about feminisms, women’s lives, and femininities, but to name and interrogate the operation of masculinities at work in the shadows of scholarship and activism around gender. From political candidates bragging about sexual assault to public figures facing accusations of sexual harassment, the problems of toxic and hegemonic masculinities have loomed large in the popular imaginary over the last few years. Moreover, toxic and hegemonic masculinities lie behind many of the problems commonly addressed in feminist scholarship: gender violence (a physical manifestation of toxic masculinity), reproductive justice (resisting masculinist efforts to control others’ bodies), homophobia and transphobia (expressions of cultural policing of “proper” masculinity), and intersectional critiques that articulate awareness of the interaction of masculinities with other systems of power that produce inequality for people, such as nationality, race, class, physical and mental (dis)ability, religion, size, or economic status.
Nevertheless, We Persisted: Living Feminist Politics through Theory and Activism
41st Annual Conference for OSCLG
October 3-7, 2018 Lake Tahoe, NV
In February of 2017, Senator Elizabeth Warren read the words of Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor to oppose the selection of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell stopped her from finishing the speech. Ultimately, the senate voted to force Warren to cease her dialogue of opposition to Sessions’ appointment. McConnell later remarked of the situation, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Warren, like so many social justice advocates before her, was silenced. Nevertheless, she persisted.
The United States is in a period of widespread silencing. In just the last year, protests of unsafe drinking water have been met with tear gas; national park employees, environmentalists, and scientists have been ordered to stop communicating publically. Advocates for gun control are silenced even as mass shootings continue. Expressed dissent to political power is labeled as “fake news.” DREAMers, Muslims, Trans military members, women, black bodies, the LGBTQ+ community, Latina/o/x communities, rape survivors, and immigrants have all been systematically silenced.
During this difficult time and despite such restrictions, advocates and allies persist and resist. The Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender calls for scholars and practitioners across a variety of academic disciplines, artistic practices, and research approaches to contribute papers, roundtable discussions, creative presentations, and other forms of dialogue that take up a calling to resist inequality in its many forms. We seek projects that demonstrate the value of persisting to work for equality and equity and resisting violent, racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and sexist language and action during this tension-filled political moment.
As scholars and activists, we also have encountered diverse and systemic silencing. Nevertheless, we persist.
OSCLG 2018 Conference Program_Final
And Some Photos!!!!
40 Shades of Purple: Four Decades of Feminisms
October 5-8, 2017
The Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG) invites scholars, artists, teachers, consultants, and activists to celebrate 40 years of gathering to imagine a better world through feminist thinking and practices.
OSCLG has grown from a series of interdisciplinary conferences that began at Bowling Green State University in 1978 to become a well established interdisciplinary and international feminist organization that fosters the presentation of research, creative projects, and activism in the areas of communication, language, and gender and advances feminist values in the academy and our communities. This year we celebrate four decades of feminisms; forty years of valuing, conceptualizing, and practicing equality across differences.
“Forty” is thought to represent a time of renewal after a period of trial and tribulation, a season of regeneration. We call for scholars across academic disciplines, communities of practice, and research approaches to celebrate where we have been and imagine where we can go as feminists in our work, families, communities, and, indeed, the world. Let’s use our history to envision a better tomorrow across multiple contexts (social, political, economic, legal, and more). We encourage papers that explore multiple waves or decades of feminist history/practices, address how to use our his/her/hir-stories to improve our futures, and raise questions about conceptual foundations that need to be challenged to move forward in inclusive, collaborative, and productive ways.
TRANS*GRESSION
2016 39th Annual meeting for OSCLG
October 13-16, 2016
Oak Park, Illinois
The Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender invites scholars, artists, teachers, and activists to gather as a chorus of transgressive voices at the 2016 conference.
Despite decades of activism, resistance, and education, both feminists and gender outlaws continue to experience personal, political, institutional, and cultural resistance to rights, recognition, and respect. In the face of these inequalities and disparities, it is evident from recent critiques that the faith of academics and intellectuals to find answers about these problems via feminist, gender, and queer studies is waning. These skeptical attitudes, combined with publics that continue to defund higher education and question the worth of non-scientific research, indicate that a fight for survival might lie ahead. As part of this battle, transgression might be in order.
We call for scholars across a variety of academic disciplines, artistic practices, and research approaches to develop new paths of intellectual inquiry: What longstanding debates must be reshuffled? What conceptual formations have remained unchallenged too long? What taboo topics have we avoided? What contradictions in values have we ignored? Who has been left out of the conversation? And how do we make a difference beyond talking to each other in small rooms?
Let’s forget what we’re supposed to say and infuse our conversation with imaginative, provocative, and evocative ideas. Let’s inspire each other with bold cross-fertilizations of concepts, principles, and practices. Let’s forget disciplinary rules, aesthetic genres, and the same old tropes
Let’s transgress.
Communication and Sexuality
The 38th Annual Meeting of the OSCLG
Bowling Green, KY
October 1-4, 2015
Western Kentucky University will be hosting OSCLG 2015 on campus in the beautiful, rolling hills of Bowling Green, Kentucky. We welcome submissions of papers, panels, performances, and workshops around the broad theme of communication, and sexuality. The theme includes a range of timely and relevant issues including healthy sexual communication, sexual assault on campus, gender and sexuality in the media, rape culture in education, workplace romance, abortion and birth control access and rights, sexual orientation and identity, and…
The Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG) provides a forum for professional discussion, presentation of research, and demonstration of creative projects in the areas of communication, language, and gender. OSCLG promotes recognition of those doing work in this area. Members of OSCLG believe that interaction across a wide spectrum of disciplines fosters more insightful discussion of the issues of language, gender, and communication.
Western Kentucky University is located one hour north of Nashville, TN atop a hill that once held a civil war fort (first occupied by the South, then the North), WKU’s campus features green spaces and sculptures among its historic red brick buildings. The conference hotel will be new and well-appointed, costing about $139 a night. The closest airport is Nashville, TN. Details of the conference schedule, location, accommodation, will be posted soon on the Hotel and Travel Information tab.
(En)Gendering Technologies
37th Annual OSCLG Conference
October 16-19, 2014
OSCLG’s 37th Annual Meeting was hosted by Santa Clara University in the vibrant technology center of Silicon Valley, situated in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area. The theme of the conference was (En)gendering Technologies, including broad considerations of gender and intersectionality. Lauran Ellingson was the conference planner and you can view the final conference program available here.
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Feminist Interdisciplinarity, Technology, and the Natural Environment
36th Annual Conference , October 10‐13, 2013 Houghton MI
35th Annual Conference of OSCLG
Moment-us: Celebrating the Present, Planning the Future
Tacoma, WA October 10-14, 2012
Performing Gender
34th Annual Meeting of OSCLG
Chicago, IL October 13-16, 2011
The 33rd Annual Meeting of OSCLG
The Good Life
St. Petersburg, FL October 14-17, 2010
32nd Annual Meeting of OSCLG
Social Justice and Diversity by the Sea: Spirituality, Creativity, and Activism