28th Annual WGSS Student Research Symposium
Friday, April 25, 2025 - Bone Student Center Prairie Room 9:00 AM - 5:30 PM
Click Here to Register for the 2025 Symposium
2025 WGSS Student Research Symposium Program
2025 Keynote Speaker Dr. Nada Elia
Dr. Nada Elia has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Purdue University. She also chaired the Global Studies minor at Antioch University-Seattle, before moving to Western Washington University in 2017 to teach Arab American Studies and Comparative Cultural Studies. She regularly writes editorials on Palestine, gender, activism, and transnational struggles for Mondoweiss and Middle East Eye. Dr. Elia is the author of Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narratives, and is currently completing her next book Beyond Apartheid: Notes from the Global Intifada. She co-edited Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader and her award-winning The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. She recently contributed a chapter to Palestine: A Socialist Introduction.
All events are free and open to the public. For more information please contact Jamie Anderson (jlande4@ilstu.edu).
2024 Symposium
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Schedule of events
Keynote
1:00 PM in the BSC Prairie Rooms
Dr. Kate Manne, PhD
"He Said, She Listened: On Epistemic Entitlement, Mansplaining, and Gaslighting"
Kate Manne was dubbed “the philosopher of #MeToo” for her timely and widely read analysis of misogyny in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017) and her treatment of male entitlement in her most recent book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020). Manne regularly writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews on moral and political topics—in venues including The New York Times, The Boston Review, the Huffington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Times Literary Supplement. Manne's address begins with the question: What are the underlying causes of misogyny? In many cases, she argues, it stems from a wrongheaded sense of moral entitlement to a woman's sexual, emotional, reproductive, and material labor.
The WGSS Symposium is sponsored by:
- The Alice and Fannie Fell Trust
- Antiracism, Identity, and Belonging (AIB) Grant
- ISU Philosophy Department
- ISU English Department
- ISU Psychology Department
- ISU Social Work Department
- ISU Sociology and Anthropology Department
- ISU Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
- College of Arts and Sciences
- Queer Coaltion
Climate and Inclusion Statement
The organizers of The Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Student Research Symposium are committed to providing a harassment-free symposium experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, national origin, ethnicity, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference at the discretion of the conference organizers.
Harassment includes, but is not limited to:
- Verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, ethnicity, religion
- Sexual images in public spaces
- Deliberate intimidation, stalking, or following
- Harassing photography or recording
- Sustained disruption of talks or other events
- Inappropriate physical contact
- Unwelcome sexual attention
- Use of a recording device (mobile phone, camera, etc.) to capture images or presentations, chats, demonstrations, etc. taking place during the annual conference
- Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior
Land Acknowledgement
Illinois State University was built on and has benefitted from the land stolen from multiple Indigenous Nations. These lands were the traditional birthright of Indigenous Peoples who were forcibly removed and dispossessed of their land by settlers. Normal, IL is on the lands of the Peoria, Kaskasia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe Nations. As settlers, we recognize that we have a responsibility to continue to learn, teach, and understand Indigenous histories and present-day realities as they pertain to these Nations as well as to confront the ongoing violence of settler colonialism.
The WGSS Symposium is sponsored by:
- The Alice and Fannie Fell Trust
- College of Arts and Sciences
- Department of Criminal Justice Sciences
- Department of English
- Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment
- Harold K. Sage Fund
- Office of International Engagement
- Milner Library
- Department of Philosophy
- Department of Politics and Government
- Department of Psychology
- School of Social Work
- Department of Sociology and Anthropology
- School of Theatre, Dance, and Film
- Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program
The WGSS Symposium is sponsored by:
- The Alice and Fannie Fell Trust
- ISU Philosophy Department
- Harold K. Sage Foundation Fund
- ISU English Department
- College of Arts and Sciences
- Queer Coaltion
- ISU Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program