•  
  •  
 

The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal
Call for Submissions to the Spring 2023 Issue

Issue Title: "Point of (No) Return? Seneca Falls and the Future of Feminist Place-Making"

Feminists gather. We gather to share knowledge and examine problems. We gather to develop resiliency, creativity, and durable structural change. We do this in the face of entrenched power imbalances within feminism in the areas of race, class, age, ability, political and sexual difference. How do our gatherings seek to repair–or reinforce–the historic betrayals within feminist movements?

As a gesture of repair, the National Women's Studies Association, for example, acknowledges the settler-colonial implications of their feminist gatherings by offering land acknowledgements at the opening of their conference, and at individual panel sessions. Other feminist groups, like The Seneca Falls Dialogues, or the Feminist Pragmatist Association, meet in places fraught with the tension of race-based suffrage history, like Seneca Falls, by adopting "strategic myth-making," explicitly calling up those historic betrayals and inequalities in order to draw awareness, and make new alliances and practices (Tetrault; Swiencicki et. al.). Still others boycott gatherings in formerly and predominantly white feminist spaces, rerouting and repositioning feminist solidarity in new spaces of activism and scholarly exchange.

The editors of The Seneca Falls Dialogues Journal seek contributions that reflect on the questions of where feminist communities and organizations should gather now, and why place matters for inclusive, intersectional social change. We are seeking short position papers (250-500 words), or any form or genre of statement-making (a vlog, podcast, digital art, poetry or fiction), that engage with one or more of the following related questions:

  • What is feminist place-making in the 21st century?
  • What is the symbolic weight of where feminists choose to gather?
  • What criteria should be adopted for where feminists gather to share research, experience, and ideas in the coming years?
  • What are the features that might make up a "politics of place" for future feminist gatherings (particularly in western New York, or elsewhere of relevance to our regional focus), one that does not erase the tensions within feminist history in the U.S., and one that contributes to a just, inclusive, and intersectional feminist community building?
  • What are some imaginative models for creative and ethical feminist place-making?
  • What are stories we should lift up and tell as we imagine a feminist politics of place?

Submissions due: September 20, 2022 to jswiencicki@sjfc.edu

Editors' Decision: October 15, 2022

Final Selected Submissions Due: December 1, 2022

Issue Published: February 2023

Thank you, and for further information,
The SFDJ editors

Jill Swiencicki, Associate Professor, Department of English, St. John Fisher College,

Mary Graham, Professor, Department of Sport Management, Syracuse University,

Lisa J. Cunningham, Director of WGST, Department of English, St. John Fisher College,

Pat Maxwell, SFDJ Managing Editor, SUNY Brockport,