November 17, 2012 by tracylhawkins 

Last weekend I got to attend the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference. I went to the conference with a sense of dread (as is common for young professors going to their professional conferences) but it turned out to be a fantastic, if very challenging, experience.

I’m sure that you don’t want a play-by-play of my experiences (I took 4500 words worth of notes!), but I do want to give you the highlights to show you some of the things that some awesome people are thinking about. So, here are some of the really interesting panels and papers that I got to hear:

•A super helpful panel on strategies of publishing in academic journals. This is an essential skill for the young academic, so it was really good to hear from the editors of specific publications about what they look for and how they do peer reviews. Now I just need to submit some articles!

•An engaging panel on different approaches to teaching Intro to Women’s Studies (West Virginia University). This panel was based around using props, so we heard about teaching with cells (from a medical perspective), condoms (from a public health perspective), corsets (from a historical perspective), and blow up dolls (from an activist perspective).

•A paper by Danielle Henderson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) on her Feminist Ryan Gosling tumblr. You guys, she is awesome, and you really need to see her memes. Such an interesting critique/use of feminist theory!

•Two really useful papers by Jenn Brandt (High Point University) and Kate Drabinski (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) on using Twitter and Blogs in the feminist classroom. I am definitely going to try to incorporate these approaches in my spring courses. There are challenges to using those technologies, but I think that teaching students to write publicly and to engage in public debates is so important. ..."

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