As part of welcoming participants to our upcoming "Feminist Making-Doing-Sensing" event, we invite you to join us in expanding on the traditional conference model through a conference pedagogy approach. This names an approach to knowledge-sharing in “thoughtful gatherings” across diverse backgrounds and disciplines. "Conference Pedagogy" encapsulates a set of questions about how learning is enacted at conferences and beyond, into classroom and other spaces. We are interested in how sessions can be innovatively re-imagined through alternative modes of interaction, knowledge sharing and production, community building, and learning. For more on this approach, please see Henderson & Buford, 2020 and ISSOTL. 

Our iteration of this approach invites participants to a collective space (in person and online) for openings or prompts that may serve as a way to get to know one another through our drafted objectives, areas of aligning interest, and overlapping curiosities. 

We see this as a beginning anew or "settling into" our space and time together to sow seeds and germinate inspiration. We are developing this website as a virtual space where you are welcome to share the beginnings of your processing and contribute ideas and works-in-progress prior to our time together. You will have the opportunity to continue this processing and connecting throughout the conference. 

By way of following up and growing our community, we will have emergent spaces both during and coming out of the conference where you can submit to a collection of objects/renderings/iterative pieces. This includes our Pop-Up Gallery in the Atrium of the library, as well as the upcoming publications that will be responding to the conference. 

Our conference will include an Art-Hive,  which is an inclusive and collaborative space for making that:  

• welcomes everyone as an artist and believes art making is a human behavior, 

• celebrates the strengths and creative capacities of individuals and communities,

• fosters self-directed experiences of creativity, learning, and skill sharing,  

• shares resources including the abundant materials available for creative reuse,  

• experiments with ideas through humble inquiry and arts-based research,  

• partners with post-secondary institutions to promote engaged scholarship and participatory research, and more!  

Our feminist Art-Hive will be hosted by Suze Berkhout and Eva-Marie Stern, who each bring experiences in arts-based events to our conference. Here's a recent piece by Eva-Marie on art-making in the context of feminist pedagogies, if you enjoy diving into some background reading as priming for our art-hive collaborations. 

Materials for creation and art-making will be provided at the conference in our main Making Space in the Experience Lab, with additional "making stations" around the library with more supplies. 

If you'd like to create something to share (on line or in person), we invite you to check out the "Poster Proliferations" gallery below and produce your own version to share with everyone. We also invite you to participate in an Art Trade (also below).

This year’s conference theme is “Feminist Making, Doing, and Sensing.” In framing our philosophical engagement this way, we hope to encourage new ways of relating to conference experiences– in particular, we hope to co-create a participatory space that generates “making” as part of the program itself! There will be a multitude of ways to engage in creative collaboration throughout our time together; here we invite you into a pre-conference “making” space. 

The idea is to create or select a work of art to trade/share with other conference participants. This could be a collage, drawing, poem, photograph, song, sculpture, a doll, original music/audio on a USB drive, a family recipe that’s written out (and maybe illustrated), a hand-written story of someone’s special or exciting experience, etc. (It can be whatever, as long as it’s portable). 

The hope is to create or select pieces that speak to something about you or your work that isn’t always able to make its way into more traditional philosophical community spaces. Maybe it’s a piece representative of a theme in your work. Maybe it’s a piece that inspires you or your work. Maybe it’s just a playful expression of how you are feeling or what you are thinking in the moment in which you make it. It doesn’t have to be any particular thing. The hope is that we will all share a bit about our pieces and processes with other conference participants. Towards this aim, there will also be “making stations” set up at the event itself in case preparing something in advance doesn’t work for you.

Please note this is an invitation; there is no pressure or expectation of your participation. Please engage to the extent such an invitation resonates with you and your own journey of “Feminist Making.”

We invite participants of this year's conference to add 1-3 songs that can provide some "casually hanging out between sessions" or "collective art making space" vibes.  Choose music that you would like to hear while engaged in Feminist Making/Doing/Sensing!   

To add your songs, click on this link.  Then, search for any song on Spotify. Next to the song's playtime, you will see three dots, which will have an "add to playlist" option. Click "2024 philoSOPHIA conference playlist" to add your song to our collective soundspace. 

If you have any trouble, or if you don't have Spotify, you can also email 1-3 song titles and artists to taylorrogersmusic@gmail.com.  This playlist-project is facilitated by Tay Rogers, the conference's sound facilitator. 

Ada Jaarsma:  our local host, Ada is a feminist philosopher who has a love of "making" in the context of pedagogy, audio, and hand-stitched portraits of philosophers.

 Lauren Guilmette: our co-host, Lauren is a feminist philosopher and executive director of philoSOPHIA whose "making" practices include tarot readings, collage, and creative pedagogies. 

Bailey Szustak:  our third member of the core planning trio, Bailey is a doctoral candidate in philosophy and artist, whose art has inspired the "poster proliferations" project that everyone is invited to contribute to.

Qrescent Mali Mason:  one of our keynotes, Qrescent is a feminist philosopher whose experimental art workshops at philoSOPHIA 2022 & 2023 and at the Pacific APA 2023 shaped our conference theme and art-motifs.

Natalie Loveless:  one of our keynotes, Natalie is a "research creation"/ art-making theorist and teacher, whose book Making Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation inspired our conference ethos of collaborative, emergent feminist making. 

Audrey Yap:  our online participation host, Audrey is a feminist philosopher, whose "making and doing" interests include martial arts and commitments to accessbility and collaborative participation.

Tay Rogers: our sound facilitator, Tay is a feminist philosopher and multi-media artist,  who is curating the conference playlist to which everyone is invited to add sounds and tracks.

Joanna Szabo:  our conference pedagogy host, Joanna is a feminist and critical health studies educator, who has a love of "making" in the context of embodied and emergent ways of being present.  

Suze Berkhout:  one of our art-hive facilitators, Suze is a feminist philosopher and psychiatrist, who has a love of "making" in the context of arts-based, collaborative inquiry. 

Eva-Marie Stern:  one of our art-hive facilitators, Eva-Marie is a feminist art therapist, whose arts-based seminar, "Art is Patient," provides a trauma-informed framework for our conference's art-hive. 

Eli Buechler: one of the student assistants to the accessibility committee, Eli is reading and writing to make the conference a place of inclusion for everyone. His "making" practices include digital and ink illustrations, especially fan art.

Avery Follett: one of a team of student research assistants , Avery is a transmasculine Sociology student who enjoys thinking about “making” as undivorceable from our human experiences. Their “making” practices include elaborate cross-stitch portraits and hand-made letters for pen pals.

Cerena Boyd:  One of our student research assistants, Cerena, is passionate about the making process in photography, knitting and acting. She is enthralled and consoled by the ability art has to change minds and hearts, fostering empathy to MAKE a more inclusive world.