We are so excited to be holding the 8th Annual International Weight Stigma Conference in Auckland, New Zealand in June 2020. We’ve chosen this location to coincide with the third Fat Studies Conference, hosted by Dr Cat Pausé at Massey University in Auckland. So two conferences and one holiday of a lifetime!
Call for papers for FSC is now out. See below. Call for papers for the WSC will go out in January.
FYI.
Venue: Massey University, Auckland New Zealand
Date: 18-19 June, 2020
Abstract submission deadline: 15 Feb 2020
Early bird registration closes: 1 April 2020
Contact: Cat Pausé, PhD c.pause@massey.ac.nz
We are pleased to invite papers for possible inclusion in the upcoming Fat Studies: Past, Present, Futures. This conference will provide for academics and activists to consider our fat pasts, our fat present, and our fat futures. We welcome papers and performances from academics, researchers, intellectuals, scholars, activists, and artists, in any field of study, and at any stage in their career.
Our keynotes are Professor Esther Rothblum and the founder of The Body is Not an Apology, Sonya Renee Taylor; and we expect contributors from around the world. Community events will take place the night before FSNZ20 and the closing night of FSNZ20. We encourage all attendees to plan to attend both community events (Wed, Fri), and the conference dinner (Thurs).
Fat Studies is a post-disciplinary field of study that confronts and critiques cultural constraints against notions of “fatness” and “the fat body”; explores fat bodies as they live in, are shaped by, and remake the world; and theorises how society conceptualises and pathologises fat bodies. Fat Studies scholars identify and discuss mainstream and alternative discourses on fatness, analyse size as a social justice issue at the intersection of oppression, and critically appraise size oppression as it is manifested in various societal institutions (medicine, media, education, etc).
All submissions are welcome, but please ensure your proposal fits within the academic framework of Fat Studies. Please also be mindful that Fat Studies is an academic discipline and not merely an umbrella term for all discussions of fat bodies. Additionally, we encourage submitters to rethink using words like “obesity” and “overweight” in their presentations unless they are used ironically, within quotes, or accompanied by a political analysis.
In your submission, please include the title of your paper/presentation, an abstract, a short bio, a photo, and a Twitter/Instagram hashtag if appropriate. Topics may include, but are not limited to
- Fat Indigeneity
- Queering fat
- Fat histories
- Disrupting fatness
- Living fat
- Biopolitics of fatness
- Cross-cultural or global constructions of fatness and fat bodies
- Geography and lived experience of fatness and fat bodies
- Theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the construction, pathologisation, and/or representations, of fatness
- Fat futures
Abstracts should be submitted as an attachment to fsnz20@massey.ac.nz. Files should be named with the author’s surname followed by _fs2020 (Jones_fs2020). Please include contact information in the body of the email, and ensure your submission includes the title of your paper/presentation, an abstract, a short bio, a photo, and a Twitter/Instagram hashtag if appropriate. The abstracts of all work presented at the conference will be published in the conference proceedings. All presentations will be live streamed for the online audience, and will be available on demand for one year.
Activists and students are especially welcome to submit.
Informal enquiries concerning papers and topics are welcome before the deadline.