Representations of Empowerment and Resistance in Contemporary Indian Women’s Literary and Cultural Discourses
Hyderabad
Organization: Mahindra University
Concept Note
We are pleased to invite submissions for an interdisciplinary conference and workshop on the theme of Representations of Empowerment and Resistance in Contemporary Indian Women’s Literary and Cultural Discourses. The conference aims to explore how women’s engagements with questions of “empowerment” and “resistance” have evolved, with each iteration reflecting its respective context and changes. Participants are encouraged to explore these themes using either or both of two analytical frameworks: the "event," which concentrates on specific historical incidents, and the "episodic," which looks at ongoing, quotidian practices that James Scott describes as "everyday forms of resistance." These themes appear regularly in the works by women across different media, and these representations serve as platforms for negotiating issues of gender, caste, class, sexuality, and regional identity. We are particularly interested in how women’s choice of media, such as cookbooks, YouTube videos, blog posts, poems, novels, and more, also shapes their articulations of agency. Additionally, we aim to investigate how women rework traditional discourses for their artistic purposes through retellings of mythological stories, fairy tales, and similar narratives. We also welcome researchers to consider how current debates surrounding the need to define the category of the “woman” can be shaped.
Call for Papers:
We invite both academic and non-academic professionals to share abstracts on related thematic concerns that match their research interests, which include but are not restricted to how women:
· Conform to, strengthen, negotiate, and reject their roles in patriarchal structures.
· Experience both empowerment and exploitation to different degrees based on their participation in economic systems where they perform affective and other forms of labor.
· Respond to experiences of precarity contingently where issues related to gender intersect with class, caste, religious, and national identities.
· Use generational and traditional Indian knowledges available to them as important elements of their resistance.
· Choose and employ different aesthetic forms and media technologies to represent themselves and present their concerns.
· Use different embodied, affective, and discursive practices to address the question of what it means to be a “woman.”
· Politicize acts of remembrance and commemoration that can supplement and challenge hegemonic narratives.
· Build networks of solidarity to shape resistance at both individual and collective levels.
· Innovate new forms of resistance that help us rethink what it means to resist.
· Resist exploitative systems at both intimate and planetary levels and lead humanity toward sustainable futures by ameliorating ecological and other forms of incipient crisis.
Submission Guidelines
· We invite abstracts of no more than three-hundred words with five keywords and a brief author bio.
· Submission link: https://forms.office.com/r/G5ZEGZptJ7
· You can mail your queries to: erchss2026@mahindrauniversity.edu.in
· Selected papers will be considered for a peer-reviewed edited volume. The selection will be based on the full papers submitted for the conference within the specified deadline.
Registration Fees
Students and Researchers: INR 1500
Academics and Industry Professionals: INR 3000
This will be an exclusively in-person conference conducted at the Hyderabad campus of Mahindra University. There will be no remote/virtual sessions.
erchss2026@mahindrauniversity.edu.in
Dr.Chilakamarri Savitha/Dr.Soham Chakraborti