Spring 2026 Colloquium: Duke Feminist Theory Workshop (FTW) Report Back
Join us as GWSS PhD students share key ideas and conversations from this year’s Duke Feminist Theory Workshop.
Royalti Richardson & Shelley Pryde will reflect on major themes and debates that emerged during the workshop and consider how they shape current conversations in feminist theory.
The Duke Feminist Theory Workshop brings together scholars and emerging researchers to engage some of the most pressing questions in feminist thought today. This colloquium offers a chance to hear reflections from the workshop and continue those conversations within our GWSS community.
The colloquium presentation will be followed by the Spring Quarter Graduate Meeting.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL B110 G. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, April 1, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM.
Explore the College of Arts & Sciences: UW's Admitted Student Day
10:30 AM and 12:00 PM | Arrive Early and Start Strong with College Edge - College of Arts & Sciences Information Session
10:30 - 12:30 PM | Open House: Natural Sciences Majors in Action
11:30 - 1:30 PM | Open House: Understanding and Changing the World through the Social Sciences
12:30 - 2:00 PM | Open House: Your Creative Future at the UW, Meet the Arts Programs
12:30 - 2:00 PM | Open House | Meet the Humanities: Languages, Study Abroad, Creative Writing & More
Learn more about UW Admitted Student Day.
Please note: ASD is now at capacity. What next? Sign up for the ASD waitlist , Join us for an online information session , Attend other campus events in April.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: asinfo@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions. Special Events.
Saturday, April 4, 2026, 10:30 AM – 2:00 PM.
For more info visit artsci.washington.edu. Admitted Student Day - Open House: Understanding and Changing the World through the Social Sciences
Step inside one of the iconic buildings on the Liberal Arts Quadrangle to see where you will take classes and meet the faculty and staff in the Social Sciences Division who will support you as you build your academic path in the College of Arts & Sciences. At UW, Social Sciences students think hard about things that matter and work alongside faculty and peers to take on real-world challenges, to push for positive change, and to shape what comes next through collaboration, research, and hands-on learning.
During the open house, talk with department representatives, including current students, and drop into short, informal sessions to hear about what it’s like to be part of the UW Social Sciences community. Get a taste for the many educational trajectories possible in the division, from cool courses to study abroad to research projects. Learn how students turn their majors into opportunities and professions—from internships and community based research to careers in government, public service, law, business, m…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Accessibility Contact: gwssadvs@uw.edu. Event Types: Information Sessions.
Saturday, April 4, 2026, 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM.
Vulveeta: Film Screening and Q&A with Filmmaker Maria Breaux
Grrrilda Beausoleil is turning 50.
All she wants is a reunion with her 1990s riot grrrl band—the one she abandoned just as they were about to make it big.
With a scrappy film crew documenting the journey, she navigates old wounds, new-age platitudes, and a San Francisco transformed by tech and displacement.
The band must decide whether they can trust Grrrilda again—and whether their DIY roots of wheat paste, stickers, and zines can still build community in a digital age.
Dubbed “SPINAL TAP with BIPOC and queers” by the Chicago Reader, the film is a hilarious improvised mockumentary that treats comedy as activism.
At its heart, the production centers LGBTQ community building across generations—reconciling past and present, passing the mic, and finding solidarity through creativity.
Read Maria Breaux’s Femme Fatales profile.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Allen Library (ALB). Campus room: Allen Auditorium. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Screenings.
Wednesday, April 8, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM.
Media, Power, and Democracy in South Asia
What does democracy look like from below? This talk will look at how ordinary lives are reshaped by surveillance, majoritarianism, and corporate-political nexus in South Asia. Exploring media influence, gendered surveillance, majoritarian and casteist politics, the struggles of urban poor workers and the slow erosion of democratic rights in contemporary South Asia through Neha Dixit’s The Many Lives of Syeda X, this talk explores how journalism can recover erased histories, expose routine violence, and hold power to account.
About the speaker
Neha Dixit is an independent journalist and author based in New Delhi. For over two decades, she has reported on politics, gender, labour, and social justice in South Asia, producing investigative, narrative, and long-form journalism for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Caravan, The Wire, and others.
Her work has exposed extrajudicial killings, hate crimes, human trafficking, unethical clinical trials, and sectarian majoritarian violence. She has…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: HUB 214. Accessibility Contact: sascuw@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Friday, April 10, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Spring Colloquium: "Fronteras Embrujades: Tracing Tejana Feminist Tensions and Speculative Statelessness on the Texas-Mexico Border," presented by Yasmine Gomez
Presenter: Yasmine Gomez, GWSS PhD Student
Moderator: Royalti Richardson, GWSS PhD Student
Framed by her upcoming candidacy exams, this presentation introduces Yasmine’s doctoral research on borderland feminisms. Fronteras Embrujadas interrogates the contested boundaries of Tejana activism, cultural production, and collective memory to examine the current political moment in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
This research examines how borderland identities are negotiated through ongoing methods of state-sanctioned violence/surveillance through technocolonialism and spaces of detainment, while looking to Tejana Speculative archives to reconceptualize the radical position of place in activism.
Further, this work considers the role of global borderlands in developing contemporary transnational feminist archives of solidarity that center anti-extractivism as core principles of feminist activism movement.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL B110 G. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Wednesday, April 15, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
The (Printed) Matter of Black Arts Writing: Archives for the Future
Join The Black Embodiments Studio for The (Printed) Matter of Black Arts Writing: Archives for the Future, a panel discussion on the practice of collecting, preserving, and circulating Black arts writing ephemera. Featuring archivists and publishers of printed matter like flyers, zines, pamphlets, notebooks, and books, the program explores the significance of gathering around materials that are fragile and prone to disappearance—and reflects on what contemporary practices of preserving and circulating Black arts writing ephemera can tell us about the futures of the art world in general.
This is the second of two programs for Public Scholarship + Practice: Black Futures + Archives, a new series highlighting University of Washington-led research and practice at the intersections of visual art and culture.
The (Printed) Matter of Black Arts Writing: Archives for the Future is organized in collaboration with The Black Embodiments Studio.
Join us on Thursday, March 12th for the first program in the series, …
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Henry Art Gallery (HAG). Campus room: Auditorium. Accessibility Contact: info@henryart.org. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, April 16, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
For more info visit henryart.org. Research and Relationality in the Peruvian Amazon
Free and open to all. At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity.
THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT.
ZOOM REGISTRATION HERE: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/jQSegZVzQFu9Sq-3hhRivg
IN-PERSON LOCATION: HUB 145
This panel features talks on conducting research in the Peruvian Amazon by Justin Perez (UCSC) and Amanda Smith (UCSC). Perez will present “Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru.” Amidst growing enthusiasm over the 2010s around the possibility of ending AIDS as a threat to global public by 2030, communities of gay men and transgender women in Peru’s Amazonian region paradoxically experienced an intensifying epidemic at the same time. Queer Emergent is an ethnography that explores how they experienced this contradiction. In Peru, efforts to “end AIDS” brought demands that communities denounce homo- and trans-phobic discrimination, embrace egalitarian sexual practices, and re-orient social…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/jQSegZVzQFu9Sq-3hhRivg. Campus room: HUB 145. Accessibility Contact: lasuw@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Tuesday, April 28, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
"Dangerous Subjects" Colloquium | Research and Relationality in the Peruvian Amazon
Free and open to all. At the Jackson School, opportunities and events are open to all eligible persons regardless of race, sex or other identity.
ALL PARTICIPANTS: Please RSVP to Vanessa Freije (vfreije@uw.edu)
THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT.
ZOOM REGISTRATION HERE: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/5aKlmvf7R0KGbr5naPCOjg
IN-PERSON LOCATION: THO 317
Justin Pérez (UCSC) and Amanda Smith (UCSC) will present their works in progress as part of LACS’s “Dangerous Subjects” colloquium series. This workshop-style event is designed to provide constructive feedback, and the papers will be circulated to participants one week prior. Please RSVP to Vanessa Freije (vfreije@uw.edu).
Justin Perez will present, “Excess and the Ontological Politics of Trans and Queer Worlds in Amazonian Peru,” which experiments with an affinity between two theories of excess. On the one hand, an ontological anthropology that takes seriously the social extension and political agency of beings that exceed the human, and, on the other,…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Online Meeting Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/5aKlmvf7R0KGbr5naPCOjg. Campus room: THO 317. Accessibility Contact: lasuw@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops.
Wednesday, April 29, 2026, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM.
From Malthus to Musk: Searching for Population Equilibrium in East Asia
Please join the East Asia Center for a special public panel featuring:
Yong Cai
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Feng Wang
Professor, Sociology, School of Social Sciences
University of California, Irvine
Sara Curran
Professor, International Studies & Sociology
Director, Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology
University of Washington
James Lin
Associate Professor, International Studies & History
Chair, Taiwan Studies Program
University of Washington
From Malthus’s warnings of overpopulation to Musk’s urge to boost fertility, the drastic turn of humanity’s relationship with population growth is one of the defining features of East Asian societies. Nowhere have demographic shifts been more seismic in their speed, scale, and scope than in East Asia over the past century. Populations in this region now simultaneously exhibit the world's longest life expectancies and its lowest fertility rates.
How did East Asian societies arrive at this point?…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus room: HUB 337. Accessibility Contact: eacenter@uw.edu. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Thursday, April 30, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
HUB 337.
CAMP LECTURE | “Against the North as well as the South, Abraham Lincoln as well as Jefferson Davis”: The Civil Wars of Lucy Broaddus, Frederick Douglass, and Franz Sigel | Angela Zimmerman, George Washington University
“If we fight, we must fight against the North as well as the South, Abraham Lincoln as well as Jefferson Davis,” Frederick Douglass declared in May 1861, just a few weeks after the Civil War began. His statement suggests a very different Civil War than the we usually hear about, centered on Abraham Lincoln: a war for the Union giving way to a tentative emancipation within the bounds of the law, the constitution, and private property. Occluded in such conventional narratives are struggles over white supremacy, the extent of Black freedom, capitalism, and patriotic nationalism. We get an entirely different war – not just a different interpretation of that war -- if we center radical perspectives that aimed for freedoms anathema to Union and Confederacy alike. In this talk I will look at the Civil War as it was understood by Lucy Broaddus, a woman born into slavery in Missouri in 1862, Frederick Douglass, and Franz Sigel, a communist German refugee who served as a general in the Union Army. Each presents a…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: histmain@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, May 6, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
Memorial Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Spring. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, May 25, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. GWSS Graduation Celebration
The University of Washington Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies invites you to join us to celebrate our graduates of the 2025-2026 school year! We will honor the accomplishments of our wonderful graduates with presentations by students and faculty.
The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: 206.543.6450/V, 206.543.6452/TTY, 206.685.7264 (FAX), or e-mail at dso@u.washington.edu.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: Lyceum. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Ceremonies. Special Events. Student Activities.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM.
Juneteenth
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, June 19, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu.