Dear CWWA members
I am delighted to confirm that our 2017 AGM will take place at 3.30pm on Friday 7 July at theShared Futures conference in Newcastle, UK (venue TBC).
Our annual AGM is a valuable opportunity for CWWA members to meet together to share aspirations and ambitions and plan for the future. I know that many of our UK-based members are attending Shared Futures, whether as presenters or delegates, and I do hope that you will join us for the AGM. If you are unable to attend in person and would like to contribute in advance (by email) we will be very happy to hear from you.
The agenda and minutes will be circulated nearer to the date.
In the meantime, please find below details of workshops and panels sponsored by the CWWA and convened by some of our members. If any of you are convening or contributing to other panels please do get in touch and we will circulate details to all members.
I look forward to seeing you in July if not before!
Best wishes
Rachel
Reader in English, Teesside University
Chair of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association
School of Design, Culture and the Arts
Teesside University
Middlesbrough
UK
TS1 3BA
01642 384029
The CWWA will be hosting a number of panels at the Shared Futures conference in Newcastle upon Tyne in July:
Generations of Feminism: Contemporary Women’s Writing Professional Development Workshops
Building on the successful AHRC-funded Contemporary Women’s Writing Skills Development Workshops which took place in 2013-14, these three workshops willencourage postgraduate research students and early-career researchers who work in the field of contemporary women’s writing to develop an entrepreneurial approach to their research and its dissemination.
Creative Work and Critical Practice: A Roundtable.
How might we shape critical-creative – or creative-critical – practice? What exactly is it? How might we use creative practice to expand our critical horizons, and vice versa? What are the opportunities and the pitfalls? This roundtable aims to explore these questions, thereby treating creative work and critical practice as conjoined disciplines which, indeed, have a shared future in Higher Education.
In addition to the Workshops and Roundtable there will be two CWWA themed panels:
Contemporary Women’s Writing: Apocalyptic Narratives
The contemporary moment, it seems, lends itself to apocalyptic narratives. Environmental damage and extreme weather events; the shifting of the political mainstream to the far reaches of left and right; the financial crash and the exposed vulnerabilities of a globalised economy; the migrant crisis and mass displacement of populations: real world events repeatedly contribute to a pervasive sense of anxiety and crisis that is productively explored in contemporary women’s writing. From the commodification of the biosciences in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, to the falling birth rate and falling temperatures of Maggie Gee’s The Ice People, contemporary women writers engaged in speculative fictions repeatedly utilise images of crisis and threat to explore political and cultural anxieties.
This panel brings together scholars interested in representations of apocalypse and apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary women’s writing.
Contemporary Women’s Writing: Archiving for the Future
How is contemporary women’s writing being remembered now and how will it be remembered in the future? This panel will address current work on archival materials regarding contemporary women writers, addressing issues such as access to and availability of materials, copyright negotiations and archival absences. What are the gender politics of archival work in contemporary literary studies, what is the role of the archive in canon formation and how does the technology of archives in an online environment shape our understanding of the past?
Contemporary Women's Writing Association 