CRES & WGST Conference 2026: Call for Proposals

Abstract Deadline: Friday, October 17, 2025

“There’s no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
- Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

In her 1993 novel, Octavia Butler speculated what a post-apocalyptic landscape near Los Angeles could look like, starting in 2024. Her vision of a Black teenage girl with the condition of “hyper-empathy,” a gated community surrounded by urban decay and despair, the consequences of climate change and the impact of political corruption and wealth disparity looms eerily reminiscent to the concerns that Butler may have seen more into the future than first realized. It is within such speculation, beyond such speculation, but also in the greater expanse of the imagination, where this query opens space to explore ways to resist, rupture, refuse and reimagine what just futures could entail. Futures are plural for the multiple possibilities of change, echoing the hope and the wonder of Parable of the Sower’s transcendent system of belief called Earthseed. We look towards many possible futures to envision justice for society now and for the ones to come. Thus, questions before us as scholars, students, activists, advocates, community members and neighbors are: What are the ways we can imagine towards just futures in our current time? What is the political work of futurity? What are the ways we can build generative solidarity and community cohesion for the future? How can we build towards a just future world? We intend to engage these questions and many more at the 2026 biennial CRES & WGST Justice Conference, themed: Towards Just Futures.

Hosted at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, on the ancestral lands of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, we bear the responsibility and the charge to amplify Indigenous knowledge-making and knowledge keeping as part of the ongoing legacy of Indigenous futurity that current land occupiers benefit from. White-washed histories that lend to white-polished futures must be problematized and interrogated. The recentering of whiteness at the expense of Indigenous dispossession is emblematic of broader conversations on reparative justice we desire to have. Taking inspiration from the critical work taking place in Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurities, feminist worldmaking, queer worldbuilding and abolition studies, we work from the lenses of race and ethnic studies and women and gender studies to imagine and forecast futures of justice, care and repair.

We are seeking work that explores the multiple possibilities of intersecting justice and futurities from various interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary contexts (including historical, literary, cultural, pedagogical, visual, artistic, interpretive, socio-political, geo-political and more). We especially seek papers that apply a decolonial, anti-racist lens to their work.

We welcome proposals that explore topics about the futures of the work of justice from an interdisciplinary standpoint:

• Migration and Borders
• Memory and Storytelling
• Regenerative Economies
• Restorative Justice
• Reparations
• Rematriation
• Body Politics/Embodiment
• Digital Justice/AI & Ethics in AI
• Cultural Preservation/ Archival Justice
• Environmental and Climate Justice
• Disability Justice
• Carcerality/Abolition  
• Indigenous Studies/Futurities
• Afrofuturism
• LGBTQ+ Justice
• Reproductive Justice
• Transnational Justice
• Linguistic Justice
• Historical Movements
• Creative explorations of justice in film, literature and art
• Education and Pedagogies of Justice
• Radical Imagination and Worldmaking
• Feminist/Womanist Futurities
• Gender/less/full futures

Submission Guidelines:

Please complete the 2026 TCU Justice Conference Application Form by Friday, Oct. 17.

There are two avenues for presenters to submit their abstracts:

1. Individual Papers
2. Panel Proposals

Required information that each author must provide depending on the selected presentation avenue as part of their submission: