ERC 2026

The conference seeks to explore how women’s engagements with questions of empowerment, agency, and resistance have evolved over time. Each articulation of these concepts is shaped by its specific historical, social, political, and cultural context, reflecting both continuity and change.

Therefore, the conference encourages participants to examine these concerns through one or both of two analytical frameworks: the “event,” which focuses on specific historical moments or incidents, and the “episodic,” which attends to ongoing, everyday practices—what James Scott describes as “everyday forms of resistance.” Together, these frameworks allow for nuanced readings of both visible and subtle modes of resistance.

Representations of empowerment and resistance recur across a wide range of literary and cultural forms produced by women, including fiction, poetry, life writing, cookbooks, blogs, YouTube videos, digital media, and other creative and cultural practices. These representations often serve as sites for negotiating gender in relation to caste, class, sexuality, region, religion, and nationality.

The conference is particularly interested in how women’s choices of aesthetic forms and media shape their articulations of agency, as well as how traditional narratives—such as mythological stories, fairy tales, and inherited cultural —are reworked for contemporary artistic and political purposes. In addition, the conference welcomes critical engagements with ongoing debates surrounding the category of the “woman” itself, and how contemporary literary and cultural practices challenge, complicate, or redefine this category.

By fostering interdisciplinary conversations, the conference aims to contribute meaningfully to current scholarship on gender, culture, and resistance in the Indian context.

Submissions may address a wide range of related concerns aligned with the authors’ research interests, including—but not limited to—critical examinations of 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.

You can click here to submit your proposal.

The abstract can be submitted under any one of the following tracks:

• Regional feminist literatures and local story-telling practices
• Role of technological mediation in shaping forms and contents of expression
• Performance, embodied resistance and cultural practices
• Labour, economy and feminist political praxis
• Intersectional feminist futures and environmental justice
• Memories, archives and collective histories
• Solidarity, networks and community building
• Genre, form and aesthetic innovation
• Theories and praxis of weak resistance

Important Dates

• Abstract Submission Deadline: January 31, 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: Feb 9, 2026
• Conference Dates: March 5-7, 2026

Schedule for the Conference on Empowerment and Resistance in Contemporary Indian Women’s Literary and Cultural Discourses

 5^th March 2026 – Colloquium on Contemporary Indian Women’s Literary and Cultural Discourses

6^th March – Conference Day 1

7^th March, 2026 Conference Day 2

Registration fee (in-person paper presentations)

• Students & Research Scholars: INR 1500
• Academics & Industry Professionals: INR 3000

The registration fee includes:

• A conference kit
• Access to the workshop, keynote sessions, and paper presentations.
• Lunch and tea on all workshop and conference days

Note:

• In case of co-authored papers, all the listed authors have to register separately for the conference.
• Limited paid accommodation is available for outstation participants. The details regarding this will be updated soon.

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• Selected papers will be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed edited volume with a reputed publisher.
• Selection based on full papers submitted within stipulated deadline.
• Publication subject to peer review and editorial approval.
• All the selected abstracts will be published in the book of abstracts.