Friday 7 March 2025, 9.00AM to 18:00 pm
Speaker(s): Dr. Claire Chambers
Sisterhood in Action is the annual conference of the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York – a space for critical and creative exchange of ideas and a time to reinforce solidarity.
Initiated by Dr. Ann Kolaski Naylor under the Directorship of Prof. Stevi Jackson in 2015, SiA is forum for all CWS students (MA and PhD) to showcase their research projects and ideas and encourage each other through presentations, discussions, an exhibition, open mic, and fun social activities.
On SiA’s tenth anniversary, the theme – Feminism for the End-Times – is a response to the global upheaval of the last two years and a challenge for us as feminists. We must ask ourselves: how should we BE feminist in these dark times?
Time | Activity |
---|---|
9:00 am | Registration with Tea/Coffee and Biscuits |
9:30 am | Welcome and Icebreaker |
10:00 am | Keynote with Dr. Claire Chambers (followed by Q & A) |
11:15 am to 12:15 pm | Panel I |
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm | Panel II |
1:30 pm | Lunch |
2:15 pm to 3:15 pm | Panel III |
3:15 pm | Tea/Coffee Break |
3:30 pm to 4:45 pm | Table Talks |
5 pm | Open Mic (with wine) |
Location: BS/104 Meeting Room (Tree House), Berrick Saul Building, Campus West, University of York
Email: cws.sisterhood@gmail.com
Key note speaker: Claire Chambers
Sisterhood Amid Apocollapse: Cap-Lit, Cli-Fi, and Vi-Fi by Diasporic Women Writers
This keynote examines how diasporic millennial women writers Ling Ma, Saleema Nawaz, and Oana Aristide advance feminist and anti-capitalist critiques through speculative pandemic fiction. The paper’s first half analyses Ling Ma’s Severance, a prescient cap-lit (anti-capitalism literature) narrative that critiques racial capitalism through the story of Candace Chen, a Chinese American worker navigating corporate greed during a global pandemic. By exploring the intersections of labour exploitation, global supply chains, and neocolonial practices, Severance contributes to debates on systemic inequities exacerbated by crises. An interlude on Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World highlights corporate opportunism during disasters, drawing eerie parallels to real-world responses to Covid-19.
The lecture’s second half explores Oana Aristide’s Under the Blue, a haunting cli-fi (climate change) and vi-fi (virus fiction) narrative where environmental collapse and a devastating virus reshape the globe. Through vivid depictions of human vulnerability and resilience, Aristide addresses themes of displacement, survival, and ecological reckoning. A second interlude revisits Songs for the End of the World, interrogating climate grief and the ethical dilemmas around women’s reproductive rights in apocalyptic times. By synthesizing cap-lit, cli-fi, and vi-fi, this paper reveals how feminist speculative fiction critiques extractive capitalism and ecological neglect while reimagining solidarities in the face of planetary crises.