Spring 2026 Events

This panel showcases a discussion between editors and authors who are published in the fall 2025 QSE special issue (SI), “Beyond Now: Feminist Politics, Policy, and Research Futures in Education.” This SI featured ten critical qualitative methodological articles that questioned and responded to traditionalist research assumptions, practice metanarratives, and taken-for-granted classed, gendered, and racialized scripts. Curated across disciplinary, generational, and professional backgrounds, panelists will engage in a dialogue about the necessity of feminist political, policy, and research futures beyond now—a horizon of possibility that resists the constraints of the present and insists on future-making grounded in abolitionist, decolonial, and feminist commitments. Mindful of our current regressive political moment, this dialogue is fueled by the kind of renewal, repair, and remedy that feminist and other critical praxes offer educative spaces and the commons.

Planners & Facilitators (not by alpha):
-Melinda Lemke, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Educational Policy, UB, SUNY. Interested in learning more about the QSE Special Issue, please contact: malemke@buffalo.edu
-Katherine Leigh-Osroosh, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Counseling, School, & Educational Psychology, UB, SUNY

Panelists (by alpha):
-Sherri Castillo, Ph.D., Learning Lab Manager & Adjunct Professor, Student Development, Austin Community College
-Sabrina J. Curtis, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Youth & Social Innovation, University of Virginia
-Susan C. Faircloth, Ph.D., Owner/Principal Consultant, Two Feathers Consulting, LLC
-Sylvia Mendoza, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Mexican American Studies, University of Texas, San Antonio
-Jaylene Patterson, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Associate, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology School Psychology, Rutgers University 
-Katherine C. Rodela, Ph.D., George Brain & Gay V. Selby Professor of Educational Leadership, Chair & Associate Professor, Educational Leadership & Sport Management, Washington State University

The Gender Institute invites early-career faculty, PhD students, and post-doctoral scholars to a mentoring event focused on supporting junior faculty of color in navigating and succeeding in the academy. While open to all faculty, this event centers the experiences of scholars of color. Participants will gain insights from senior faculty on mentoring and sponsorship, building scholarly identity, navigating institutional cultures, achieving tenure and promotion, balancing service and research expectations, and sustaining well-being in academic spaces that are not always designed with faculty of color in mind. Through a combination of brief reflections from experienced faculty and interactive discussion, participants will have opportunities to ask questions, share challenges, and gain practical strategies for thriving in academia. Attendees of all backgrounds are encouraged to participate, as the lessons shared are broadly relevant and contribute to building more equitable, inclusive, and supportive academic environments for everyone.

Robin Mitchell is the College of Arts and Sciences Endowed Professor and an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo. She is also Affiliate Faculty with the Department of Africana & American Studies, and the Department of Global Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is a 19th century French historian, specializing in discourses about race, gender, and sexuality. Mitchell’s first book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020), was named by the African American Intellectual HistorySociety to its “The Best Black History Books of 2020,” and by The Guardian as one of “The Best Books About Sex” in 2021. She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, and the Series Editor of Noir(e): Race and Belonging in the Afro-French World with Louisiana State University Press. Her forthcoming book will be the first biography of Suzanne Simon Baptiste, also known as Madame Toussaint Louverture, a heretofore neglected yet influential figure in the history of Blackness in France. It is currently under contract with Princeton University Press. 

Nadine Shaanta Murshid is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, University at Buffalo. Her research primarily centers on violence, with a focus on reframing reductive narratives surrounding women who experience violence. Rather than positioning them solely as victims in need of rescue, her work highlights their multifaceted lives, emphasizing the profound impact of violence, while recognizing their agency. Additionally, she challenges the notion that intimate partner violence is an isolated, individual issue, critically examining the systems of oppression that perpetuate and sustain such violence.

Noelle M. St. Vil is an Associate Professor in the University at Buffalo (UB), School of Social Work and the Deputy Director of the UB Gender Institute. Dr. St. Vil’s community-based research focuses on supporting positive Black intimate relationships, with the aim of strengthening Black families and communities. Her research challenges scholarship that ignores systemic oppression, pathologizes, victim-blames, and stereotypes Black intimate relationships. Dr. St. Vil’s work highlights the disproportionate risks and dangers faced in Black intimate relationships but looks at these risks and dangers through a lens that is critical of historical and structural racism and affirming of Black resilience. Her scholarship concentrates on two dimensions of Black intimate relationships: 1) Violence Against Women; and 2) sexual behavior, health, and well-being. Her current work focuses on high-risk intimate partner violence (IPV) and culturally specific interventions. Her long-term goal is to create prevention interventions that strengthen Black male-female relationships.

Rinaldo Walcott Is a Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies. He holds the Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies. He is a writer and critic. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, policy and education broadly defined. As an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, Walcott has published in a wide range of venues on everything from literature to film, to theatre to music to policy. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and books, as well as popular venues like newspapers and magazines and media online sources. He often comments on black cultural life for radio and TV. 

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping federal protection for abortion rights and placing control in the hands of individual states. This monumental shift in policy underscores the need for deeper historical perspectives on reproductive rights. The Nursing Clio Reader answers that call, bringing together essays that examine reproductive health through historical research and personal experience. Featuring both new and classic pieces from the Nursing Clio blog, leading historians of reproductive health provide insights that connect past struggles with today’s ongoing battles over bodies, reproductive rights, and health care. This collection offers intimate, urgent scholarship that speaks to the present moment. A powerful resource for classrooms and individual readers alike, The Nursing Clio Reader invites reflection on how the past informs current debates, urging us to engage deeply with the history of reproductive justice in a time of unprecedented change, underscoring that indeed "the personal is historical." 

Jacqueline Antonovich is Associate Professor in History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, where she teaches the history of medicine, gender, and politics in the United States. Her recent publications include, “White Coats, White Hoods: The Medical Politics of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s America,” and she is currently working on a book with Rutgers University Press on the history of women physicians and their political activism in the early twentieth century. Antonovich is also the creator and executive editor emerita of Nursing Clio, an online journal that ties historical scholarship to present-day issues related to gender, health, and medicine. Her research and teaching have been featured in The Washington Post, BBC, Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, and Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness.

Sarah Handley-Cousins is Associate Teaching Professor of History at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North from the University of Georgia Press, 2019, co-author of Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale, New York, from Three Hills Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, October 2024, and co-editor of The Nursing Clio Reader, from Rutgers University Press 2025. She is also Executive Editor of Nursing Clio and Producer of Dig: A History Podcast.

This talk draws on social reproduction theory to conceptualize art work as value-generating labor that is structurally rendered invisible within the field of cultural production. Focusing on recent unionization among freelance art workers in Slovenia and Croatia, it examines how creativity is ideologically framed as individualized “labor of love,” obscuring the labor process, normalizing unpaid work, and reinforcing gendered and class-based inequalities. Grounded in militant participatory research conducted with the artists’ union Zasuk, the talk argues that the sustainability of the cultural sector depends not on advocacy or innovation discourses, but on recognizing and compensating art work as labor. By tracing how unionization makes invisible labor visible, formulates collective demands, and reconfigures worker agency, the presentation offers a feminist intervention into arts management practices and institutional accountability.

Katja Praznik is an Associate Professor in the Arts Management Program and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on artistic labor, feminist political economy, and labor organizing in the field of cultural production, particularly in post-socialist contexts. She is the author of Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (University of Toronto Press) and co-author of Which Side Are You On: Ideas for Reaching Fair Working Conditions in the Arts (IETM 2022). She is currently writing a book titled Why Artists Don’t Want to Get Paid.

Despite existing in a male-dominated, male centered and misogynistic industry, Nigerian female reggae-dancehall practitioners curate a feminist universe to express their subjectivities and challenge the surround patriarchal oppressions. By forcefully inserting themselves into their music industry as disc-jockeys, MCs, dancers, financiers, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists, Konto women reconstitute themselves as creative and economic agents in a musical culture that objectifies them. Moreover, Konto women push back against wage discrimination, sexism, and misogyny in their music industry through violent resistance, diplomacy, and masculinity performances. In this presentation, I use the example of Konto women to observe the overt and covert feminist practices of Nigerian female music-makers as they survive the murky waters of their music industry. 

Mopelolade O. Ogunbowale is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Africana and American Studies, University at Buffalo where she teaches and conducts research in Afro-Atlantic popular music, religions, feminist, and urban studies. Her book project, The Spirit is the Music: Osun’s Aesthetic Manifestations in Reggae-Dancehall Music reads the rhythm and resistance politics of Konto (a reggae-dancehall styled music genre produced in Ajegunle, Lagos) as representative of the creativity, rebelliousness and feminist resistance of Osun (an Afro-Atlantic Goddess synonymous with creation, fluidity, benevolence and malevolence).

When twenty-seven-year-old Laura Mauldin moved to New York for graduate school, she fell headlong into love. But just months into the relationship, her partner’s leukemia returned—and in a country without adequate systems for long-term care, Laura found herself quietly and devastatingly transformed from romantic partner to unpaid, full-time caregiver, fighting to keep the woman she loved alive in a system designed to let them both fall through the cracks. 

Now a sociologist and professor of disability studies, Dr. Mauldin turns her private pain into a searing public investigation. To better understand her own experience, she speaks with couples across the country navigating the brutal, lonely fallout of chronic illness and disability. These are heartbreaking stories of love under strain — relationships full of extraordinary intimacy and resilience, but pushed to the edge by an ableist society that would rather look away from its most vulnerable citizens. At the heart of this investigation is a profound series of questions: What if love isn’t enough? What if our most cherished romantic ideals—commitment, sacrifice, “in sickness and in health” — have been weaponized to excuse the state from its responsibilities? And what happens to love when we ask it to do the work of an entire broken system? 

Urgent, unflinching, and full of grace, In Sickness and In Health is a rallying cry for a radical reimagining of care—not as an individual act of devotion, but as a collective responsibility. In connecting the care crisis to the politics of love and intimacy, Mauldin reframes the conversation, urging us to build a world where no one is left to do the work of love alone.

Laura Mauldin is a writer and an Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut. In 2024, she was named a New America Fellow, and her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Baffler, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. Laura is also a nationally certified sign language interpreter and maintains the website Disability at Home.org, which highlights the ingenuity of disabled people and caregivers while sharing advice on how to make homes accessible. Her new book, In Sickness and In Health: Love Stories from the Frontlines of America's Caregiving Crisis from Ecco/HarperCollins received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which described it as "an unflinching look at private worlds of pain and a forceful denunciation of America’s for-profit healthcare system.

Since the Middle Passage, the intellectual and physical freedom of Black women in the United States and the Caribbean has been constrained. Yet Black women writers, artists, choreographers, and performers have contested pervasive political, cultural, and discursive silencing by drawing on the traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths: the Southern United States and the Caribbean, as well as Africa.

In The Souths in Her—a phrase borrowed from Ntozake Shange—Nicole M. Morris Johnson shows how key Black women artists transformed the enclosing narrative frames imposed on them, developing new forms of creative expression informed by the lived experiences and submerged histories of women across the Africana southern world. She analyzes the intertwined relationship between movement and writing in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Maryse Condé, and Shange, among others. Morris Johnson demonstrates that although the central role of motion reinforced perceptions of primitivity that relegated Black women and the South to a space outside modernity, it was in fact crucial to their formal innovations. For these writers and choreographers, unexpected encounters with unfamiliar traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths catalyzed formal experimentation and movements for liberation. Considering the violence routinely inflicted on Black women alongside their artistic innovations, this book reveals a transmuted South that is rich in techniques for weaving liberatory works. Illuminating Black women’s singular contributions to Black modernity, The Souths in Her offers new frames for understanding their embodied and textual creative expression.

The Souths in Her available for purchase here. Use promo code cup20.

Nicole Morris Johnson is an assistant professor of English at the University at Buffalo. She is author of The Souths in Her: Black Women Writers and Choreographers and the Poetics of Transmutation (Columbia UP 2016) and co-editor of The Cambridge History of Black American Women’s Literature, a work in progress with Cambridge University Press.

Chanon Judson is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo. She served as Co-Artistic Director and ensemble performer with Urban Bush Women. Choreographic credits include “Haint Blu,” “Hair and Other Stories” (UBW), “The Priestess of Twerk” (Nia Witherspoon),“The Hang” (Taylor Mac, Niegel Smith), “Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville” (Talvin Wilks, Baba Israel, Grace Galu) “The Invention of Tragedy” (Meghan Finn). Performance-Collaborator Credits include, Dancing with Glass - The Piano Etudes, Snake Hips in our DNA, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, God’s Trombone, and the Tony award winning musical Fela!

Rinaldo Walcott Is a Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies. He holds the Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies. He is a writer and critic. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality with interests in nations, nationalisms, multiculturalism, policy and education broadly defined. As an interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, Walcott has published in a wide range of venues on everything from literature to film, to theatre to music to policy. His articles have appeared in scholarly journals and books, as well as popular venues like newspapers and magazines and media online sources. He often comments on black cultural life for radio and TV.