Save the Date and Call for Abstracts: International Women's Day 2026 Virtual Conference

The Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI) at the University of Guelph is pleased to announce to the 9th annual free one-day virtual format conference in honour of International Women’s Day 2026, taking place on Friday, March 6th, 2026 from 11:00am - 4:00pm EDT

This year's theme, Reimagining the Future: Our Stories Deserve Justice calls us to center the diverse, often marginalized voices that shape what it means to be a woman in our world today. In a time marked by rapid change, global uncertainty, and growing calls for equity, the theme opens its arms wide enough to honour the full spectrum of work in research and beyond, aimed at supporting the needs of underserved communities*, especially women**. It embraces scholarly and creative contributions across academia, policy, activism, the arts, community work, and everyday resistance, recognizing that our stories are not a single narrative, but a rich, sometimes messy, mosaic of lived experience.

In keeping with the current urgency around equity and human rights, we are called to reimagine systems so that every woman’s story is not only heard but prioritized. Our stories may look profoundly different across race, class, disability, sexuality, nationality, and motherhood status, and that diversity is our collective strength. For International Women’s Day Conference 2026, this theme is a promise: we will create a space where every woman feels seen, where difference is not merely tolerated but celebrated, and where together, we imagine and build a future in which justice is not the exception, but the foundation.

We invite proposals from undergraduate and graduate students across Canada. We are particularly interested in:

• Showcasing the multiplicity of women’s stories across any field of study, especially work that illuminates how diverse lived experiences can inform more just futures and expand our collective imagination.
• Highlighting the contributions of “nontraditional” scholars, artist‑researchers, and community‑engaged practitioners whose work challenges conventional boundaries and brings marginalized narratives into view.
• Mobilizing meaningful, justice‑oriented support for gender‑oppressed people by pairing academic inquiry with practices that uplift, protect, and empower women and woman‑aligned individuals in their communities.
• Amplifying research and creative work that examines strategies for resisting, disrupting, or transforming structural and systemic oppressions, including racism, colonialism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and gender‑based violence.
• Offering creative forms of storytelling that reflect the theme’s call to imagine new futures where every woman’s story is heard, valued, and treated with dignity.

We invite student researchers, practitioners, and artists from all backgrounds to participate and exchange ideas about the ways they facilitate and/or grapple with rooting and reckoning in their work. We welcome both traditional research and unconventional, non-normative, and untraditional ways of doing and engaging with research and changemaking that forge a more equitable and livable present.

Submit your abstract by February 15, 2026.

Join us for a day of connection, inspiration, and support as we celebrate International Women's Day 2026! Stay tuned for the full conference program and registration details - coming soon!

*Underserved communities is a wide-ranging term, referring to groups who have been systemically disenfranchised or denied access to basic resources and rights, including more-than-human communities.

**Women includes anyone who identifies with the gender category of woman. We resist essentialism, welcoming diverse expressions of womanhood.