International Women's Day Online Conference 2025

We invite you to attend the 8th annual International Women’s Day Online Conference hosted by the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute at the University of Guelph on Friday, March 7th from 10:30 am to 4:30 pm! This year, we will have researchers, students, practitioners, artists, and community members from all backgrounds sharing ideas, presentations and creative offerings about the ways they facilitate and/or grapple with rooting and reckoning in their work.

At large the conference’s objective is to connect undergraduate students, graduate students and community members who engage in challenging women-oriented research and work to collectively support and form community with each other. Across departments, disciplines and organizations, many folks work on similar issues from myriad perspectives. This conference is an annual meeting point to reconnect, take pause, share findings, and strengthen bonds with one another. Please join us!

Theme and Description

Our theme this year is Rooting and Reckoning: Supporting the Supporters, centering the experiences of those who deliver critical work to support underserved communities* in the research space and beyond, while honouring the complexities that come along with navigating such lines of inquiry. Rooting involves exchanging and amplifying interconnected practices, strategies, resources, and collective embodiments which nurture, feed, guide, and ground us in dreaming, co-creating, and sustaining equitable worlds. This is also how we root for each other. Reckoning reminds us of the cyclical nature of this work, of its relentless call for more to be done in the field of gender equality and its many intersections, while living as embedded beings in webs of dynamic oppressions which impact all of us.

This year’s official IWD 2025 global theme is Accelerate Action, which is a call to acknowledge and elevate the strategies that positively impact women’s** advancement. Though we do not resonate with the analogy of acceleration, it has been generative to consider some ways we may need to slow down. Rooting and reckoning both take time, as does supporting the supporters, which involves taking a moment in solidarity to highlight the important work individuals and groups locally and globally are doing to accompany women around the world. This conference aims to support the supporters through dually amplifying / platforming meaningful work and cultivating a sense of community amongst those supporting underserved communities. We invite researchers, students, practitioners, and community members from all backgrounds to participate and exchange ideas about the ways they facilitate and / or grapple with rooting and reckoning in their work. Alongside traditional research, this theme aims to explore unconventional and non-normative ways of doing and engaging with research and changemaking that forges a more equitable, and livable, present.

This student-led International Women’s Day conference brings together students and community members invested in amplifying and celebrating research and activities done for, by, and with women around the world. This year’s theme, Rooting and Reckoning: Supporting the Supporters, aims to host speakers and community panelists who uphold others in their work, or who investigate strategies to support women subjected to structural and systemic oppressions. We have intentionally oriented this conference to include active community members and artist-researchers who bring nontraditional elements into their work as we recognize that mobilizing meaningful support to gender oppressed folk often requires engaged practices alongside academic research. We will also offer grounding activities and artistic performances throughout the conference as a reminder to take space in community, and to hold each other through challenging and taxing learnings and experiences.

*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.

How to Access the Conference

Attendees are welcome to come and go throughout the day as it suits their schedule.

The Zoom link to attend will be sent to all registrants via email in advance of the event.

More Information

We will share updates leading up to the conference via email.

This conference is hosted by the University of Guelph's Community Engaged Scholarship Institute in partnership with the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences and the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) Guelph.