This event is free and open to the public. There is no charge for registration; however, we encourage both conference participants and attendees to fill out the following registration forms and to send completed forms to wstudent@albany.edu by Tuesday, November 20, 2007.

CONFERENCE PARTICIPANT: Download and complete Registration Form (Rich format).

CONFERENCE ATTENDEE: Download and complete Registration Form (Rich format).

The conference will be held both days in Campus Center's Assembly Hall, located on the Uptown Campus of the University at Albany (See Map). The campus is accessible by using Interstates 87 (New York Thruway) and 90. Albany also has an international airport and Amtrak and Greyhound stations. Please see the University at Albany's Visitors page.

We recommend that conference participants and attendees stay in lodgings close to campus. The Best Western Sovereign Hotel, located across from the uptown campus on Western Avenue, offers reasonable rates, and several hotels on the other side of campus, on Washington Avenue, are also available. Please visit the University at Albany's Accommodations page, which includes contact information for each nearby hotel. For those who are interested in requesting a roomate, please contact our email address at wstudent@albany.edu.

Every fall semester, graduate students in the Women's Studies department at the University at Albany organize an annual conference - often through the Feminist Theory graduate seminar or occasionally through another course. What began in Fall 2002 as a class conference, in which students presented their seminar papers in a public format, has grown into open calls for participation from both graduate and undergraduate students in different departments, colleges, and universities. The annual conference in the past has featured both local and statewide students, with last year's conference, Looking Back, Moving Forward: Celebrating 35 Years of Women's Studies, as our biggest and most successful event.

This year's conference, Media Justice and Feminist Futures, promises to be even bigger and more successful, with conference participants coming from different regions of the country - including Texas and Missouri - and even beyond, with two participants who hail from Canada, thus making our annual conference an international student conference for the first time. We are also privileged to feature a special panel comprised of local media artists, activists, and scholars - one who is from a different region of the globe but who is a visiting scholar this fall semester at the University at Albany.

If last year's conference focused on our past and the historical progress Women's Studies has made, this year we look toward the future and how our present-day preoccupation with media and digital technologies have forced feminist scholars and activists to embrace, resist, and negotiate diverse media in the realm of feminism and social justice. Part of the global reach of this year's event is due in part to the dissemination of our call-for-submissions on the web, as participants answered the call on websites as diverse as blogs, MySpace, Facebook, and others. We welcome the opportunity presented for students, faculty, locals, nationals, and transnationals to interact, network, share ideas, and build an intellectual community that addresses deep social problems and strategies relating to the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, dis/ability, and (trans)nationality. As the different sessions suggest, media and technology allow scholars and activists to dismantle problematic representations as well as to shape those representations through self-empowering media production tools.

This event has been organized this fall semester by graduate students enrolled in the seminar, Feminist Theory, which examines key changes in contemporary feminist theory, including the political implications of multifaceted oppressions and power relations impacting women's lives. The conference is the final project of students who are expected to bridge theory and practice in their collaborative efforts to invite works that theorize feminisms through different subjects and to heighten themes and community-building as they engage public scholarship. They have worked tremendously through different committees in the organizing of this event:

• Publicity Committee: Reese Kelly, Mara Linnenkamp, Yvonne Jourdin, Carissa Sojka, and Kate Shannon.
• Program Committee: Elizabeth Doggett, Susan Goodier, Jiel Latimer, and Anne Lin.
• Scheduling Committee: Patricia Lenihan, Christine Nealon, Jamielynn Varriale, and Rhianna Weber.

We also wish to thank Debbie Neuls, Administrative Assistant in Women's Studies at the University at Albany, for her assistance with the conference.