The Institute for Research on Women & Gender (IRWG) warmly invites you to join us for the IRWG Spring Research Symposium, taking place April 23–24. This year’s gathering is part of IRWG’s 30th anniversary celebration, guided by the theme Resistance Is Fertile.

Resistance Is Fertile honors the founding moment of IRWG while speaking to the present. The institute was established because faculty members believed that research on women, gender, and sexuality required an institutional commitment to thrive. That belief was itself a form of resistance—to disciplinary silos, to marginalization, and to the idea that such scholarship was peripheral. The theme reminds us that resistance is not merely reactive; when rooted in collaboration and sustained through infrastructure, it produces knowledge that reshapes disciplines, institutions, and public life.

The symposium will open on the evening of April 23 with a keynote address by Dr. Brittney Cooper, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University and founding director of the Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab. Dr. Cooper is the award-winning author of Eloquent Rage and Beyond Respectability and a widely recognized public intellectual whose work bridges Black feminist thought, cultural criticism, and public scholarship.