15th International Interdisciplinary Conference
Gender, Work and Organization Conference
Call for Stream Proposals
Conference theme:
World in Crisis and Future of Work:
Gender, Work and Organization and Bodies on the Move.
(20) 21 - 23rd July, 2025
Audencia Business School, Nantes, France
Launched in 1994, Gender, Work and Organization was the first journal to provide an arena dedicated to debate and analysis of gender relations, the organisation of gender and the gendering of organisations. The Gender, Work and Organization (GWO) conference provides an international forum for continuing those debates and analysis of historical and contemporary issues affecting gender studies at work, in organising work, and in jobs. The journey of this international conference is one punctuated by moving from the United Kingdom to Bogota, Colombia, to Stellenbosch, South Africa in 2023, to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 2024, before landing on European Atlantic Coast in a city of Nantes, France in 2025.
The 2025 GWO conference’s theme reflects our desire to engage in critical conversations and reflections on the state of the world in crisis (Bilsecker and von Winterfeld, 2017; Einola et al., 2020; Averett, 2020; Ipsen, 2022; Becker and Peticca-Harris, 2024), both in terms of political (Gardiner and Fulfer, 2020; Pullen and Rhodes, 2014) as well as moral perspectives (Hennekam and Shymko, 2020; De Coster and Zanoni, 2018; Fang et al., 2023) and invite an in-depth examination of the multifaceted impact of global crises on labour markets, organizational structures, and employment practices, with a specific focus on gender dynamics (Ahl and Marlow, 2012) and migration (Sang and Calvard, 2019; Johansson and Sliwa, 2014; Omanovic et al., 2022) and race (Kalemba, 2023).
It encourages scholarly reflection on how crises exacerbate gender inequalities in the workplace, influence migration patterns and the experiences of migrant workers (Bolzani et al., 2021; Vershinina et al., 2019; Fotaki, 2021), and reshape the future of work and organizing through technology evolving organizational practices (Beyes et al., 2023; Faraj and Pachidi, 2021; Kishak and Pors, 2023; Lindebaum et al, 2023; Boucher, 2024).
Furthermore, the theme underscores the importance of resilience (Branicki et al., 2022; Bridges et al., 2021; Jogulu and Franken, 2022), adaptive strategies, and inclusive policies in mitigating the adverse effects of crises (Azevedo et al., 2020; Tokbaeva and Achtenhagen, 2021). It also highlights the necessity of intersectional and context-specific approaches revealing indigenous knowledges that help us understand the compounded vulnerabilities (Clavijo, 2020) faced by individuals with multiple marginalized identities (Vershinina et al., 2024) and in understudied areas in the world.
By integrating these dimensions, the conference seeks to advance theoretical and empirical insights into the interplay between global crises, work, gender, and other marginalized identities and mobility, fostering a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary and future landscape of work and organizing. We aim to build meaningful and compelling resistance and activism experiences in Nantes - a place with a dark history of the slave trade and colonial commerce, today known amongst other things for its social movements and activism.
We welcome submissions for stream proposals for this onsite only and hybrid mode.
We hope we can engage in debates of issues critical to decolonisation and indigeneity, along with gender knowledges and practices in organising work. Such knowledges include postcolonial and decolonial feminisms, intersectionality scholarship and critical race theory, feminist disability scholarship, queer theory, and future of resistance and activism, to name a few areas.