Communities of Care Symposium 2025
Celebrate. Create Solidarity. Share Knowledge. Join us on April 24 and 25 for the Communities of Care Symposium 2025. The event will bring together community members, students, faculty, and others to share their work on care and caring communities. Keynote speakers are Dr. Julie Avril Minich (Stanford University), and Dr. Jina Kim (Smith College).
We invite people who are interested in discussing care, disability, and communities from all backgrounds, including but not limited to, scholarship, activism, art. While we are grounded in critical disability studies, we are interested in the broader range of approaches to care and disability.
The Communities of Care symposium features presentations by community members, artists, activists, and scholars. The symposium brings together people who are interested in discussing care, disability, and communities from all backgrounds, including but not limited to, scholarship, activism, art. While the Communities of Care project is grounded in critical disability studies, we are interested in the broader range of approaches to care and disability.
The symposium has three themes: Celebrate; Create Solidarity; Share Knowledge.
- Celebrate: Share our successes in caring for one another, building networks of care and resilience, and creating joy in sharing time with one another.
- Create Solidarity: How can we support one another in our movements and goals? How can disparate work on care structures that impact particular people be supported by people doing work in other spaces?
- Share Knowledge: What do we know about care? Where does this knowledge come from? What do we still need to learn? What are opportunities for co-creating and sharing knowledge that take into account the diversity of standpoints and experiences of care?
Days, Times, Location
April 24 & 25, 2024
Thursday & Friday
9:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Hyatt Regency Buffalo
2 Fountain Plaza, Buffalo, NY
Contact
General Inquiry Email:
communitiesofcare@buffalo.edu
On this page
Event Registration
The event is free to attend, but advance registration is required. Register for the symposium by April 1 2025, using the form, here.
Hotel Reservations
For symposium attendees, the Hyatt Regency Buffalo has reserved rooms at a discounted block rate. Our room block rates are available 3 days pre- and post-conference. Reserve your hotel room using the Hyatt Regency Buffalo booking form, here.
Sponsors
- Mellon Foundation
- UB Global Gender Studies
- UB Center for Disability Studies
- UB School of Public Health and Health Professions
Keynote Speakers
Julie A. Minich (Stanford University)
Julie A. Minich, PhD
Julie A. Minich holds a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from Stanford University and a BA in Comparative Literature from Smith College. She is the author of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (Temple University Press, 2014), winner of the 2013-2014 MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latina and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Drawing from Chicana/o studies and disability studies, this book works against the common assumption that disability serves primarily as a metaphor for social decay or political crisis, engaging with literary and filmic texts from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in which disability functions to extend knowledge of what it means to belong to a political community. Additionally, Dr. Minich’s articles have appeared in journals such as GLQ, Comparative Literature, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Continue reading.
Jina B. Kim (Smith College)
Jina B. Kim, PhD
Jina B. Kim is a scholar, writer, and educator of feminist disability studies, queer-of-color critique, and contemporary multi-ethnic U.S. literature. Broadly, her teaching and research aims to connect the intellectual and movement lineages of disability politics and feminist-/queer-of-color critique, extending the work of building solidarity across difference. Dr. Minich is currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled Enforceable Care: Health, Justice, and Latina/o Expressive Culture. Minich explores how Latina/o cultural production depicts public conflict around legislation governing health care and disability accommodations. While mainstream discourses about the distribution of health care often implicitly construct some as deserving of health (and others as undeserving), the texts examined in this study critique health ideologies that present health crises as failures of individual responsibility and create a political environment in which it is seen as a duty of citizenship to maintain oneself in a state of maximum able-bodiedness. The study uncovers the social context in which individuals make health decisions to show how health and disease are determined by factors that cannot entirely be reduced to questions of individual choice. Continue reading.
Key Dates and Deadlines
November 27, 2024: Deadline to submit proposals.
December 20, 2024: Notification of the status of your proposal
January 31, 2025: Deadline to submit access requests.
April 1 2025: Deadline for attendee advance registration (required).
April 24 and 25, 2025: CoC Symposium (Thursday/Friday)
Accessibility Statement
The Communities of Care 2025 Symposium is an inclusive and welcoming event. If you have questions about accessibility or would like to request an accommodation, please include your requirements with your registration form or email: communitiesofcare@buffalo.edu.
The Genesee Building - Hyatt Regency Hotel is a 15-story tall hotel red brick building in Buffalo, New York that was built as the Hyatt Regency Hotel in 1922 by architects E.B. Green and William S. Wicks. Photo courtesy of Hyatt Regency Buffalo.
Hotel Reservations
For symposium attendees, the Hyatt Regency Buffalo has reserved rooms at a discounted block rate. Our room block rates are available 3 days pre- and post-conference. Reserve your hotel room using the Hyatt Regency Buffalo booking form, here.