We are delighted to share with delegates Tracey McIntosh‘s keynote title and abstract:
Transgress, translate, transcend, transform? Criminalised women and creative writing
Prisons are receptacles of confined experience. This ability to simultaneously reveal and conceal the nature of the experience of prison in Māori life-worlds shows the power of a discourse that renders the prison a natural part of the social environment for particular groups. It is important to recognise that the Māori experience of prison is gendered.
We deal 
with difference in every part of our lives, much of it passing unremarked, or accepted as contributing to the colour and vibrancy of everyday life. Yet there are other responses to difference that critically shape the social and cultural parameters of our collective existence. In my work difference has too often meant devastation, disappearance, disintegration and dislocation to vulnerable sectors of society. Amnesia initiated by the dominant group can be seen as a wilful forgetting or a legitimated ignorance of the social processes and the exercising of unequal power relations that has resulted in an embedded marginalisation. Responses to difference can be mapped over time and place and in this paper I draw on the writing of women in prison that articulates raw experience and responses to their environment in the recognition that they are experts of their own condition.
Tracey is an Associate Professor and Head of Sociology at the University of Auckland. She will be delivering her Keynote address at 9am on 23rd November 2015. Check out our tentative timetable here: http://transformingfeminisms.noblogs.org/post/2015/09/25/tentative-timetable/