On International Women’s Day 2026 Umran Academic Research Association and Umran Mahila Manch under the aegis of Umran Green Perspective Foundation, invites scholars, activists, and practitioners to submit papers for an online international symposium themed “Being Women” —an exploration not of what women do, but of who women are, have been, and are becoming. This theme resists reductionist narratives that define women solely through struggle or utility. Instead, it asks: How do women weave identity, resistance, care, art, and community out of the threads handed to them? Against the backdrop of a post-pandemic world marked by rising inequality, digital exclusion, and backlash against bodily autonomy, this gathering seeks to interrogate the gap between formal equality and lived reality. We invite contributions that examine gender through the lenses of work, law, health, technology, literature, and intersectionality, prioritizing voices from the margins and early-career researchers.

As Savitribai Phule understood when she opened India’s first school for girls in 1848, and as Fatima Sheikh—her peer and collaborator from the Dalit community—embodied through her teaching there, to name a woman is to resist her erasure. Seventeen years earlier and an ocean away, Maria W. Stewart stood before an audience in Boston and called out: “O ye daughters of Africa, awake! Awake! Arise!”, insisting that Black women’s intellectual awakening was itself a political act, that thought was liberation. Virginia Woolf wrote, a century later and a continent away, that “for most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” This symposium brings together these genealogies of resistance, from Stewart’s radical exhortation to Phule’s tireless pedagogy to Woolf’s modernist lament to Shaikh’s embodied practice, to ask what it means to be women now, not merely as subjects of history but as its makers.

This symposium is an attempt to give that anonymity a name, a voice, and a legacy, to unspool the threads of silence and reweave them into narratives of agency and imagination. By creating space for rigorous empirical research, lived experience, and feminist solidarity, we hope to archive the present with honesty and imagine futures with audacity. Selected papers will be published in an edited volume. Being women is not a monolith; it is a tapestry, and we invite you to bring your thread.

Expected Keynote Speaker: Prof. miriam cooke, Braxton Craven Professor of Arab Cultures at Duke University. She focuses on modern Arabic literature and critical reassessment of women’s roles in the public sphere.

PRESENTATION FEES

Track A (Research Scholars & Faculty): ₹500 | Track B (PG & UG Students): ₹300

Selected presenters will pay the fee after confirmation of selection. Fees include participation certificate and publication charges.