What does a well society – or wellness in a socially just society – look like? 

These are profound questions of great magnitude and consequence whether we are examining the past or abiding in the present. And they are quite definitely weighty matters as we consider and construct, right here and now, our individual and collective human- and eco-futures.

We invite historical, intellectual, artistic, activist, and world-building contributions that define and explore wellness, well-being, and care in relationship to the personal, interpersonal, societal, human-centric, and eco-centric.

At the 2026 Big Berks, we are starting from these three foundational premises: We want to get well. We know it’s a weighty matter. And we want to get clearer about what this means by investigating, dialoguing, and funning together. In the tradition of Kitchen Table Press (Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Audre Lorde), we welcome you to sit with us to be in conversation to co-create kitchen table history.

We invite you—national and international scholars, activists, and artists of all persuasions, and especially graduate students and early career colleagues—to collaborate and be nourished and nourish each other.

You might consider the following prompts:

• Historical narratives, interpretations, and analyses we create: shifting frameworks and “states of mind” toward wellness.
• Re-imagining power and the -isms, informed by our lives, to create a more holistic history and historical record. 
• Decentering people as the sole focus of history: exploring alternate approaches such as eco-centric realities (e.g. remembering and belonging linked to microbes, animals, ecology, and the Earth).
• Investigating strategies of the past to deal with local and world political systems and their discriminatory, unequal, oppressive, and dystopian contexts.
• Healing from trauma, harm, and toxic environments: identifying ideological dogmatism, the ill-politics of revenge interpersonally and systemically; carceral systems and prison abolition; gracelessness in the wake of conflict and austerity, eco-annihilation, etc.
• Struggles for embodied physical autonomy and mental wellness, including reproductive justice; disability studies; impacts of pandemics, etc.
• Strengthening relationships between healing justice and structural transformation, including urban excavations and immigration; public health and anti-gentrification work; homelessness; environmental justice as human justice, etc.
• Connecting individual health to social, economic, and political health.
• Be guided by joy, love, collective care modalities, improvisation, collaboration as well as liberatory work within systems of spirituality, religious, sacred communities including freedom lineages and praxis.
• Engage the questions – What is ill-being, what creates it, and how can we break cycles of ill-being – as a way to think deeply about how we sustain wellness in its stead. 
• Explore how culture, art, and music can create new worlds, as well as illuminate connections and pathways to wellness in activist, academic, and policy spaces. 
• Reaffirm the morals, ethics, principles, and aspirations for scholarship and community-engaged work and how that ultimately connects to our vision of a well world.
• Recommit to activism and resistance at the local, global, and transnational levels.
• Or other related topics!

We welcome submissions that explore the prompts above while also paying attention to what we are calling “cross-category meta-themes” such as race and imperialism; gender and sexuality; class, poverty, and economic systems; geography and place; compassion and courage; and accessibility and disabilities. We encourage submissions that use interdisciplinary methodological, pedagogical, and digital humanities approaches that engage up to three of the themes listed below.

Please begin by selecting the format of your proposal. You can choose to submit a single paper, traditional panel, roundtables, interactive workshop, lightning session, curriculum discussion/workshop, or other formats. Once you begin your submission you will be required to select 1-3 of the following themes in order of relevance.

CONFERENCE SUBTHEMES: 

•       The Art of Interpretive Work: Excavating, Creating, and Complicating Historical Narratives
•       Power, Economy, Political Ecosystems
•       Marginalized Identities, Global Majority Resistance, and Justice Agendas 
•       History, Practices, Policies of Physical and Mental Health
•       Joy, Love, Healing, and Collective Care
•       Life Writing and Other Sources of Community-Based Intellectual History
•       Repair: Naming Ill-Being, Suffering, and Struggling as a Path Toward Transformation
•       Culture, Art, World-building, and Enacting Different Futures
•       Collaborations: Community-based Research and Feminist Engagement

The 2026 Berkshires conference will have a small theater setting for the ongoing screening of films submitted for viewing at the conference. To submit a film to be included as part of the screening, we offer a separate form on the submission site to provide required information for the film along with information for the format required to be included in the screening.

Submissions for the 2026 conference will open on Monday, 16 September 2024 and end on Friday, 31 January 2025. For more information, please email: execadmin@berksconference.org

The Berks is committed to encouraging new scholarship, especially by graduate students. If your session includes at least three presentations by graduate students and you would like your session flagged, please check “emergent scholars” on your session submission.

The Program Committee actively promotes the full and equitable inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities, religious minorities, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people. To that end, the Big Berks Officers and Trustees, 2026 Program Co-Chairs, and Program Committee encourage session proposals that include diverse participants in various career paths such as  activists, artists, filmmakers, and academics of various ranks (i.e. senior and junior scholars, public historians, graduate students, independent historians, and historically-grounded scholars in any discipline). 

The Program Co-Chairs and Program Committee encourage the submission of complete sessions. When this is not possible, single papers will be accepted and then  added to the program where appropriate.