Eight Denison students traveled to San Juan, Puerto Rico, in November 2025 for the 45th National Women’s Studies Conference, where they heard cutting-edge scholarship, tested ideas, made connections, and brought back experiences that will shape their studies and careers.
Julia Barker ’26, an anthropology and women’s and gender studies (WGST) double major, said the people she met “were expressive, supportive, and knowledgeable.”
“I deeply enjoyed being able to think and engage with Denison professors,” she said. “This experience deeply informed my understanding of WGST as a tool for interdisciplinary collaboration and transformative change.”
Denison student body president and WGST major Norah Carter ’26 deepened her knowledge on a research paper she wrote on disability justice.
“I’ve also studied care ethics as a philosophy of disability justice, so sessions like ‘Organizing and Community Care Across the Americas’ were incredibly useful for me as well,” she said.Teresa Collins ’28 learned from members of the Caribbean abolitionist collective known as ‘La Brecha,’ who spoke about their goal to provide a space for people incarcerated in Puerto Rico or those caring for an incarcerated loved one.
“The conference exposed me to new topics not covered in my WGST classes and gave me new ideas to explore more on my own and even for an independent research study,” she said. As an intern with a forensic psychologist, Sarah Gray ’26 found the conference “helped my future research and career goals.”
“I was able to meet undergraduate students, graduate students, and professors with similar interests to my own and talk with them about their research and other forms of work,” she said.
As she prepared for the conference, Maya Sutte ’26 looked forward to analyzing new perspectives and expanding her realm of career possibilities, as well as her personal goal of “further developing what it means to be truly equitable in a marginalized world.”
“I want to impact the world through prioritizing an ethics of care,” she said.
Iyanna Sanders ’26, a double major in economics and women and gender studies, looked for ways her classroom learning merged with the real world.
“I hope this experience will allow me the opportunity to make solid decisions about how I will spend my time after Denison,” she said. Sanders is applying to master’s and doctoral programs.
The conference was particularly relevant for Sofia Valerio ’26.
A roundtable discussion on tourism resonated with the questions framing her interdisciplinary senior project: how to ethically navigate research, archival research, travel, and solidarity in places marked by colonial histories and ongoing struggles for justice.
The conference sharpened “my theoretical lens and building connections between my research and the work of established scholars in the field,” she said.