The ASECS Women's Caucus is pleased offer two panels during the 2020 ASECS meeting in St Louis:

 Decolonizing ASECS (Roundtable) Emily Casey, Saint Mary's College of Maryland; eccasey@smcm.edu and Tita Chico, University of Maryland; tchico@umd.edu
In the twenty-first century, decolonization is an ongoing theory and practice that challenges the political norms of institutions and recasts the dynamics of power that still structure the modern world. Calls to decolonize intellectual disciplines and their attendant institutions are predicated on the understanding that change only arises through a deconstruction of the very systems that construct knowledge. Ongoing decolonial efforts are aligned with Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, LGBTQ+ activism, and intersectional feminism; they actively work against white supremacy for a long-term transformation of society by redistributing power to those who have been historically minoritized and oppressed. To decolonize ASECS is to question the association’s privileging of a Western European construction of the long eighteenth century. In recent decades eighteenth-century studies broadly has “gone global,” attending to places and histories beyond the traditional European canon, especially as they are shaped by colonialism and empire. However, despite a diversification of geographies and materials, the discipline’s knowledge-production continues to be founded on a colonialist paradigm. Similarly, our membership is still overwhelmingly white. What would we need to divest of, materially, politically, and intellectually, to make space for the perspectives and leadership that will keep ASECS relevant, necessary, and thriving for its next fifty years? We welcome papers that levy challenges to the systems of privilege and power that underly our association, that examine how neo-colonialist practices like gentrification inform the intellectual work of the field, and that explore the political pasts and futures of eighteenth-century studies. Proposals strongly encouraged from applicants who are members of minoritized groups.

Invisible Service: The Ethics of Academic Labor Marilyn Francus, West Virginia University; marilynfrancus@mail.wvu.edu 
How do we determine the types and amount of professional service that we do? How do we avoid the trap of engaging in invisible, unappreciated, unrecompensed labor, and if we are caught in the trap, how do we get out of it? This panel will discuss the multiple manifestations of invisible labor: uneven levels of mentorship, inequity and who’s making things go behind the scenes (people of color, queer, etc), shadow chairing, being stuck as an associate professor, and more.