WW05 is organized around the theme, "Embracing the Earth:East-West/North-South. "This theme provides an excellent venue for reflecting broad range of modern and post-modern orders and global issues. Under this theme, we expect to explore the changes, contestations, remappings and challenges of the categories of East-West/North-South. We will see how women's lives are interwoven--as well as separated--by the increasing economic and political disparity between North and South or the contesting images of East and West. The theme also calls attention to the reconfiguration of boundaries between East and West, North and South in the emerging international conflicts since the end of the Cold War. We hope to generate lively discussion and investigations on the diversification and complexities pertaining to the East- West/North-South boundaries, how these impinge on women's lives and the challenges they pose to feminisms.