Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies

News & Events

Feminisms Unbound

New Terms in Feminist Studies

Wednesday, February 10th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321

This panel will feature three feminist scholars who are conceptualizing new and evolving terminologies for the discourse of race, gender, and sexuality studies. The panelists, each trained interdisciplinarily, will consider the expansiveness of emerging language in the field along with the fraught limitations of contemporary keywords within feminism. The scholars will offer new terms for contemporary feminist studies, across and beyond disciplinary frameworks. Specifically, this event will utilize the multi-valent rubrics of digital media, film, and dance to participate in new ways of seeing and thinking through the field.

Roundtable discussion participants:

Moya Bailey, Postdoctoral Fellow, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Digital Humanities, Northeastern University

Moya Bailey is a postdoctoral scholar of Women’s Studies and Digital Humanities at Northeastern University. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She currently curates the #transformDH Tumblr initiative in Digital Humanities. She is also the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.

Pooja Rangan, Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies, Amherst College

Pooja Rangan is Assistant Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. Her book, Immediations (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2017) examines the humanitarian impulse in documentary, with a special focus on questions of childhood, animality, ethnicity, and disability. Rangan’s writing has been published in differences, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, South Asian Popular Culture, World Picture, and other anthologies and journals. She serves on the board of the Flaherty Film Seminar.

Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson, Assistant Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University

Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson is an Assistant Professor of African & Afro-American and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. A Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow, she earned her Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley and served as the Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at Northwestern University. Johnson's work examines the politics of black movement including dance, diasporic travel, and gentrification. Interdisciplinary in nature, her work is situated at the intersection of diaspora theory, dance and performance studies, ethnography, and black feminism. Currently, Johnson is working on her book manuscript "Rhythm Nation: West African Dance and the Politics of Diaspora," forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Johnson is a founding member of The Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. She is also a dancer, and performs internationally.

Moderator: Kimberly Juanita Brown, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies, Mount Holyoke College

Kimberly Juanita Brown is Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her work gathers at the intersection of contemporary literatures of the black diaspora and visual culture studies. Her book, The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press) examines the proliferation of imagery emerging after the civil rights movement, and leading to a "failure of seeing" regarding black women's corporeal vulnerabilities. She is currently at work on a second project about images of the dead in the New York Times in 1994. Tentatively titled "Their Dead among Us: Photography, Melancholy, and the Politics of the Visual," the book will consider the place of photography within the sphere of transnational racial unbelonging.

About Feminisms Unbound

This Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.

The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Kimberly Juanita Brown, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies, Mount Holyoke College, Lisa Lowe, Professor of English and American Studies, Tufts University, and Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons College, have programmed the four events in this series.

Feminisms Unbound 2015-2016 Events

Public Feminisms: Roles, Responsibilities, Challenges
Wednesday, September 16th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT Campus

Queer Diasporas and Futurities
Wednesday, November 18th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus

New Terms in Feminist Studies
Wednesday, February 10th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus

A Celebration of Books by GCWS Authors
Wednesday, April 13th: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus