Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies

News & Events

Feminisms Unbound

Trans/Multi/Mediations

Wednesday, February 15, 2017: 5:30-7:30 PM
The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT

This roundtable hosts scholars and activists who intervene in the racialized, gendered, and queer aspects of our thoroughly mediated worlds, perspectives, subjectivities, and selves. These participants write and reflect critically on media forms, working within and across multiple modalities, ranging from the conventional to the digital and the emergent. Setting their work further apart is that these participants use media forms creatively, purposing and repurposing them to call on their transformational capacities in the service of vulnerable communities and social movements.

Roundtable discussion participants:

Sasha Costanza-Chock, Associate Professor of Civic Media, MIT

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a scholar, activist, and media-maker, and is currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. They are a Principal Investigator at the MIT Center for Civic Media (civic.mit.edu), creator of the MIT Codesign Studio (codesign.mit.edu), and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Sasha’s book Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement was published by the MIT Press in 2014. They are a board member of Allied Media Projects (alliedmedia.org), and a worker/owner at Research Action Design (RAD.cat), a worker-owned cooperative that uses community-led research, transformative media organizing, technology development, and collaborative design to build the power of grassroots social movements.

Sarah J. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Northeastern University

Sarah J. Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University and faculty affiliate of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Sarah studies the role of media and technology in national conversations about social movements. Her recent work considers the evolution of the #Ferguson hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, and other online interventions about race and policing. She is lead author on a collaborative book project on the Twitter activism of black, feminist, and queer counterpublics.

Thomas A. King, Associate Professor of English, Brandeis University

Thomas A. King is Associate Professor of English at Brandeis University; he co-chairs the interdisciplinary minor in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST) and was a founder of the minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies (SQS). King is author of The Gendering of Men 1660-1750, vol. 1: The English Phallus (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) and The Gendering of Men 1660-1750, vol. 2: Queer Articulations(University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). He recently adapted and directed Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (Artists’ Theater of Boston at Aeronaut Brewery, 2015; remounted at Brandeis University’s Merrick Theatre, 2016). He is currently writing The Subject at the End of the Voice, which explores erotic and affective subjectivity in early modern and eighteenth-century England in relation to the divisions of speaking across disparate geographical, racial, generic, and bodily registers.

Moderator: Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons College

Jyoti Puri is Professor of Sociology at Simmons College and works at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality and queer studies, and postcolonial feminist theory. Her book, Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle against the Antisodomy Law in India, was recently published by Duke University Press (February 2016). She has also published books, including Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India (Routledge 1999) and Encountering Nationalism (Blackwell Publishers 2004), as well as articles, chapters, and journal special issues on sexuality, state, gender, and nationalism. She is a co-editor for the journal, Foucault Studies.

About Feminisms Unbound

This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual 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 2016-2017 Events

Black Women and the Carceral State
Wednesday, September 14, 2016, 5:30-7:30 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT

Sexual Collisions: Reflections on Empire, Terror, and Violence
Wednesday, October 26th: 5:30-7:30 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT

Trans/Multi/Mediations
February 15, 2017: 5:30-7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus

Graduate Student Roundtable
Wednesday, April 12, 2017: 5:30 - 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus