News & Events

Events Archive

Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 Events

Fall 2013 and Spring 2014 Events

Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 Events

Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 Events


Fall 2008 and Spring 2009 Events

Fall 2007 and Spring 2008

Fall 2006 and Spring 2007

Spring 2006

Fall 2005

2004-2005

International Faculty Exchange (2001)




Fall 2009

GCWS/Office of the Dean for Graduate Education Dinner

A dinner hosted by Vice Chancellor and Dean for Graduate Education Steve Lerman for faculty and students of the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies honoring the unique institutional partnership that the GCWS creates.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009
6 PM reception, with brief program to follow
Where: R&D Dining Room, 4th floor, Stata Center
32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA

Directions and Parking information:

Walking from the T stop in Kendall Square: The Red Line T stop for MIT is the MIT/Kendall stop, which exits you onto Main Street in front of the MIT Coop. Take a left, following Main to Vassar Street (3 blocks). The Stata Center is on the corner of Vassar and Main. Once in the Stata Center, follow the central corridor to the end and take the elevator to the 4th floor. Cross through the doorway ahead and to the left of the elevator. The R&D Dining Room is at the end of the hall.

PARKING: Parking in some lots at MIT is free after 5 PM. One such lot is the Hayward Lot off of Hayward St. and Amherst Street in Kendall Square.

The Hayward Lot on the MIT campus map:
http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=P5&Parking=go

Directions to the R&D Dining Room from the Hayward Lot: Take a right and walk up Hayward St. (away from Main St.) until you reach the intersection of Hayward and Amherst St. Take a right on Amherst St. and walk to Ames St. Take a right on Ames St. and walk to Main St. Take a left, following Main to Vassar Street (3 blocks). The Stata Center is on the corner of Vassar and Main. Once in the Stata Center, follow the central corridor to the end and take the elevator to the 4th floor. Cross through the doorway ahead and to the left of the elevator. The R&D Dining Room is at the end of the hall.

Fall 2008

Traveling People -- Traveling Concepts
a discussion with Tatiana Barchunova, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Novosibirsk Statae University, Western Siberia, Russia

When: Thursday, October 30
4-6 PM
Where: Building E51-275
MIT Campus

What are Russian post –socialist perceptions of Western social and gender theories and methods of conducting empirical research?

Professor Barchunova will discuss the challenge of translating English-language gender discourse into Russian. She tracks the distortion of circulating texts and the misrepresentation of ideas and tries to explain the distortion by several factors.

The crisis within the institution of publishing, the underdevelopment of Russian social theory, and the lack of funding available to scientific communities to publish the necessary (and large) volume of texts in translation, she argues, all threaten to reinforce the conservative turn in cultural translation

Tatiana Barchunova is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Novosibirsk State University (Western Siberia) where she received her Ph D in 1991. Her initial empirical research focus was the post-Soviet gender system, in particular gender stereotyping in the media. Her work has been supported by the MacArthur, Soros, and Carnegie Foundations and the Social Science Research Council. Barchunova edited a collection of papers "Potolok
pola"(Gender Ceiling) (Novosibirsk, 1998) and, with E. Zdravomyslova and A. Temkina, edited a collection of translated Western feminist texts (Saint-Petersburg, 2000) and co-authored a popular book Gender Studies for Dummies (2006). Currently she is interested in religious and consumption networks and leisure activities (such as historical and martial games, classical and historical dancing clubs, and Internet dating) and the concept of “naive translation" the latter of which will be the focus of her GCWS presentation.

Spring 2009

GCWS Course Development Events

We invite you to join your feminist colleagues from our nine member institutions to learn more about the unique teaching opportunities offered by the GCWS and to explore innovative course design with scholars in different disciplines and from different institutions. Through these informal gatherings, our goal is to initiate conversations among peers whose research and teaching interests intersect within broad topic areas and to encourage collaborative course development for future interdisciplinary graduate courses in Women's and Gender Studies.

Come to one (or more) of the three evening conversations we have planned for the Spring semester to share your course ideas, meet potential teaching partners, and become an active part of our dynamic institution.

FOOD

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 5:30 - 7:30 PM: Possible issues or directions include, but are not limited to:

*Location TBA* Contact gcws@mit.edu for more information

LAW & ORDER

Date and Time to be determined by participants.
Possible issues or directions include, but are not limited to:
Women in Prison
Gender and the criminal justice system
The institutionalization of power and social control
Gender, Justice, and International Law

*Location TBA* Contact gcws@mit.edu for more information

WORK

THURSDAY, APRIL 23rd, 1:30 - 3 PM: Possible issues or directions include, but are not limited to:
Gender, Work, and Migration
Labor and Inequality
Women in a Globalized Market
Gender and the informal economy

*Location TBA* Contact gcws@mit.edu for more information

Conversation on Publishing Options: Meet the Editors

Tuesday, May 5th, 2-3:30 PM
MIT Campus, Building E51-095

The GCWS’ Faculty Development committee welcomes you to a Conversation on Publishing Options. We are very fortunate to have editors from Beacon, Harvard, and MIT Presses, whose specific acquisition interests include religion, classics, immigration, and science and technology, and whose presses are highly regarded for both scholarly monographs and trade books in a range of fields. Whether we are at the mid-career level or trying to figure out how to turn that dissertation into a book, this will be a wonderful opportunity for all of us. We look forward to seeing you there.

RSVP to gcws@mit.edu

Presenters:

Marguerite Avery is Acquiring Editor in Information Science and Science, Technology, and Society at The MIT Press. She has pursued graduate work in gender history and will complete her Masters of Library and Information Science this May.

Joanna Green is an Editorial Assistant at Beacon Press, a nonprofit and independent book publisher of serious nonfiction, and the Criticism Editor for Fringe Magazine. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts Boston and a BA in English and Women's Studies from the University of Minnesota.

Sharmila Sen is the editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press. She commissions and acquires books on religion and classics, among other subjects, written for scholarly, as well as general intellectual audiences. Sharmila received her AB from Harvard, her PhD from Yale, and taught as an assistant professor of English at Harvard for 7 years before being appointed as editor at HUP.

Directions for E51-095:

To get to building E51 by T, take the red line to Kendall Square. Look for the intersection of Hayward Street and Main Street. Walk one block down Hayward until it intersects with Amherst Street. Take a left on Amherst and walk down until you see a parking lot and building on your right. This is building E51. Walk up a ramp to the entrance. Walk down the stairs to the ground floor and take a right. Room 095 will be at the end of the hall on your left.

Link to the campus map

How to Publish Early in your Graduate Career

Wednesday, May 20th
5:30 - 7:00 PM

MIT Campus
Building E51 Room 095

Please join us for a panel discussion of the most effective ways to turn that paper you worked so lovingly on into a publishable article in Women’s and Gender Studies. One faculty member, two faculty editors, and a fellow graduate student will present:

Light refreshments provided.

Please RSVP [required] to gcws@mit.edu

Presenters:

Marilyn Gaull is a REsearch Professor at Boston University's Editorial Institute. She has published widely on British and American literature, intellectual history, folklore and oral performance, and the history of science. As an editor, she founded The Wordsworth Circle, a large and comprehensive journal of Romantic studies, Editor’s News for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals which she helped to organize, and Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters, her most recent series for Palgrave.

D. Lynn O'Brien Hallstein's present research focus is the complex relationship between white feminism and motherhood and mothering, past and present. She has published in a variety of communication and women's studies journals and is currently under contract to complete a book manuscript and co-edit two future volumes on feminism and maternity.

Amber Musser will receive her PhD in History of Science from Harvard University in June 2009 with a dissertation on the history of masochism.

Deborah Swedberg has been the Managing Editor of Studies in Romanticism at Boston University for 27 years. She also teaches in the Women's Studies Program.

Directions for E51-095:

To get to building E51 by T, take the red line to Kendall Square. Look for the intersection of Hayward Street and Main Street. Walk one block down Hayward until it intersects with Amherst Street. Take a left on Amherst and walk down until you see a parking lot and building on your right. This is building E51. Walk up a ramp to the entrance. Walk down the stairs to the ground floor and take a right. Room 095 will be at the end of the hall on your left.

Link to the campus map

Fall 2007

Gender, Geography, and Women in Muslim Countries
an informal discussion and curriculum dialogue event with Simmons College visiting Fulbright scholar, Dr. Shahnaz Hussain.

When: Friday, September 28th
2 - 4 PM
Where: Building E51-275
MIT Campus

The GCWS is pleased to feature feminist geographer Dr. Shahnaz Hussain. Dr. Hussain is a visiting Fulbright scholar at Simmons College from September 16th to October 5th and comes from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her research focuses on the field of feminist geography, a scholarly practice that applies theories, methods, and critiques of feminism to the study of the human environment, society, and geographical space. We are excited for the opportunity to host a faculty discussion with Dr. Hussain and invite faculty to join her in conversation around topics of gender and geography from 2-4 PM on Friday, September 28th at MIT. There is limited space available for this event and an RSVP is required.

Dr. Shahnaz Hussain is Professor in the department of Geography and Environment at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Her areas of scholarly interest include gender, work and the environment, Women and Islam, migration and development and urbanization and poverty. She was a team member in a project between Virginia Tech-UCDavis-University of Dhaka/Women's Studies on curriculum development and the production of a gender project on Bangladesh. Her long list of publications include /Female Migrant's Adaptation in Dhaka/ and /The Invisible Resource: Women and Work in Bangladesh.

Feminist Intellectuals Dinner

When: Tuesday, 10/16/07

Where: MIT Campus, building E51-095

This is an event for faculty at our member institutions that provides the exciting (and fun!) opportunity for vision sharing, networking, and energizing intellectual exchange among feminist scholars at our member institutions and beyond. It's a chance to meet women's and gender studies colleagues at other GCWS schools, to learn more about on-going projects, and to network and discuss ideas for future team-teaching collaborations and projects related to GCWS.

To facilitate meeting people and exchanging ideas, especially for those who
are new or somewhat out of the scene, we will supplement the regular
cocktail hour with a networking experiment based on... speed dating! Eager
to exercise our faculty matchmaking chops, we're trying this new and fun
strategy to promote community building and course topic brainstorming across our member institutions and beyond.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Gender, Food Politics, and Social Justice - a faculty course development workshop

When: First weekend in May, date TBA

Where: MIT Campus

This course development workshop will address questions pertaining to the intersection of gender, food, culture and social justice.   Exploration into the topic of food and society (food in society) might be directed toward a multitude of arenas:  production and consumption, art and literature, international development, culture and context, health and wellness, and more. And within each of these broad areas, looking through a gendered lens provides a complex and rich perspective.  

This workshop seeks to bring together scholars working on or interested in these issues to discuss their work and perspectives on each of these topics.   We will invite individual presenters to speak on their work in four different areas of gender and food studies:

  1. food, social justice, and inequality;
  2. food in socio-cultural contexts;
  3. food and gender in art and literature; and gender,
  4. Gender, food and body image

These short presentations will set the stage for small group discussions among event participants.   

Our goal is to spark dialogue and strategic networking among local faculty interested in exploring these issues in a research and interdisciplinary teaching environment.  We hope that the conversations that occur at this event will inspire new research directions, reinforce existing explorations, and even lead to GCWS seminar topics and cross-institutional teaching teams.

Gender and Education: A Panel Discussion and Course Development Workshop

Thursday, October 12 , 5:30 – 8:00 PM at the Stata Center, MIT

This workshop will address enduring debates about gender and education. Panelists from different disciplinary perspectives will share their research, teaching experiences and thoughts on the topics of access, equity, empowerment, and the gendered construction of knowledge. In light of the resurgent concern about a “gender gap,” focused on the underachievement of boys, panelists will consider what various feminist perspectives might have to offer this debate.

The panel discussion will include presentations by Helen Haste, Professor of Psychology at the University of Bath, England; Lorna Rivera, Assistant Professor of Community Planning and Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston; and Kathleen Weiler, Professor of Education at Tufts University; and will be moderated by Wendy Luttrell, Aronson Associate Professor in Human Development and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Refreshments will be provided.

Where: Room 32-155 at the MIT Stata Center
32 Vassar St., MIT Campus
Campus map: http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=32&Buildings=go
When: Thursday, Oct. 12, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Directions and Parking: To get to the Stata Center by T, take the Red Line to Kendall Square. Exit and walk up Main Street, away from the river. The Stata Center is at the second set of lights, at the corner of Vassar Street and Main Street. Enter and walk down the main hallway; room 32-155 will be on your left.

If you are driving, free parking is available at the East Lot, a parking lot next to the Stata Center. The entrance to the lot is off of Main Street.

Presenters:

Helen Haste is a Visiting Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and Professor of Psychology at the University of Bath, England. Her research on gender includes work on gendered images of science and scientists, on gender and motivations in relation to science education, on gender in relation to moral political and social development, and on the ways that metaphors of gender permeate the wider cultural context.

Lorna Rivera is an Assistant Professor of community planning and women's studies at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. In 2003, Dr. Rivera received the National Academy of Education’s Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on her forthcoming book entitled, “Laboring to Learn: Women’s Literacy & Poverty in the Post-welfare Era” (University of Illinois Press, 2007). She has recently published articles in "Democracy & Education" and "Women’s Studies Quarterly." She is currently a Research Associate at the Gaston Institute for Latino Public Policy at UMass Boston, where she is studying Latino families who participate in the Chelsea Public Schools Family Literacy Programs. She actively serves on the Board of Directors for WE LEARN (Women Expanding/Literacy Education Action Resource Network and the Massachusetts Coalition for Adult Education.

Kathleen Weiler is a Professor in the Education Department at Tufts University where she teaches courses in the philosophy and history of education. Her research has focused on the democratic possibilities of education, particularly in relation to questions of gender. She has employed a number of approaches in her research, reflecting her own multidisciplinary training. Her first book, Women Teaching for Change (1987), used an ethnographic approach to explore the lives of teachers who identified themselves as feminists and who sought to encourage social change through their teaching. She broadened her study of women teachers in her second book, Country Schoolwomen (1998), an historical study of the lives of women teachers in rural California. She has also published a number of edited collections. She is now engaged in work on a joint biography of two California women educators, Helen Heffernan and Corinne Seeds, who attempted to enact Deweyan and progressive ideas in the public schools of California. While her major research focus for the past few years has been historical, she has continued to contribute theoretical and philosophical analyses of education, particularly on the work of Paulo Freire. She contributed an essay on Freire in her edited collection Feminist Engagements (2002), a collection of feminist critiques of major educational and cultural theorists.

Moderator:

Wendy Luttrell, Aronson Associate Professor of Human Development and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education studies the relationship between culture, identity, and schooling. She focuses on American schools as sites where beliefs about worth, value, knowledge, and power are acquired and contested, and as contexts for the formation of social identities and self-understandings. She has worked with women literacy learners and pregnant schoolgirls – both groups of under-represented learners-- to understand this process. In addition to her research and teaching, Luttrell is the co-principal investigator for Project ASSERT (Accessing Strengths and Supporting Resistance in Teaching), a multi-site study of urban teachers' experiences and concerns about serving the needs of low-income students. Her published works include School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women's Identity and Schooling and Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens.

For more information please contact Andi Sutton, GCWS Coordinator, at arsutton@mit.edu or 617-324-2085.

2nd Annual Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies Conference: BEYOND REVOLUTION OR BEHIND IT? The Politics and Practice of Contemporary Feminism across Academic and Activist Communities

This conference took place on March 23-24, 2007 at MIT.

This cutting edge conference grew out of our interest as academics and activists to understand the relationship between practice, experience, and theory. Theories of race, multiculturalism, Marxism, postcolonialism, and feminism ground work in Women’s and Gender Studies – we will consider what realities these theories address (or ignore), what praxis they strengthen (or fail to), what communities they reach, and which they may leave behind. Is the grassroots and activist sentiment inspiring these concepts trumped by the theoretical vocabulary used to describe them? Do the pressures of academies and institutions limit the execution of diverse expressions of feminism in the classroom and on the ground? 

In an effort to model the alternative methodology addressed in the conference abstract, this conference followed a non-traditional structural and organizational format.  Presentations will take the form of open dialogues; panels will be followed by topic-based, hands-on workshops; other opportunities for attendees to share their knowledge, experience, and opinions equally with topic presenters.  

Faculty Development Events : Fall and Spring Feminist Intellectuals Dinners

Feminist Intellectuals Dinner
November 9, 2006
MIT Stata Center

Following our mission to build a feminist intellectual community across disciplines and institutions, we  produced our Feminist Intellectuals Dinner in Fall 07.   The Feminist Intellectuals Dinner is a tradition of GCWS, normally hosted once a year to celebrate and nourish the diverse faculty community at our member schools and beyond who do work in the field of Women’s and Gender Studies.  On November 8, 2006, over 40 faculty from our member institutions and beyond gathered for dinner, conversation, and course topic brainstorming.  

For this event, the Institutional Participation and Support Committee, Board and staff organized an engaging and unorthodox discussion format among faculty and expanded their experience of the event and one another.  To this end, participants were invited to share creative titles for books they’ve always wanted to write including topics ranging from an ethical analysis of the response to Hurricane Katrina to a guide on what you need to know to understand articles in the New York Times (that they didn’t teach you in high school or college.)  The event gathered GCWS “veterans” who had been involved as faculty, board members, and supporters and new faculty who were encountering the Consortium for the first time.

Yet another marker of success, the gathering sparked a course topic discussion among faculty that initiated the GCWS seminar that is being offered in 07-08: Transexuality, Transgenderism, and the Rest…   

 

Feminist Intellectuals Dinner: Feminist Pedagogy and ‘What’s in a Name?’
May 9, 2007
MIT Campus, E51-095

Due to the overwhelming positive response to the Fall dinner, the GCWS hosted a second Feminist Intellectuals Dinner in the Spring.  The goal of this dinner was to provide an open atmosphere for faculty to meet, reconnect, and discuss their current work, and to deliberate about the developments and changes in their departments and universities.  The second goal was to sponsor targeted discussion around two topics: Feminist Pedagogy and ‘What’s in a Name?” which explored the institutional politics of naming Women’s, Gender, Feminist, and Sexuality Studies programs.

The Board initiated two discussions.  One group discussed a proposal for a Feminist Pedagogy course offering, modeled after GCWS’s Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women’s and Gender Studies.  Faculty discussed potential directions such an offering might take and its relevance to their programs and the students with whom they work. Another group of faculty discussed “What’s in a Name?”  This topic was initiated as a response to the current debate around the politics of department/program titles.   Faculty from departments/programs that had recently undergone a name change (from Women’s Studies to Women’s and Gender Studies, for example), shared their experience, discussed the debates, and provided insight into the process for others’ whose departments/programs were just beginning these discussions

 

1st Annual Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies Conference: Shifting Gender Identities in the Face of War, Globalization, and Natural Disaster

On March 30 and 31, 2006, the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies launched its first ever graduate student conference, Shifting Gender Identities in the Face of War, Globalization, and Natural Disaster.    The conference took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street in Cambridge, MA.

The 2006 conference was an event organized by the GCWS and a team of graduate students representing the Consortium member institutions of Boston College, Brandeis University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Simmons College, Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts Boston.    The goal of the conference was to support and promote students working at the graduate level in the field of Women's and Gender Studies.   It was a 2-day event where students, faculty, and members of the public gathered to present and discuss cutting-edge work, workshop ideas, and build a cross-institutional colleague community.   The conference gathered over 100 students, faculty, and members of the public in conversation about contemporary work in the field of Women's and Gender Studies.   

WOMEN, WEALTH AND POVERTY: a faculty tea and course development discussion

Wednesday
February 22, 2006
6:00pm-8:00pm
MIT Campus, Building 14E Room 304
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Campus Map

The GCWS community welcomes you to join us for an informal tea and an open-ended discussion on the theme of Women, Wealth and Poverty. We are interested in thinking about the many ways that gender interacts with economic status, both in the present as well as the past, and in all parts of the world. Some questions we might want to pursue include the following: Are there systematic ways in which the men's and women's access to economic resources differ? and how do systems of resource allocation vary across time? In what ways is the economic status of women tied to systems of household formation and to processes of childbearing and child rearing? What is the impact of visual and rhetorical representations of women's economic activity on the social construction of "women's work" or on the material well being of real women? How should society assign value to different kinds of work, especially perhaps when performed by different demographic or social groups? In what ways are inequalities in economic outcome explained (justified?) by different societies?

All members of the community are invited to come and share either their research interests or teaching expertise on any aspect of these questions. It is our hope that future GCWS interdisciplinary course offerings related to this subject material will develop out of conversations such as this. So please come meet your colleagues from across the disciplines and across Boston who share an interest in this theme.

Hosted by:

Anne McCants, History Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Marlene Kim, Economics Department
University of Massachusetts Boston

Marya Dantzer-Rosenthal, PhD Candidate, Law, Policy and Society
Northeastern University

Contact Andi Sutton at GCWS for more information at gcws@mit.edu.

GENDER AND MILITARIZATION: a faculty tea and course development discussion

Thursday
February 9, 2006
2:00pm-4:00pm
MIT Campus, Building 14E Room 304
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Campus Map

Gordana Rabrenovic, Associate Professor of Sociology and Education and Director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University and the GCWS invite local scholars to a discussion and networking event. Participants with a particular research or teaching interest in topics relating to gender and militarization are encouraged to attend.    It is our hope that future GCWS interdisciplinary course offerings related to this subject material will develop out of conversations such as this. So please come meet your colleagues from across the disciplines and across Boston who share an interest in this theme.

Hosted by:

Gordana Rabrenovic, Sociology Department
Northeastern University

WOMEN AND FILM ROUNDTABLE

Wednesday
December 7, 2005
12:00pm-1:00pm
MIT Campus, Building 14N Room 417
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Campus Map

Seven faculty members from Boston University, MIT, Tufts University, and UMass Boston and spanning disciplines from Anthropology to Literature, Film, and Art History presented their current research interests relating to gender and film.   The discussion began with a conversation about the GCWS course development process and the team-teaching experience and extended in to conversations about potential thematic intersections that could be developed into a future team-taught course with the GCWS.     Topics that were discussed included the culture, history, and art of Manga and Anime, African and Francophone narrative and documentary styles, and ways women write resistance and oppression for the screen.   

Hosted by:

Chris Walley, Anthropology Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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WOMEN, RELIGION and POLITICS: A Curriculum Development Workshop

Wednesday
November 30, 2005
6:30pm-9:30pm
Stata Center, Building 32 Room 124
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Campus Map

The workshop will address questions pertaining to women and their well being in the context of religion and the contemporary politicization of religious identities. Panelists representing the major religions of the world: Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, will share their research, their teaching experiences, and thoughts on women's complex negotiations with various religious traditions, and the ways in which they feel empowered or disempowered by the imbrication of religion with politics. Our distinguished participants are:

Bernadette Brooten
Brandeis University
Bernadette Brooten, Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies, supervises graduate work in the areas of New Testament, Second Temple Judaism, early Christian literature, Hellenistic Judaism, and other branches of ancient Post-Biblical Judaism. She has written Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (Scholars Press, 1982) and Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (University of Chicago Press, 1996). In addition, she has published articles on Paul and the Jewish Law, Jewish epigraphy, paparological and literary evidence for Jewish women's power to initiate divorce in antiquity, and on various topics of ancient Jewish and early Christian women's history. Professor Brooten is a recent recipient of a Macarthur Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant on sexual ethics and religious traditions.

Mary Daly
Boston College
Mary Daly has long been concerned with giving her readers and students tools with which to understand the nature of patriarchy. Her work has enabled a wide variety of women and men to understand issues of sexism in ontological terms and continues to build upon, revise and expand her interperetation of ultimate reality. Daly is a scholar of substantial achievement, receiving a Ph.D in religioun at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, and a Ph.D in Catolic Theology and also Philosophy at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She is the author of seven books and countless articles and lectures. As a scholar and activist Daly has been on the forefront of feminist theory, publishing seminal texts such as Beyond God the Father, Church and the Second Sex, and the Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Wickedary).

Shahla Haeri
Boston University
Shahla Haeri is the director of Women's Studies Program and an Assistant Professor of cultural Anthropology at Boston University. She has conducted research in Iran, Pakistan, and India, and has written extensively on religion, law and gender dynamics in the Muslim world. She is the author of Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage, Mut'a, in Iran (1989, 1993), and of No Shame for the Sun: Lives of Professional Pakistani Women (Syracuse University Press in the US, and Oxford University Press in Pakistan, 2002). She was involved in the University of Chicago's multi-year program on global fundamentalism, Fundamentalism Project , which was funded by a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur grant, and she contributed an article to the second volume: "Obedience versus Autonomy: Women & Fundamentalism in Iran & Pakistan" (1993). Dr. Haeri has also made a short video documentary (46 min.) titled Mrs. President: Women and Political Leadership in Iran , which focusses on six women presidential contenders in Iran in 2001. This documentary is distributed in the United States and Canada by the Films for the Humanities and Sciences ( www.films.com , 2002).

Debra Renee Kaufman
Northeastern University
Debra Renee Kaufman is the Director of Jewish Studies, Professor of Sociology and a Matthews Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University. She founded the Women's Studies Program at Northeastern University and was its first Director for ten years. Her recent books, chapters and articles related to Jewish identity, memory and/or the Holocaust include a special edition of Contemporary Jewry, entitled "Women and the Holocaust"; "The Place of Judaism in American Jewish Identity";" Post-Holocaust Memory: Some Gendered Reflections"; "Better the Devil You Know and Other Contemporary Identity Narratives: Comparing Orthodox to Reform Judaism"; "Post Holocaust Identity Narratives: A Sociological Approach to Collective Consciousness, Memory and History"; "Renaming Violence"; and "Embedded Categories: Identity among Jewish Young Adults in the United States". Perhaps her most well-known work of this period is Rachel's Daughters (Rutgers University Press, nominated for three awards, 1991; second paperback edition reprinted in 1993; chapter three reprinted in Total Immersion).

Nandini Manjrekar
Maharaja Sayajirao University
Nandini Manjrekar teaches at the Women's Studies Research Centre, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. She works on issues of gender and education in India and is currently a visiting scholar in the Program in Women's Studies at MIT. She has been active in women's and civil liberties movements in India. Her published and forthcoming papers include: "Through the Looking Glass: Gender Socialization in a Primary School" (Sage, 1999), Women's Worlds, Women's Words (M.S. University of Baroda, 2000), The Last First: Participatory Research in Women's Development (M.S. University of Baroda, 2000) and Landscapes of a Different Kind (Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2002.)

A light dinner will be served.

Facilitated by
Kalpana Rahita Seshadri,
Director, Women's Studies Program
Boston College

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BREAKING BREAD
WOMEN OF COLOR DIALOGUE

A warm invitation to gather in unity and Break bread

A Day for Us*

Morning session:

This participant dialogue is called for the purpose of sharing souls and minds on issues and experiences of concern to the Circle of women of color involved with the academy. An open forum and gathering of women, young and elder, from every continent, faculty, staff, students, and community partners in small and large group discussion to foster the spirit of sisterhood and solidarity across nationalities,
across disciplinary boundaries, across communities No star speakers, no papers presented, no split ranks. This morning session is for women of color only.

Afternoon workshop:

The GCWS would like to present an afternoon panel from 1:30pm-3:00pm which will welcome all women interested in the above issues. This afternoon session is specifically GCWS oriented and we hope to use the workshop as a means to develop potential courses and discuss pedagogical issues. Panelists who participated in the morning session will share and reflect on the morning's dialogue.

Saturday
September 24, 2005
9:00am-3:00pm
Raytheon Amphitheater
Northeastern University

A light lunch will be served

Co-facilitated by
Robin Chandler,
Director, Women's Studies Program
Northeastern University
and
Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks
Director, Women's Studies program
Boston College

Contact Andi Sutton at GCWS for more information at gcws@mit.edu, or contact Dr. Lihua Wang at NEU’s WOmen’s Studies Program office at l.wang@neu.edu

Katzenstein Artist in-Residence Program
Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess

The GCWS, Katzenstein Artist in-Residence Program, and the Office of the Arts co-present feminist composer and muscian Jewlia Eisenberg and special guest artists Charming Hostess the evening of  September 16, 2005 in a performance on MIT campus following their presentation in the 2005 Katzenstein Lecture: "Sounds Like Home:  Voice, Text,
and Diaspora Consciousness in Nerdy-Sexy-Commie-Girlieland, A Conversation with Composer/Musician Jewlia Eisenberg" on Thursday, September 15 at 7 p.m. in Room 6-120, 77 Massachusetts Avenue,
Cambridge. 

“Hip-Hop, Culture, and Gender: A workshop for faculty development and feminist debate”

Facilitators:
Ian Condry, Thomas Defrantz, and Robin Chandler

Time:
March 12, 2005 Saturday morning 9:30 to 11:30

Location:
Foyer Room, First Floor of the Cronkhite Center, 6 Ash Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Contact Andrea Powell, GCWS Staff at apowell@mit.edu for more information.

Description:
“Feminist scholars and activists frequently criticize the portrayal of women's bodies in Hip-Hop culture. These criticisms include women artists in the industry. Why does misogyny occupy such a large part of the Hip-Hop imaginary? How might images of sexuality in the media be seen as healthy or hurtful to young people in various contexts? Is misogyny inevitable in the construction of popular culture? Is misogyny inseparable from Hip-Hop? Alternately, how can Hip-Hop be enabled to empower women and add to the struggle for the advancement of women? What kinds of Hip-Hop combat misogyny, and how is it produced? What sorts of rhymes and beats support feminist concerns? During the workshop concepts to be considered are: hyperreal, public women, dance, and social domains of the body. A special focus on the gender dynamics of hip-hop in Japan and other national contexts will be given. For example, is Japanese Hip-Hop less misogynist than in the U.S.? Why are women at the forefront of the Japanese pop music trends, and yet still marginalized in Hip-Hop? Comparing Hip-Hop through an international lens could give us insight into its potential to support feminism. Individual woman in the Hip-Hop music scene will be discussed such as Missy Eliot, Queen Latifah, Lauren Hill, and Jill Scott.”

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Workshop Presenters:

Ian Condry is assistant professor of Japanese cultural studies at MIT in the Foreign Languages and Literatures department.  He is writing a book about hip-hop in Japan, based on fieldwork in Tokyo for his Ph.D. thesis (Yale, Anthropology, 1999).  Recent publications include "B-Boys and B-Girls:  Rap Fandom and Consumer Culture in Japan" in the volume Fanning the Flames (W. W. Kelly, ed., 2004) and "Cultures of Music Piracy:  An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan" in the International Journal of Cultural Studies (2004) Vol. 7, No. 3.  Website:   http://iancondry.com.

Thomas DeFrantz holds degrees from Yale, the City University of New York, and earned his PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. He has taught at Stanford, NYU, and at MIT, where he is Associate Professor and holds the Class of 1948 Career Development Professorship. He teaches courses on Hip Hop, Theater, and Dance in relation to Performance Studies, Comparative Media Studies, and Women's Studies. He has published widely, including recent essays on break dancing and afro-futurist filmmaking. A director and choreographer, he has affiliations with the Drama League of New York, the Theater Offensive of Boston , and the performance research group Slippage: Performance Interventions in Culture and Technology, in residence at MIT.

Dr. Robin Chandler is a sociologist and former Fulbright Scholar to South Africa. Currently Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Northeastern University, the Program is being expanded into the Institute for Critical Gender and Ethnic Studies Research (ICGESR) with an urban and international research agenda. She has been the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the NEA, and the Fulbright Commission. Chandler’s research focuses on international social movements including Hip-Hop, democratization, and development practices in micro-enterprise in rural arts, crafts, and cultural tourism. Chandler has conducted research in and published widely on cultural politics in  South America, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australia, and the U.S. With a split portfolio in the arts, Chandler has been a practicing artist for more than  20 years, is included in numerous public and private collections , and has exhibited in the U.S. and abroad with the U.S. State Department Artists in Embassies Program. She is founder of numerous community-based projects including Caravan for International Culture, the Peace Doors Project, and the Hip-hop Tutorial Project and sits on numerous Boards including the National Association of Ethnic Studies.

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“Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism”

Please come to an author reading and brown bag lunch discussion on third wave feminism and every day activism!

February 23, 2005
12:30 to 1:45
Brown Bag Lunch
Behrakis Health Sciences Center
Northeastern University
30 Leon St .
MBTA Stops: Green Train E Outbound to Northeastern Stop, or Orange Train Forest Hills Train to Ruggles Stop

The Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies and Northeastern University's Women Studies Program proudly announces a brown bag lunch talk with the feminist authors of Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism.  The authors will speak about their book and ways that every day feminists can be a part of activist change in their communities and beyond. Please join us in hearing Jennifer Baumgartner and Amy Richards discuss their new book.

About the authors:
Jennifer Baumgartner is former editor at Ms. And writes for The Nation, Glamour, and National Public Radio. Amy Richards is a member of the advisory board at Ms.; a co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, an activist group for young feminists; and the author of Shopping in New York. They are the co-authors of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (FSG, 2000) as well as the founders of Soapbox, Inc., a speaker’s bureau representing outspoken experts with a progressive take on current events and culture.

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Next Steps

Contact Us

Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14N-211
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-324-2085