Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies
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News & Events
Each year at the GCWS is packed with events, curriculum development opportunities, and conferences.
2018 - 2019 Events
A Celebration of GCWS Authors
September 27, 2018 5:00 - 8:00 PM
MIT Stata Center 4th Floor
Join us to celebrate recently published works, meet fellow faculty and graduate students, and ring in the school year!
Friday, March 29 & Saturday, March 30, 2019Location: MIT
Feminisms Unbound
Multiple dates
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.
Feminisms Unbound: The Time of the Border
Wednesday, October 3, 2018, 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT
Feminisms Unbound: Ethnography: Fictions, Feminisms, and Vulnerability
Wednesday, November 28, 2018: 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT
Feminisms Unbound: Quare are we now?: The time and place of black queer and trans studies
April 3, 2019: 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT
2017 - 2018 Events
Higher Ed in the Era of #MeToo
April 20, 2018 1:00-5:30pm
Building 3 Room 270
Join us for a free half day conference at MIT on how the recent #MeToo movement has impacted higher education, specifically at the graduate level. There will be a mix of panels and workshops to encourage dialogue and learning between graduate students, faculty, activists, and other experts.
2016-2017 Events
Feminisms Unbound
Multiple dates, Multiple events
This GCWS initiative 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. Read below for a full list of event offerings, identified with the heading "Feminisms Unbound" more »
Feminisms Unbound: Black Women and the Carceral State
Wednesday, September 14th, 2016: 5:30-7:30 PM
Building E51 Room 095, MIT
This roundtable considers the totality of the carceral state, from the vantage point of black women’s histories, testimonies, experiences and creative works. Three interdisciplinary scholars will gather to ponder all of the mechanisms of the prison system, from its long historical trajectory to literary and visual representations. more »
Making Feminist Fitna! Islamic Feminist Disruptions
Saturday, October 22nd, 2016: 12:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Lobdell Dining Room, MIT Campus Center
A half-day event bringing together local muslim feminists and allies from academia, activist, and art spaces to share, discuss and celebrate Islamic feminist thought. more »
A Teach-In: Standing Rock Protests and Protective Actions
Saturday and Sunday, October 28th & 29th: hours vary
Paige Hall, Tufts University
This two-day teach-in will consider a range of issues related to the Sacred Stone Camp protests and protections in solidarity with the Standing Rock Souix against the Dakota Access Pipeline. more »
Feminisms Unbound: Sexual Collisions: Reflections on Empire, Terror, and Violence
Wednesday, October 26th, 2016: 5:30-7:30 PM
Location: Building E51 Room 095, MIT
This roundtable brings together queer and feminist scholars of race, diaspora, performance, and religion to reflect on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of contemporary crises within racial capitalism, such as: masculinity and the militarization of policing; gender, race, and incarceration; the gendered criminalization of immigrant and diasporic religions; and queer responses to policing and the “war on terror.” more »
Trans/Multi/Mediations
Wednesday, February 15th: 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. more »
Women Take the Reel Film Festival 2017
Various dates, various locations around the Boston area
This annual film festival is a collaborative effort among Women's and Gender Studies departments involved in the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (as well as select institutions/universities aligned with its mission) that features films about issues relating to gender, race, sexuality, class and/or feminism. The theme of this year’s festival is Power & Access.
The focus is on the intellectual investigation of these issues, so every film is accompanied by a Q&A and discussion with the film director, producer, local activists and practitioners, and/or faculty members from the host institution for each film.
All films are free and open to the public... more »
The Personal Is Still Political: Challenging Marginalization through Theory, Analysis, and Praxis - 2017 Graduate Student Conference
Friday, March 31st and Saturday, April 1st, 2017
The Ray and Maria Stata Center, MIT
32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
In the late 1960s, the statement “the personal is political” emerged as a central rallying cry for feminist activists. While salient before, it has become all the more urgent in light of the 2016 United States election results. Given this, the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) is hosting a graduate student conference which seeks to investigate how this slogan has been, can be, or is now being mobilized as a concept for resistance by marginalized groups theoretically, analytically, and practically. more »
Graduate Student Roundtable
Wednesday, April 12th: 5:30-7:30 PM
The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT
The final event of the Feminisms Unbound 2016-2017 year will be a roundtable of current GCWS doctoral students who are participating in the GCWS Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies. The Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality has, since its inception, facilitated the production of numerous doctoral dissertations, all concerned with the transnational structures of power and resistance shaping the contemporary world. Students will present their research as the culminating event of the series. more »
2015-2016 Events
Public Talks by GCWS Dissertation Workshop Participants: Women's and Gender Studies Dissertation Works in Progress
Building 4 Room 144
MIT Campus
Cambridge, MA
Join the GCWS Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies participants as the workshop students formally present their works in progress... more »
Feminisms Unbound: A Celebration of Books by GCWS Authors
Wednesday, April 13th, 5:30 - 8:30 PM
The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321
MIT
Join us to celebrate recently published works on topics in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The event will feature over 30 books published since 2013. The evening will include a book table where you can peruse copies of the featured works and very short book talks by our featured authors. more »
Feminist Strategies in the Classroom and Beyond
Saturday, April 9th, 9 - 5 PM
Mandel Center for the Humanities
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA
The Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies welcomes you to a daylong, multi-disciplinary symposium on Feminist Strategies in the Classroom and Beyond. The symposium seeks to elicit practical advice from faculty members and graduate students across the disciplines - as well as writers and activists - about feminist, hands-on approaches to learning, teaching, knowledge production, and publishing. It will take place at the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. more »
Black Lives through the Arts
Thursday, March 3rd, 4 - 9 PM
The Brattle Theater
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA
*Women Take the Reel film festival opening event*
The opening event for the Women Take the Reel film festival is devoted to reflecting on and celebrating Black Lives through film, music, poetry, and dialogue. Each of the works presented in this program provides a different lens with which to look at topics ranging from identity, racial justice, sexuality, gender, masculinity, and more. All of the contributing artists and filmmakers will be present to talk about their works that day and will be featured in a concluding roundtable discussion and Q&A with the audience... more »
Women Take the Reel Film Festival 2016
Various dates, various locations around the Boston area
This annual film festival is a collaborative effort among Women's and Gender Studies departments involved in the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (as well as select institutions/universities aligned with its mission) that features films about issues relating to gender, race, sexuality, class and/or feminism. The theme of this year’s festival is Activism
The focus is on the intellectual investigation of these issues, so every film is accompanied by a Q&A and discussion with the film director, producer, local activists and practitioners, and/or faculty members from the host institution for each film.
All films are free and open to the public... more »
Feminisms Unbound: New Terms in Feminist Studies
Wednesday, Feb. 10th, 5:30 - 8:30 PM
The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321
MIT
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. more »
Feminisms Unbound: Queer Diasporas and Futurities
Wednesday, Nov. 18th, 5:30 - 8:30 PM
The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321
MIT
Our roundtable explores the ways in which both "queerness" and "diaspora" each displace normative classifications of sexuality and nationality, with consequences for the imagination of "futurity" in literature, visual culture, and cultural politics. As queerness complicates the boundedness of an ethnic, national or religious collectivity that desires to reproduce its own identity, so may diaspora unsettle the normative white Europeanness of conceptions of same-sex desire. more »
Feminisms Unbound: Public Feminisms: Roles, Responsibilities, Challenges
Wednesday, Sept. 16th, 5:30 - 8:30 PM
Building E51 Room 095
MIT
At a moment when feminism’s relevance to the public sphere seems more urgent but also more contested than ever, this roundtable reflects on the promises and pitfalls of public feminisms. Bringing to bear their expertise, the invited participants address the possibilities of using film, social media, and popular writing as public forms of feminist intervention. In so doing, the discussion complicates questions of feminist engagements, their modalities, their “proper objects,” as well as troubles which feminisms stand in for Feminism proper and what counts as the public sphere. more »
Feminisms Unbound
Various dates, various locations at MIT
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 our contemporary moment. With four events in the series, it 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... more »
2014-2015 Events
Join the GCWS Workshop for Dissertation Writers in Women's and Gender Studies participants as the workshop students formally present their works in progress. more »
Feminist Pedagogy in a Digital Age: A Workshop on Teaching with Technology
The near-ubiquitous use of use of social media (and particularly networked and mobile communications technology in one form or another) by students and faculty invites questions about how these tools might be used in the classroom to facilitate dialogue and to foster collaborations between students and even across institutions. FemTechNet, a group of feminist academic scholars and teachers located within and beyond academe, has proposed... more »
Women Take the Reel Film Festival 2015
This annual film festival is a collaborative effort among Women's and Gender Studies departments involved in the Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies (as well as select institutions/universities aligned with its mission) that features films directed by women and about issues relating to gender, race, sexuality, class and/or feminism.
The focus is on intellectual investigation of these issues as well as visibility for female directors, and so every film is accompanied by a Q&A and discussion with either the film director, producer, or a faculty member from the film screening's host institution host institution. more »
This is a symposium organized by GCWS graduate students that will feature graduate student work in the field of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. This symposium, on Saturday, March 28, 2015, is an interdisciplinary inquiry rooted in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies that explores the simultaneous nature of hyper visibility and invisibility. As intelligibility is relative to (in)visibility, how/why are certain identities (un)intelligible and made invisible or hypervisible? How do the intersections that individuals inhabit become legible through systems of power? more »
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 our contemporary moment. It 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. more »
Next in Series:
Sexualities, States, Governance
Wednesday, November 12, 2014: 5:30 – 7:30 PM
Location: The Moore Room, Building 6 Room 321, MIT Campus more »
Gender, Health, and Marginalization
Reproductive Justice and the Abortion Wars: Public Lecture by Loretta Ross
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 @ 7:00 PM more »
Anita: Speaking Truth to Power (2013) Film Screening
w/ Discussion by Dr. Evelynn Hammonds
Wednesday, November 5 @ 7 PM more »
2015 Women Take the Reel Film Festival
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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
