Barnard Center for Research on Women

In this panel, young feminist activists discuss their areas of interest, what they see as the major challenges for feminist movements, how organizing today compares to that by previous generations, intersections between feminism and other approaches to social justice, and how to build coalitions that can enact structural change. Panelists include Dior Vargas, Sydnie Mosley '07, and Julie Zeilinger '15. The discussion also included Jessica Danforth, who is not included in the recording at her request. Dina Tyson '13 moderated the panel.

Sonia Pierre (1963-2011), mobilized communities in the Dominican Republic to advocate for citizenship and human rights for Dominicans of Haitian descent. As the director of Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitiana (MUDHA), she used legal challenges in domestic and international courts to defend the citizenship rights of first and second generation children born on Dominican soil. This panel highlights the activism of young women who are moving forward with Sonia Pierre's work on behalf of Dominicans of Haitian descent, and addresses the question of how international pressure impacts efforts by marginalized groups to demand recognition. Panelists include Manuela (Solange) Pierre, Sonia Pierre’s oldest daughter, and the founder and coordinator of the Dominican Network of Young African Descendants (Red Dominicana de Jóvenes Afrodescendientes); Ninaj Raoul, the Executive Director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees; Monisha Bajaj, Associate Professor of International and Comparative Education at Teachers College; Minerva Leticia Solange, daughter of Sonia Pierre; and Miriam Neptune (moderator), video producer and director of Birthright Crisis, an award-winning documentary depicting the cycle of deportation and violence faced by Dominicans of Haitian descent.

The 2012-13 Africana Distinguished Alumna Series honors one of Barnard’s most distinguished African American alumnae: Ntozake Shange '70. A playwright, poet, and novelist of startling originality, Shange is best known for her 1975 Obie Award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Following the screening of Tyler Perry’s acclaimed 2010 film version of the play, Ms. Shange speaks candidly with Soyica Diggs Colbert, assistant professor of English at Dartmouth College, and Monica Miller, associate professor of English at Barnard, about her groundbreaking work and its controversial adaptation to the screen.

Since visual images invoke the spectator's experience of unmediated access to the inner world of the subject, the evocative power of photographic images may readily reproduce forms of voyeurism. This under-theorizing becomes particularly problematic in projects that document the lives of migratory and marginalized women. Drawing on several decades of prior field research and documentary film projects, Professor Haaken presents a study carried out with women refugee and asylum-seekers in the UK. In discussing photographic images from the study, Haaken provides a framework for working through a series of ethical, political, and methodological dilemmas. She draws on psychoanalytic feminist theory, critical psychology, and participatory action research methods to argue for the importance of an approach to the visual that includes the dynamics of spectatorship as well as the dynamics of the research setting itself as an affectively rich and conflicted site of knowledge production.

Celebrating the release of The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Topside Press, 2012), four of the volume's contributors, Ryka Aoki, Imogen Binnie, Red Durkin, and Donna Ostrowsky come together to read from their work. Following the readings, the writers discuss future of literature, the complex ways that literary trans narratives will evolve in years to come, and their own stories of characters navigating relationships, gender, family, work, race, and more. This panel, co-sponsored by Barnard Library, Topside Press, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women, is moderated by Reina Gossett.

Some writers have celebrated a new biological citizenship arising from individuals' unprecedented ability to manage their health at the molecular level. In this year’s Helen Pond McIntyre '48 lecture, Dorothy Roberts examines the role of race and gender in the construction of this new biocitizen in light of the current expansion of race-based, reproductive, and genetic biotechnologies along with neoliberal reliance on private resources for people's welfare. Roberts argues that science, big business, and politics are converging to support a molecularized understanding of race, health, and citizenship that ultimately helps to preserve inequities. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, Dorothy Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge/George A. Weiss University Professor, the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and Professor of Sociology at University of Pennsylvania.

Feminist writers discuss what the new digital landscape means for them - how to deal with a constant barrage of critiques and suggestions, how race and gender impact the ways communities form online, the ethics of live-tweeting academic conferences, and more. From #twittergate to the necessary limitations of identity in digital networks, these academics and journalists take a fresh look at the complicated practice of performing feminist labor online. Panelists include Brittney Cooper, Gail Drakes, Dana Goldstein, Courtney Martin, and Renina Jarmon in this discussion moderated by Jonathan Beller.

Dr. Ziba Mir-Hosseini is a legal anthropologist specializing in Islamic law, gender, and development. She is currently Professorial Research Associate at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, University of London. In this lecture, Dr. Mir-Hosseini explores the Islamic feminist movement's potential for changing the terms of debates over Islam and gender, arguing that the real battle is between patriarchy and despotism on the one hand, and gender equality and democracy on the other.

The second event in BCRW's newly inaugurated Salon Series features Karla FC Holloway, Tina Campt, Farah Griffin, Saidiya Hartman, Rebecca Jordan-Young, and Alondra Nelson. These scholars, whose expertise lies at the cross-section of law, race, gender, and bioethics, respond to Karla FC Holloway’s new book, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics, an important and groundbreaking work that examines instances where medical issues and information that would usually be seen as intimate, private matters are forced into the public sphere, calling for a new cultural bioethics that attends to the complex histories of race, gender, and class in the US.

How does a shift from focusing on the 'autonomous and independent subject' to a framework of shared vulnerability transform intellectual, legal, and activist terrains? This interdisciplinary panel explores how our ideas of personhood, the state, politics, organizing, religion, consciousness, arts, and ethics change when vulnerability becomes the lens through which we examine them, focusing particularly on relationships of interdependence and structural inequality. Panelists include Martha Albertson Fineman, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Colin Dayan, and Ilaria Vanni. This discussion, moderated by Elizabeth Castelli, took place at The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2012, Vulnerability: The Human and the Humanities.

BCRW Acting Director Elizabeth Castelli delivers opening remarks at The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2012, Vulnerability: The Human and the Humanities.

Advice about diet and health is extraordinarily controversial for reasons of science and politics. Human nutritional science is difficult to conduct and interpret. Advice about what to eat affects the ability of food companies to sell products. The result is cacophony in the marketplace and unnecessary confusion about dietary matters. Will better science solve this problem? Does the food industry have a role to play in promoting healthful food choices? Or are food companies analogous to cigarette companies in the way they deal with nutrition advocacy? Food expert Marion Nestle addresses such questions through relevant examples in this presentation. Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003. She is also Professor of Sociology at NYU and Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She is the author of three prize-winning books: Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health; Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety; and What to Eat. She also has written two books about pet food, Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine and Feed Your Pet Right (with Malden Nesheim). Her most recent book, released in March 2012, is Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics (also with Dr. Nesheim).

The recently published anthology Voices of A Women's Health Movement (Seven Stories Press, 2012), co-edited by women's health advocate Barbara Seaman (1935-2008) and her longtime collaborator Laura Eldridge, brings together an essential collection of essays, interviews, and commentary by leading activists, writers, doctors and sociologists on topics ranging across reproductive rights, sex and orgasm, activism, motherhood, and birth control. In this panel discussion, some of the book's contributors discuss the rich history of this movement and its continued significance in struggles for reproductive health today. Panelists include Laura Eldridge '01, Helen Lowery, Lauren Porsch '01, Leonore Tiefer, and Irene Xanthoudakis '01. This discussion took place on February 15, 2012 at Barnard College in New York City.

How much do you know about the food you eat? Food production and the politics surrounding it have an enormous impact on our environment and economy. In recent years, scientists and activists have raised concerns about the sustainability and security of our food systems here in the US and around the world, but food has always been a driving force in international and domestic policy. Barnard faculty members Kim F. Hall, Deborah Valenze, Paige West, and Hilary Callahan engage in an interdisciplinary conversation about the past and present social, geopolitical, rhetorical, and environmental factors that influence how food - including items as seemingly ordinary as sugar, coffee, milk, and corn - shapes culture and politics in this discussion moderated by Elizabeth Castelli.

Since the women's health movement blossomed in the 1970s, there has been an ever-increasing trend toward examining all aspects of human health for evidence of sex differences. But some of the movement's major achievements - such as a federal mandate to collect and analyze data by sex in all health research - may paradoxically turn out to be obstacles for understanding health differences between and within sex/gender groups. Building on her earlier work in Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences and using examples from both physical and mental health research, this 2011 Silver Science lecture by Rebecca Jordan-Young reviews some basic questions about measurement in "sex-specific" medicine that could revolutionize the field and yield research and clinical practice that is actually far more specific and scientific than the current approach. What kind of variable is "sex," and can it be measured separately from "gender"? When we have information on specific biological mechanisms underlying health differences, what does the variable "sex" add to our analyses? Introduced by BCRW Acting Director Elizabeth Castelli, Rebecca Jordan-Young delivered this lecture on October 11, 2011.

From writing new constitutions to serving in local and national governance to sustaining NGOs and grassroots organizations to making policy changes, women and feminist groups in Africa are doing the difficult work of pushing local, state and international bodies to implement and guarantee gender equality and justice at every level. A group of scholars and activists draw on their experience in multiple regions of Africa, discussing how women are participating in the rebuilding of their societies - whether in post-conflict contexts or in times of deep political transformation during revolutions, post- revolutionary periods and transitions to democracy. Panelists include Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University), Rabab El Mahdi (American University in Cairo), Jane Bennett (African Gender Institute), and Penelope Andrews (CUNY School of Law). This discussion, moderated by Rosalind Morris (Columbia University), took place on the second day of Activism and the Academy: Celebrating 40 Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action, a two-day conference held September 23-24, 2011 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Does a feminist perspective limit researchers' abilities to see and interpret empirical realities? What happens when these perspectives clash with the reality of field observations? A group of ethnographers discuss how their feminist perspectives can both limit and enhance their ability to analyze power structures and evaluate social change. Panelists include Orit Avishai (Fordham University) and Lynne Gerber (University of California, Berkeley). This discussion, moderated by Margot Weiss (Wesleyan University), took place on the second took place on the second day of Activism and the Academy: Celebrating 40 Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action, a two-day conference held September 23-24, 2011 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

What does it mean to be an activist researcher? What are some of the challenges of conducting research about social movements and within activist communities? Drawing on ethnographic and teaching experiences, panelists discuss their research on different communities and social movements, and how their roles as activist researchers affect this work. Panelists include Roberta Villalon (St. John's University), Jennifer Rogers (Long Island University), Nikki McGary (University of Connecticut), Barbara Gurr (University of Connecticut), and Kathleen Coll (Stanford University). This discussion, moderated by Nancy Naples (University of Connecticut), took place on the second took place on the second day of Activism and the Academy: Celebrating 40 Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action, a two-day conference held September 23-24, 2011 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Colleges and universities are experiencing the effects of the economic downturn and our political climate in numerous ways. This panel of students and faculty discuss how activists on their campuses are working to combat budget cuts and the undermining of the public sector, provide alternatives to neoliberal restructuring in higher education, and fight against racism and gender inequities. Panelists include Abigail Boggs (University of California, Davis), Debanuj Dasgupta (Ohio State University), Stephanie Luce (Murphy Institute, CUNY), Sandra K. Soto (University of Arizona), and Jesse Kadjo (Loyola University). This discussion, moderated by Catherine Sameh (BCRW), took place on the second took place on the second day of Activism and the Academy: Celebrating 40 Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action, a two-day conference held September 23-24, 2011 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

What types of projects are possible when scholars and activists work together? Scholars in the Gender Studies Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico have formed partnerships with activist groups to address issues like state oppression and violence, struggles for land rights and indigenous rights, and gender equity both within the University and in the community at large. Scholar and activist participants in these projects discuss how they've combined traditional academic tools with new ways of intervention to create change. Panelists include Marisa Belausteguigoitia Rius, Rian Lozano de la Pola, Lorena Wolffer and Helena Lopez. This discussion, moderated by Margaret Cerullo, took place on the second day of Activism and the Academy: Celebrating 40 Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action, a two-day conference held September 23-24, 2011 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Barnard Center for Research on Women.