NEW FACES IN FMST | GRADUATE NEWS | UNDERGRADUATE NEWS |
FACULTY NEWS | FMST EVENTS | UPCOMING DEADLINES
CHAIR’S LETTER: Fall 2018
Welcome to the new academic year! The feminist community has a great deal to celebrate, and much to give us pause.
First, the good news. We are proud to welcome our newest faculty member, Jenny Kelly, in Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies! Look for her classes this year on Militarism & Tourism and Racial & Gender Formations in the US. We are also thrilled to welcome two new grad students – Gabriel Evans and Krizia Puig. We also are thankful that Noya Kansky stepped up as Grad Representative this year, to serve as liaison between faculty and students. And we are happy to have a new undergrad peer advisor, Mia Aniceto.
It is timely that Feminist Studies announces the Bettina Aptheker Award for Sexual, Gendered, and Racial Violence. More details on this award and funding opportunities will be coming soon. Bettina is one of UCSC’s legendary professors, and this award marks her incredible legacy.
This fellowship in support of undergraduate and graduate research on sexual violence comes at a particularly trying time as the campus and the nation continue to grapple with cases of sexual abuse against women, trans, and non-binary people. We support the students who bravely came forward, and acknowledge the many years of struggle it took to speak out against non consensual sexual relations committed by UCSC professor Gopal Balakrishnan, who a Title IX investigation has confirmed violated the UC Policy on Sexual Harassment. We are in strong support of a decisive campus decision to address this behavior. I want to acknowledge, too, that many of us felt the collective anger, pain, and bravery of women such as Christine Blasey Ford who recently testified against Brett Kavanaugh. We remain hopeful that ruptures in the social fabric expose new and continuing forms of patriarchal violence, leading to new demands and understandings that do not have to return us to a culture of sexual conservatism or prohibition. Adelante!
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Associate Professor & Chair, Feminist Studies, UCSC
NEW FACES IN FEMINIST STUDIES
THE 2018 FMST GRAD COHORT
Say hello to our new 2018 FMST grad students:
Krizia Puig is a trans disabled queer migrant theorist/artivist born in Venezuela. They graduated with an M.A. in Women's Studies and a Graduate Certificate in LGBT Studies from San Diego State University, where they worked as a Lecturer until Spring 2018. Krizia also has an M.A. in Performing Arts (URJC-Spain) and a B.A. in Media Studies (UCAB-Venezuela). They have worked as a writer, editor, dramaturgist, curator, actor/performer, and director in more than 30 cultural projects in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. Their current research integrates animal biology, high-tech, performance art, trauma studies, magic realism(s), and Latin American espiritismo to theorize/ experiment with future notions of love, healing, freedom, and revolution. For more than 15 years – while working as a college professor, workshop facilitator, and/or community organizer – Krizia has passionately focused on developing teaching methodologies that foster creative disruption and honor the equal value of our thoughts and feelings as ways of knowing.
Gabriel Evans is from London, U.K. Gabe has a Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Manchester and has since been living/working in London and elsewhere as a journalist, gardener, in youth work and set design. She has organised with various political groups, primarily Sisters Uncut, a radical feminist direct action group fighting gendered, sexual and state violence in the context of U.K. austerity. Her research is focused on historical geographies, queer studies, space and the city, neoliberalism, age, generation and cohort and disability studies.
WELCOME ASSISTANT PROFESSOR JENNIFER KELLY!
We are very pleased to introduce Jennifer Kelly, Assistant Professor in Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. Jenny is on campus this fall and will begin teaching in the winter quarter.
Jenny received her Ph.D. in American Studies with a Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of Texas at Austin, and her bachelor’s degree in Feminist Studies and Literature from UCSC. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. She is currently completing the manuscript for her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine, a multi-sited ethnographic study of solidarity tourism in Palestine drawing from research completed as a 2012-13 Palestinian American Research Center Fellow. Jenny analyzes the ways in which solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. Please join us in welcoming Jenny back to UCSC!
MEET OUR NEW UNDERGRAD PEER ADVISOR
Mia Aniceto has joined us as Undergrad Peer Advisor this year. Mia is a third year FMST major and Education minor. She is a Pilipinx-identified first generation college student. Mia also is the
Programs and Outreach Intern for the Women's Center, the Vice Chair for Anakbayan Santa Cruz, and the Academic Coordinator under Bayanihan. She is eager to advise undergrads in the process of pursuing a FMST degree and open to listening to students' stories and experiences related to the department (or not). Mia can help navigate Academic Planning Sheets, assist in selecting classes for the major, and help research internship opportunities. She is very excited to meet fellow FMST undergrads and students who want to learn more about the department. Email Mia at fmstpeer@ucsc.edu.
Most of you already know our full-time FMST Undergrad Advisor, Anne Eickelberg. Have a question about FMST major requirements, concentrations, electives, and what courses you need to stay on track for graduation? Anne is your resource to discuss course scheduling and other issues as you work toward your degree. See Anne’s schedule for drop-in meetings below. You also can schedule an appointment via Slug Success at My.UCSC, or email questions to aeickelb@ucsc.edu.
GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS
RYAN KING WINS FUNDING TO BUILD FMST TRANSFERS PROGRAM
Ryan King was awarded a summer fellowship as part of the Chancellor's Summer Graduate nternship Program. Ryan’s project – Recruiting and Retaining Transfer Students in Feminist Studies/Humanities – focused on maintaining the momentum of outreach during the academic year through the summer to three local community colleges targeted for the Baskin Scholars Feminist Studies Transfers program.
FMST GRAD STUDENTS AWARDED THI FELLOWSHIPS
In June, just before the close of the academic year, The Humanities Institute announced 18 fellowships for 2018-19, awarded in support of UCSC faculty and graduate student research. THI supports research at all stages, with support for faculty research, preliminary graduate research, dissertation writing, and – new this year – the development of a digital research project.
Congratulations to FMST grad students who were awarded THI fellowships:
Summer Dissertation Fellows 2018-2019
Yizhou Guo – Project: "Postsocialist Youth and Online China"
Claire Urbanski – Project: "The Afterlife of Settler Colonial Incarceratioin: Archeological Excavation as Militarization in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands"
Public Fellows 2018-2019
Erin McElroy – Project: “Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire”
Lani Hanna – Project: “Freedom Archives”
SSRC-DPD Fellows 2018-2019
Vivian Underhill – Project: “Fracking, Groundwater, and Scientific Standards of Evidence in California's San Joaquin Valley”
FMST PROJECTS RECEIVE UCHRI MULTICAMPUS WORKING GROUP FUNDING
Congratulations to Erin McElroy and Eli Erlick, who were awarded grants through the University of California Humanities Research Institute for 2018-19 funding for two Multicampus Graduate Student Working Groups.
Erin’s group is working on a manuscript for publication – “Thinking From Oakland: Urban Study in the Town” – that will foreground and amplify representations of Oakland rooted in the city’s unique histories, geographies, and cultures of urban spatial politics. The project is specifically interested in understanding the city’s politics of race, space, and history in ways that challenge and expand the conventional frame of gentrification.
Eli is organizing the Transgender Studies Working Group, a collective of UC interdisciplinary humanities scholars who aim to complicate theorization of the political economy with the notion of transgender, mobilize the next generation of Trans Studies scholars, question the usages of trans as a pedagogy and methodology, and help create networks of academics and activists engaging in timely transgender issues.
FMST GRAD STUDENTS WRITING, SPEAKING, AND MUSIC MAKING!
Eli Erlick contributed a book chapter in "(Trans)forming Education: How Transgender Youth Are Leading the School Justice Movement" in Gender Diversity and LGBTQ Inclusion in Schools, Routledge, July 2018.
Noya Kansky, in collaboration with Jane Komori (HISC) and LuLing Osofsky (HAVC), is bringing the No-No Boy Project to Santa Cruz. No-No Boy is a musical multimedia performance by Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama, Ph.D. students from Brown University. Inspired by interviews with World War II Japanese incarceration camp survivors, his own family’s history in the Vietnam War, and other stories of Asian American experience, Saporiti has transformed his doctoral research into folk songs to bring these stories to a broader audience. Alongside Aoyama, whose family was incarcerated at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, one of 10 Japanese American concentration camps, No-No Boy aims to shine a light on experiences that have remained largely hidden in the American consciousness. More info about No-No Boy’s 2018 Tour here, and check out their trailer here. See event info below.
Erin McElroy received an Antipode Scholar-Activist Award for 2018.
Krizia Puig recently co-founded The Queer Futures Collective, a radically vulnerable, trans-centered multimedia knowledge hub/activist laboratory exploring the intersections of crip technoscience, arts, transformative pedagogies, and spiritual activisms in practice(s) of Future Making.
Krizia will present their paper “My Big Fat Summer as a Skinny Hot Chick in Second Life: Thinnest Pleasures/Avatarian Disruptions” at the UCLA QGrad conference on October 26. Krizia also will be talking about Virtual Reality and Sexual Technologies at San José State University on November 1.
Veronika Zablotsky will serve as the TA Trainer in Feminist Studies this fall. In August 2018, Veronika organized a panel on “Gender and Sovereignty in Eurasia” in the Normative Political Theory Division at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Boston. She presented a paper on “Geopolitics and the Making of Eurasia” to explore imperial conceptions of Eurasia in feminist and postcolonial perspective.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT NEWS
FMST STUDENTS TAKE HOME DEAN’S UNDERGRAD AWARDS
Feminist Studies made a strong showing in the 2018 Dean’s Undergraduate Awards, announced last May. Each year, 10 awards are granted in each of UCSC’s five academic divisions for an outstanding senior thesis or project completed during the academic year. Lauded by Humanities Dean Tyler Stovall for the high caliber of their research projects, three FMST students received a Dean’s Award; one of them, Rosa Lee Patterson, went on to win a Chancellor’s Award:
Deanna Corrine Duffy, “South Asian Cultural Productions and the Garden”
Isabella Ann Nguyen, “Trials of Multicultural Liberalism: A Visual Examination of Occupy Wall Street’s Resistance Art and Settler Colonial Expressions of Power”
Rosa Lee Patterson, “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party”
Applications for the 2019 Dean’s Undergrad Awards open February 2019, with a final due date in early April 2019. Go to dca.ue.ucsc.edu for more info about the Dean's Undergraduate, Chancellor's Undergraduate, and Steck Awards.
NEW COURSE AIMS TO EASE TRANSFER STUDENTS INTO FEMINIST STUDIES
A new Feminist Methodologies course (FMST 75) has been added this Fall specifically tailored for FMST transfer students. FMST graduate student Taylor Wondergem is teaching the course with support from UCSC’s Baskin Scholars Feminist Studies Transfer program. Specific methodological debates will vary each year but may include feminist theorizing of experience, epistemology, situated knowledges, and notions of truth and the real. Feminist methods may include transnational approaches, as well as queer, decolonial, postcolonial, and critical race methodologies.
KORET SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITY
FMST students are encouraged to apply for a $2,000 Koret Undergraduate Research Scholarship! Koret scholarships are available to UCSC students in any major or discipline who propose an undergraduate research project or creative activity. Up to 64 scholarships will be awarded. For more details and to apply, visit koretscholars.ucsc.edu. Deadline to apply: October 31, 2018.
FACULTY NEWS
AFRICANA STUDIES FACULTY SEARCH
Feminist Studies is looking to fill a new position of Associate or early Full Professor in Africana Feminist Studies. We seek a scholar with a demonstrated track record of creativity and excellence in problem- and question-driven scholarship on Africa and/or the African Diaspora, capaciously construed, who will contribute to the Department's undergraduate major and Ph.D. program.
We welcome candidates who would complement or deepen department strengths in intellectual and disciplinary history, postcolonial and poststructuralist engagements with language and power, critical area studies, transnational cultural studies, and feminist science and technology studies, as well as candidates who might push departmental forms of expertise in new directions and challenges.
Full consideration given to applications completed by November 1, 2018. Applications received after this date will be considered only if the position has not been filled. APPLICATION AND INFO AT (https://recruit.ucsc.edu/apply/JPF00615). Please share widely!
NEDA ATANASOSKI PROMOTED TO FULL PROFESSOR
Congratulations to Neda Atanasoski, who was promoted to full Professor in Spring 2018.
Neda came to UCSC as an Associate Professor in 2008. In addition to her Professorship in FMST, Neda is the interim FMST Grad Director until Neel Ahuja returns in Winter, and also is Director of the CRES program. She also is affiliated with UCSC’s Film & Digital Media department.
Neda is the author (with co-author Kalindi Vora) of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (forthcoming, Duke University Press, 2019) and Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
BETTINA APTHEKER REMEMBERS TURBULENT 1960s ON KPIX-TV AND FILMS A MOOC FOR edX
As part of its celebration of 70 Years of Stories, KPIX-TV aired a series of reports about news events that helped define the San Francisco Bay Area. One segment focused on the student protests that rocked campuses in the 1960s, featuring interviews with UCSC Professor Bettina Aptheker, who was a prominent figure in the Free Speech Movement and anti-war protests at UC-Berkeley. Bettina was one of three people interviewed, including Mark Buell, a high school senior when he witnessed students being firehosed at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings at San Francisco City Hall, and Dr. Ramona Tascoe, who was a sophomore at San Francisco State and Secretary of the Black Students Union in 1968. View the interviews and footage from the 1960 campus protests here.
Over the summer, Bettina also filmed four sessions of FMST 20, adapted from her Feminism & Social Justice syllabus as a Massive Open Online Course available free through MOOC.org. An extension of edX, founded by Harvard University and M.I.T., MOOC.org is a non-profit, open-source learning destination offering online courses from more than 100 member institutions comprised of leading universities and colleges, and a diverse group of prominent organizations around the world.
NEW WORK FROM FMST FACULTY
Several of our FMST colleagues have had new work published recently:
Neda Atanasoski
"‘Seeing justice to be done’: the documentaries of the ICTY and the visual politics of European value(s)," Transnational Cinemas9(1): 67-84 (2018).
“The Surrogate Effect: Technoliberalism and Whiteness in a ‘Post’ Labor Era,” co-authored with Kalindi Vora, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 4(1): 1-13, 2018.
“Postsocialism and the Afterlives of Revolution: Impossible Spaces of Dissent,” co-authored with Erin McElroy, Reframing Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories Thought on the Edge, ed. Nicoletta Pireddu (Palgrave Macmillan), pgs. 273-297.
Nick Mitchell
"Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus," co-authored with Abigail Boggs, Feminist Studies, Fall 2018.
FMST EVENTS
October 24 – Cultural Studies Colloquia – 12noon – H1 room 210
Tropical Exceptions: Racial Logics in Twentieth Century Intergovernmental Age of Consent Debates – Ashwini Tambe, Associate Professor, Department of Women’s Studies, University of Maryland. Discussing two UN cases, Dr. Tambe traces how intergovernmental efforts at setting common age standards for sexual consent and marriage occasioned elaborate posturing and coding of racial difference. Presented by the UCSC Center for Emerging Worlds and Feminist Studies.
Grad Workshop: “Demystifying Academic Publishing” – 2-4pm – H1 room 202
Ashwini Tambe is also Editorial Director of Feminist Studies, a journal for interdisciplinary feminist scholarship and creative expression. She will conduct this workshop for grad students.
October 28 – No-No Boy Project – 7pm – Radius Gallery at The Tannery, Santa Cruz
No-No Boy present a free multimedia concert performed by Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama, Ph.D. students from Brown University. Free and open to the public.
October 29 – No-No Boy Workshop – 11:30am to 1:30pm – H1 room 202
Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama host an on-campus workshop about their approach to art, scholarship, and activism. Keep your eyes open for emails about the workshop and how to RSVP.
November 28, 2018 – Science & Justice Research Center – 4-6pm – Engineering 2, room 599
Algorithms, Mobility and Justice –FMST professor Neda Atanasoski joins Nassim JafariNaimi (Assistant Professor, Digital Media, Georgia Tech School of Literature, Media & Communication and director of the Design & Social Interaction Studio) and Abhradeep Guha Thakurta (Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, UCSC) to explore whether moral algorithms are a reasonable solution for taking advantage of the life-saving potential of self-driving cars. Co-sponsored by Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, and The Humanities Institute’s Data and Democracy Initiative.
January 17, 2019 – Feminist Studies Colloquium – 1:30-3:30pm – H1 room 210
Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity – Ralina L. Joseph, Director of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity (CCDE) and Associate Professor in the Departments of Communication and American Ethnic Studies and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at University of Washington. Dr. Joseph looks at how, in the First Black First Lady era, African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse – the media-propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over, and that race and racism no longer affect the everyday lives of both whites and people of color – in order to resist its very tenets.
UPCOMING DEADLINES
Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Summer Workshop – Deadline: September 30, 2018
This pre-doctoral program aims to help prepare doctoral students for careers both within and outside the academy through a series of summer workshops. THI is now accepting applications for the Summer 2019 workshop, to be held in Chicago, July 15-August 2, 2019. More info here.
Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship – Deadline: October 15, 2018
The Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies encourages original and significant research about women that crosses disciplinary, regional, or cultural boundaries. Learn more at woodrow.org/womens-studies
Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference – Deadline: October 28, 2018
The UCLA Center for the Study of Women invites submissions of paper, poster, and roundtable proposals for its 29th Annual Conference on February 22, 2019. This year’s conference theme is Feminists Confronting the Carceral State. View the Call for Proposals.
Patriarchy and Political Theology Workshop – Deadline: October 30, 2018
Villanova University’s Political Theology Project and the Political Theology Network invite applications for this two-day workshop, March 30-31, 2019. What can scholars of political theology learn from gender studies? This workshop will explore new methods for thinking about and beyond patriarchy and political theology. More info here.
Sexuality and Borders Symposium – Deadline: November 1, 2018
New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication invites proposals for this two-day symposium, April 4-5, 2019. Co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, the DFG-funded research training group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” (University of Potsdam, Germany), and supported by LSE’s Department of Gender Studies. More info here.
38th Annual Gender Studies Symposium – Deadline: November 2, 2018
Who Cares? will explore the concept of care and the gendered politics embedded within it. The symposium will be held at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR, March 13-15, 2019. Submissions invited for panel discussions, individual papers, interactive workshops, and artistic productions. More info here.
2019 Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship – Deadline: November 7, 2018
The IDRF program supports scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences pursuing research that advances knowledge about non-US cultures and societies. The program is open to grad students regardless of citizenship. More info here.
2019 Yale Pettit Doctoral Fellowship Workshop – Deadline: February 15, 2019
The Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship in Lesbian Studies at Yale University welcomes applications for the 2019 Doctoral Dissertation Workshop, May 13-17, 2019 in New Haven, CT. This biennial three-day workshop will focus on scholarship at the intersection of queer studies, LGBT studies, and religious studies, with fellows receiving feedback from two faculty mentors, Professors Kathryn Lofton and Linn Tonstad. Afterward, fellows will stay an additional two days to write and take advantage of Yale University libraries and resources. Application and instructions for submission here.
