We have four candidates visiting for the Feminist Africana Studies search on four Tuesdays in February and early March. All talks will take place from 1:30-3:00. More info will be sent prior to each visit. 

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UCSC’s Feminist Studies department was a vibrant presence at the annual National Women’s Studies Association conference, with many faculty and grad students traveling to Atlanta to speak and participate on panels. The theme of the November 2018 conference was Imagining Justice: Feminist visions of freedom, dream making and the radical politics of futures. Several FMST grad students also presented at the 2018 American Studies Association Conference in November.

Anjali Arondekar addressed geopolitics and trans studies in Geo/objects, or Area Impossible.

Neda Atanasoski and collaborator Kalindi Vora presented Reproducing the Robot: Automation and the Future of Domestic Labor.

Angela Davis, UCSC Emerita in Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness, was on a Plenary Panel discussing "Global 1968: A world on fire, remembering 1968 and looking to the future."

Gina Dent was on a Presidential Session panel, "Imagining a World Without Prisons: Through a Feminist Lens." In a separate talk, Gina presented her research on Cachoera, Brazil: Diaspora’s Negative Project.

Jenny Kelly presented Welcome to Gaza: The Politics of Invitation and the Right to Tourism on a panel she organized titled “Art against Empire: Palestinian Visions of Freedom under Siege and Settlement.” Jenny also presented her paper on an ASA panel she co-organized with Emily Hue (UCR) titled "Emergent Acts: Colonial Logics and Transnational Performances of Resistance.”

Madhavi Murty engaged with Ralina Joseph’s book, Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity, on a panel on “Re-imagining Resistance.”

FMST Graduate Student Speakers

Dana Ahern, in a group exploring “Emerging Futurities,” discussed his work on ReMembering and ReQueering the Trans Body.

Jessica Calvanico presented her research on Histories of Disaster and Carceral Girlhoods in Segregated New Orleans Post-Katrina as part of a panel on “Transforming Justice & Imagining Futurities: Innovative Approaches to Black Girls’ Studies in Carceral & Settler States." Jessica also shared her research on hurricanes and carceral girlhood in New Orleans in an ASA panel on "Racial Capitalism, Environmental Capitalism, and Survival in the South."

Eli Erlick presented a talk on Transmisogyny and Its Discontents. Eli also participated in two panels at the ASA Conference: "Students' Committee: Emerging Scholars and Graduate Students in and Beyond Crisis" and "Identity Politics."

Lani Hanna presented Money Talks (And Sees): What funding reveals about labor and knowledge production.

Noya Kansky explored “The Question of Palestine": The Epistemic Containment of Palestine as Object.

Krizia Puig presented Ode to Harmony’s Eyes: Erotic Robotics and The Mass Production of Lovable Machines in a panel on “Tinkering with the Human: Technologies Defining the Self and Other Queer/Crip Premonitions.”

Elana Santana shared her research on Seeking Sanctuary: Feminist Ethics of Care and the Politics of Wolf Recovery.

Claire Urbanski co-convened a panel at ASA titled “(Re)Emergent Bones: Settler Colonial Spaces and the Accumulation of Human Remains." Claire presented her paper, Settler Surveillance and Sacred Formations: Shellmound Desecration and Colonial Occupation in the SF Bay Area.

Taylor Wondergem, in the group discussing “Emerging Futurities,” presented Authorizing Violence at the Nexus of Liberalism, Warfare, and the Human. Taylor also presented Contesting and Colluding with the Homogenizing Force of Liberalism: The (Im)possibilities and Potentials of Feminist Studies.

GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS 

BEYOND NWSA: GRAD STUDENTS WRITING, SPEAKING + WINNING AWARDS

Lani Hanna is one of four Humanities grad students selected to lead undergraduate courses focused on The Humanities Institute’s 2018-19 theme: Data and Democracy. The GSIs will collaborate to develop a cross-disciplinary syllabus to be taught Spring 2019 at Crown, Porter, Rachel Carson, and Stevenson Colleges. More info about the THI Graduate Public Scholarship program here - https://thi.ucsc.edu/thi-supports-graduate-student-initiatives-focused-publicscholarship/ 

Claire Urbanski was named a 2019 Graduate Pedagogy Fellow by the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL) and will work with CITL and the Feminist Studies department to create an enhanced pedagogy program for FMST TAs.

Veronika Zablotsky is poised to defend her dissertation, Governing Armenia: The Making of Global Diaspora in Asia Minor, in Spring 2019. Veronika welcomes any relevant leads on jobs and postdoctoral fellowship opportunities in and beyond Feminist Studies. In Fall 2018, Veronika mentored beginning FMST teaching assistants as a TA trainer and cofacilitated a two-part workshop series for interdisciplinary dissertation writers that she developed for THI and CITL in collaboration with Nadia Roche (Sociology). In Winter 2019, Veronica is serving as a GSR and will conduct a study she proposed to the Graduate Division, the Division of Student Success, and the Division of Global Engagement to assess whether existing support meets the needs of international graduate students at UCSC. She will be holding focus group discussions in the first or second week of February 2019. If you are an international PhD student and would like to participate, please get in touch via email: vzablots@ucsc.edu.

 

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT NEWS

FMST UNDERGRADS WIN THI RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS

Two Feminist Studies majors – Natalie Gonzales and Summer Al-Saleh –recently learned that they were awarded 2018-19 Undergraduate Research Fellowships from The Humanities Institute. Natalie was selected for her project titled, Archiving the Future through the Digital: Redesigning the Human through Indigenous and Decolonial Technoscientific Imaginaries. Summer’s project was Gaza’s Great March of Return: Mapping Convergences Between the Politics of Human Rights Organizations & the Logic of the Settler-Colonial State. They will present their projects during the poster presentation session at the Humanities Spring Awards event on June 7.

FMST UNDERGRAD WORKS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Roya Visconti, FMST and Legal Studies double major, spent Summer 2018 in Cape Town, South Africa, on an internship with the South African Human Rights Commission, funded in part by the FMST Departmet.

"The education I've received in the past three years from the Feminist and Legal Studies Departments forced me to critically analyze the way the South African government, in the wake of apartheid, has attempted to effectuate large scale social change through legislation, as well as to compare similar efforts to do the same by the government here, in America."

Read more about Roya's summer experience here - https://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/newsevents/department-news/visconti-undergrad-scholarship.html. Learn more about other undergrad scholarship opportunities at https://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/undergraduate/undergradawards/index.html. 

BASKIN FEMINIST TRANSFERS SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENTS ANNOUNCED

Three transfer students from local community colleges have been awarded scholarships as part of the Baskin Feminist Scholars Transfer program. The 2018-2019 recipients, currently enrolled as FMST juniors, are Kayl Bourgault, Shanti Gail Kumar, and Isela Reyes. Please offer them a warm welcome and congratulations when you see them!

The Baskin FMST scholarship is open to transfer students from Cabrillo College, De Anza College, and Monterey Peninsula College who have demonstrated commitment to feminist social justice work and meet academic merit and financial need standards. More info about the program at https://feministstudies.ucsc.edu/undergraduate/transfer-info.html. 

FMST ALUMNI PROFILE: FROM WOMEN'S STUDIES TO PUBLIC HEALTH

UCSC alumnus Andrew Woodruff, who graduated with a double major in Feminist Studies and Microbiology, was recently profiled in his local community newspaper. After 12 years working in public health-related jobs in San Francisco, Andrew is now Director of the Plumas County Public Health Department in the Sierra foothills town of Quincy, CA. Read the full story at http://www.plumasnews.com/introducing-plumas-county-public-health-director-woodruff/    

FACULTY NEWS

IN MEMORIAM: HELENE MOGLEN, 1936-2018

Helene Moglen was a fierce presence at UCSC. One of the early founders of what was formerly the Women's Studies Department, the Professor Emerita of Literature and Women's Studies and former Dean of Humanities and Arts died peacefully at her home in Santa Cruz on October 18. She was 82.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, Helene earned a B.A. at Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in English Literature at Yale. She began teaching English Literature at NYU in 1966, and then at SUNY Purchase, where she founded the first Women’s Studies program with feminist colleagues.

Helene came to UCSC in 1978 as a Professor of Literature and Dean of the Humanities, the first woman dean in the UC system. From 1984-1989, she was Chair of the Women's Studies program and founded and directed the Focused Research Activity (FRA) in Women’s/Feminist Studies. In 2003, she was appointed to the prestigious Presidential Chair in Literature, which allowed her to establish and fund the Institute of Advanced Feminist Research. Helene also was a well-known feminist literary scholar; she published four monographs and co-edited five collections exploring the intersection of literature and feminism.

Helene retired in 2008 but remained engaged in teaching and mentoring grad students and junior faculty until 2013. Read an interview with Helene, “The Vicissitudes of a Feminist Administrator,” at https://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/helene-moglen. And learn more about her career accomplishments by following these links: https://bit.ly/2Cz1sCD and https://bit.ly/2Hlox1k. 

Donations in honor of Helene’s memory will be gratefully received by UCSC’s Center for Cultural Studies - https://bit.ly/2W5cjgW.

MEET OUR WINTER 2019 LECTURERS

Ceylan Cemali

Ceylan taught Sexuality & Globalization (FMST 40) in Fall and is teaching Transnational Migration (FMST 15/115) this Winter. 

Ceylan holds a BA in Philosophy from California State University, Fullerton and an MA in Women’s Studies from San Diego State University. In 2007, she earned her PhD from UCSC in History of Consciousness with her dissertation on Tight Space Sages and Story Tellers: A Yielding Ethnography of Art, Street and Non-Ordinary Childhoods in Turkey, for which she conducted art and writing workshops with Kurdish street children in Turkey and Romani paperpicker children living in squatter settlements.

Ceylan’s fields of research are Women and Gender Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and Area/Cultural/Transnational Studies, with emphasis on violence, social displacement, and forced migrations. Rooted in the tradition of social movements, national, race and gender liberation movements, women of color, (transnational) feminist and queer movements, her teaching emphasizes women's memoir, histories of women of color in the U.S, transnational feminist theory and liberatory pedagogy.

Ceylan grew up multi-ethnic/racial and multi-gendered in Istanbul in a family composed of Yemeni, Egyptian and Thessalonian populations of the Ottoman Empire, naturalized as Turkish. A youth athlete, she has taught martial arts since 2002.

Veda Popovici

Veda is teaching Feminist Theories (FMST 100) in Winter quarter and will teach Race, Sex & Technology (FMST 125) in Spring.

Veda grew up in a Romanian-Serbian-Moldavian lower middle-class household that embraced her as a queer vegan anarchist. An independent scholar and artist with local and regional activist and research engagements, Veda is based in Bucharest, Romania, where she received a Ph.D. in Art History and Theory in 2016 at the National University of Art. Her dissertation: National idea and nationalism in art of the Ceausescu period, was an analysis of intellectual discourses employing critical nationalism studies, decolonial thinking, and feminist methodologies, revealing that defining Europeaness and belonging to Western modernity is at the heart of all competing intellectual discourses on the nation.

Veda’s research reflects her long term interdisciplinary interests in intellectual genealogies, the intertwining of liberal, conservative and far-right ideas and the relationship between intellectuals with state structures. Her interests are paired with a continuous engagement in feminist, queer and anti-authoritarian activism as part of various collectives, self-publishing platforms, and grassroots groups anchored locally (in Bucharest) and regionally (in Eastern Europe). In the past 10 years, Veda has been part of and initiated intersectional feminist reading circles, an anarchist infoshop, a workers cooperative social space, and a radical housing justice initiative fighting evictions and gentrification.

NEW WORK FROM FMST FACULTY

Nick Mitchell published his essay "Diversity" in African American Keywords, edited by Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (New York: NYU Press, 2018).

Bettina Aptheker delivered her talk, "#METOO: The Long Struggle Against Sexual Violence," as a guest lecturer at two universities in November – Wellesley College’s Gender & Sexuality Studies Department and New York University’s Education Department in the Division of Social Sciences.

Karen Barad was an invited speaker at several conferences in Australia as part of her Fall 2018 Fulbright Scholarship:

• A talk on temporality and alterity for 4S, the Society of Social Studies of Science, in Sydney.
• Keynote address on nuclear refugeeism for the Anthropocene Campus conference in Melbourne.
• Keynote address on political technoscientific imaginaries at Symbiotica’s "Quite Frankly" Conference in Perth.

Karen also lectured at Deakin University, University of Tasmania; gave three International Master Classes at Deakin University and for Symbiotica in Perth; and was an invited respondent for three events in Melbourne: New Materialist Approaches to Educational Inequalities, Model Citizen Arts Conference, and Talking About Objects. Back in the US, Karen gave the keynote address at the Reading Matters conference at Princeton University.

Jenny Kelly published an essay, “Technologies of Empire and the Rejection of Warfare’s Refrains,” in Radical History Review (Issue 133, January 2019).

Madhavi Murty recently published two pieces:

• “Genealogies: Postcolonial Media Studies” Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring 2018.
• “Chandra Talpade Mohanty,” Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Studies, Oct 2018.

FMST EVENTS  

Feminist Africana Studies Job Talks – Save the Dates! February 5 // February 19 // February 26 // March 5 - 1:30-3 pm

Four candidates are visiting UCSC for the Feminist Africana Studies search. More info will be sent prior to each visit.

January 17 – Feminist Studies Colloquium – 1:30-3:30 pm - 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, University of Washington. Dr. Joseph looks at how African American women celebrities, cultural products, and audiences subversively used the tools of postracial discourse – the media propagated notion that race and race-based discrimination are over – in order to resist its very tenets.

February 13 - Works-in-Progress: Karen Barad - 4:00-5:30 pm, SJRC Common Room Oakes 231

Karen will discuss her research on matters of force, entangled nuclear colonialisms, quantum temporalities, and the otherwise of being. Before becoming a FMST Professor, Karen earned a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics. She is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.

February 21 – Feminist Studies Colloquium – 12:00-2:00 pm - H2 room 259

Burn It Down: Firebrand Feminism and the Legacy of Second-Wave Radical Feminism – The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dana Densmore, Breanne Fahs, Professor, University of Washington. This talk will consider the historical impact of secondwave radical feminism and its impact on contemporary iterations of collective forms of resistance, particularly around the subjects of feminist rage, sex and love, tactics of feminist resistance, and intergenerational knowledge-making.

March 1 – Feminist Studies Colloquium – 12:00-2:00 pm - H1 room 210

Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Associate Professor, University of Hawaii. A discussion of how the roots and routes of the US military are foundational to tourist itineraries, as well as how modern tourism is central to the mission of unilateral American militarism.

American Quarterly Publishing Workshop - 2:30-4:00 pm - H1 room 210

Dr. Gonzalez is managing editor of AQ and will conduct this workshop for grads interested in writing for the Quarterly.

March 6 – Surrogate Humanity Project, Neda Atanasoski & Kalindi Vora – 4:00-5:30 pm – Oakes 231

FMST Professor Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora are co-authors of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures, tracing the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system entrenched in racial capitalism and patriarchy. A graduate of UCSC’s History of Consciousness program, Vora is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at UC Davis and is Director of UCD's Feminist Research Institute. Presented by Science & Justice Research Center.

April 10 – Book Launch: Counterpoints: Bay Area Data and Stories for Resisting Displacement, Erin McElroy, FMST Graduate Student – 3:00-5:00 pm – H1 room 210

Counterpoints is the new print atlas by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP). The book, which will come out in 2020, brings together dozens of artists, activists, designers, and cartographers. Chapters include: Migration and Relocation; Indigenous Geographies; Evictions and Root Shock; Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism; Speculation and Speculative Futures; Carcerality and Abolition; and Transportation, Infrastructure, and Economy. Counterpoints encompasses geographies ranging from Sacramento to Santa Cruz in an effort to tell a regional story of gentrification, particularly as it is racialized and classed. More info at https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/counterpoints/. 

UPCOMING DEADLINES 

American Studies Association – Deadline: February 1, 2019

Call for Papers for the 2019 ASA Conference – November 7-10 in Honolulu – is now open. Find more info and guidelines on proposals for panels and individual papers here - https://www.theasa.net/annual-meeting/years-meeting/years-theme. 

Strauss Undergraduate Scholarship - Deadline: February 5, 2019

Sophomores and juniors are encouraged to apply for the $15,000 public service scholarship from the Donald A. Strauss Foundation, to pursue a project of public service and social change during their junior or senior year. More information at https://www.straussfoundation.org. 

Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development (SSRC-DPD) Award - Deadline: February 8, 2019

THI is soliciting applications for 12 graduate students to participate in the SSRC-DPD program, which supports dissertation proposal development. More info at https://thi.ucsc.edu/researchfellows/#funding 

Chancellor's Undergraduate Internship Program - Deadline: February 13, 2019

The recipient of this $8,000 intern scholarship will work with a mentor to conceive and execute a campus project applicable to their post, and also take a 2-unit leadership class. More info at intern.ucsc.edu/cuip 

Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Haverford College – Deadline: February 15, 2019

The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities in Haverford, PA invites applications for a one-year fellowship to begin Fall 2019 in gender and sexuality studies with a focus in visual studies. The fellowship comes with a competitive salary, health benefits, and funds for research and travel. More info at http://apply.interfolio.com/58658. 

National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference – Deadline: February 20, 2019

The Call for Proposals for the 2019 NWSA Conference – November 14-17 in San Francisco – is now open. The theme for the 2019 conference is Protest, Justice and Transnational Organizing. Visit www.nwsa.org for more info. 

NEH Summer Programs – Deadline: March 1, 2019

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced its 2019 Summer Seminars and Institutes for Higher Education Faculty. For seminar schedule and locations, eligibility info, and application, visit https://www.neh.gov/divisions/education/summer-programs 

Dizikes Faculty Teaching Award - Deadline March 4, 2019

This Humanities award recognizes faculty for their commitment to and effectiveness in transformative teaching and mentoring. The faculty recipient will receive a grant and designate a student from a Humanities program to receive a scholarship. More info at https://humanities.ucsc.edu/academics/awards-fellowships/dizikes.html