FMST Events
Fall 2021
November 19
DISSENT Lecture Series, 2021-22
Risk and Respectability: Sexuality and the Nation in the Time of AIDS - Gowri Vijayakumar, Brandeis University. The 2nd in this year-long lecture series, curated by FMST Professor Anjali Arondekar and presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and THI.
October 15
DISSENT Lecture Series, 2021-22
In Memoriam: Stories of Dissent in Sri Lanka - Sharika Thiranagama, Stanford University. The first event in this year-long lecture series, curated by FMST Professor Anjali Arondekar and presented by the Center for South Asian Studies and THI.
Spring 2021
May 7
Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective
This roundtable celebrates the launch of the Critical Ethnic Studies special issue “Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective" and kicks off a three-part lecture series presented May 7 + 14 + 21 by a THI Research Cluster headed by Jenny Kelly (FMST) and Camilla Hawthorne (SOC). Taking up sites that range from US/Mexico, to the Mediterranean, to Palestine/Israel and beyond, the special issue’s contributors investigate urgent challenges related to questions of migration and displacement.
May 5
Works-in-Progress Talk
FMST/CRES professor Neel Ahuja will share his project titled "Managing Flow: Race, Design, and the Question of Access in COVID-19 Research on Airborne Transmission." FMST PhD candidate and CRES DE Dana Ahern will share his research on the topic of "Dangerous If Left Untreated: Transgender medicine and constructions of health."
May 4
Book Launch: Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance
The University Forum hosts a celebration for the launch of FMST PhD alum Erin McElroy's new book, which features original research from multiple campus contributors including SJRC’s Just Biomedicine research cluster and the No Place Like Home initiative. Counterpoints (PM Press) brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism.
Winter 2021
March 9
Rematriation and the Land Back Movement
Corrina Gould, Spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone, Co-Founder, Sogorea Te Land Trust
The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is an urban, Indigenous women-led land trust that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people through the practices of rematriation, cultural revitalization, and land restoration.
March 9
Feminism and Resistance: Afghan Women Moving Forward
FMST Teaching Fellow Halima Kazem-Stojanovic hosts a panel discussion with Afghan scholars and activists about women's rights, feminism, and resistance in Afghanistan.
February 25
Indigenous Feminism and Language Reclamation
Nitana Hicks Greendeer, Curriculum Specialist at Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project
The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, profiled in the documentary We Still Live Here, works to revive the culture of the Wampanoag of Southeastern Massachusetts and resurrect their native language, Wôpanâak.
February 18
FMST Book Talk and Celebration: "Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa"
Xavier Livermon, Associate Professor, FMST/CRES
In his new book, Kwaito Bodies, Xavier Livermon examines the cultural politics of the youthful black body in South Africa through the performance, representation, and consumption of "kwaito," a style of electronic dance music that emerged following the end of apartheid.
Respondents: Savannah Shange (Anthropology), Marcia Ochoa (Feminist Studies)
January 15
Migrant Futures (I) – Sound into Form: South Asias and the Middle East
Fall 2020
November 16Unhealthy Regulations: Native Women's Health, Sexual Surveillance & Bodily Control
Caitlin Keliiaa, Assistant Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC
A Work-in-Progress talk that looks at how Indian health and federal bodily regulation unfolded on native women domestic workers in the 20th century Bay Area.
November 13
From Insecurity to Adaptation: Race, Human Capital, and the Figure of the Climate Refugee
Neel Ahuja, Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC
In a talk presented by the University of Wisconsin's Center for 21st Century Studies, Professor Ahuja shared portions of his forthcoming book: Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century, and discussed how public images of climate change—particularly those focused on the problem of coastal flooding in Bangladesh—reflect the manner by which both states and emerging green security formations reconfigure inequalities generated by financial, development, and labor policies in terms of environmental processes.
November 4
The Morning After: A (Post) Election Conversation
In this Cultural Studies event, Gina Dent (FMST), Debbie Gould (SOC), and Savannah Shange (ANTHRO) will start a conversation the morning after the November 3rd US Presidential election. We will gather as a community the morning after to process the preceding night (and preceding years) and to think together about the weeks, months, and years to come.
October 20
Barring Freedom Art & Lecture Series - 2020-2021
Presented by the UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with FMST Professor Gina Dent, this year-long series of online events features artists, activists, scholars, and others united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Barring Freedom kicks off with Visualizing Abolition: A Conversation with Angela Y. Davis and Gina Dent.
October 2020 thru April 2021
Towards Justice Lecture Series
A yearlong lecture series presented by the Center for South Asian Studies, curated by FMST Professor and CSAS Co-Director Anjali Arondekar.
Winter 2020
March 2-3
Speculative Futures of Labor: New Feminist and Critical Race Approaches Symposium
This two-day symposium features emergent approaches to labor in light of the surge of interest in technological socioeconomic transformations, including robotics, AI, and app-based on demand services. Presented by the UC Speculative Futures Collective, co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute, the Center for Racial Justice, and the Peggy & Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Chair in Feminist Studies.
Fall 2019
November 20
Cultural Studies Colloquium: What More Remains: Sexuality, Slavery, Historiography
FMST Anjali Arondekarm Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC
Professor Arondekar gives a talk engaging a "small" history of sexuality and slavery in Portuguese India.
November 13
FMST Colloquium Series: Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival
Dean Spade, Associate Professor, Seattle University School of Law
A look at mutual aid as an important part of building participatory movements.
FMST Colloquium Series: Blacklisted Jews Like Us - Gerda and Carl Lerner: Intersectionality, Experience as Deviants, and the Film Black Like Me
Vera Kallenberg, Visiting Scholar, Feminist Studies, UCSC
A discussion of the life of Gerda Lerner (1920-2013), a pioneer of women's history who co-wrote the 1964 film Black Like Me with husband and film director Carl Lerner. Based on John Howard Griffin's highly controversial book about the white Texan writer who darkened his skin and travelled through the Jim Crow-era "deep South" to expose the everyday realities of racism, the film reflects the Lerners' experience as participants in the civil rights movement and their own experiences of repression as communists in Cold War America and Gerda's persecution as a Jew in Nazi Europe.
Spring 2019
May 30-31
Indigeneity and Climate Justice Conference
The FMST Department presents a two-day feminist science conference organized by FMST professors Karen Barad and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer. Climate Justice, as opposed to the more narrow framings of “environmental justice,” considers the entanglement of ecological, cultural, social, political, geological, biological and other forces, understood as simultaneous and mutually constitutive. A shared concern among our esteemed keynote speakers is the question of how to respond to the challenges and potentials of collaborative engagements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to caring for the Earth.
May 23
FMST Colloquium Series: History Does (Not) Repeat Itself: Speculative Histories of Post-Revolutionary Romania
Veda Popovici, Lecturer, Feminist Studies, UCSC
Professor Popovici presents her latest art project: a mapping of collective dreams and desires of revolutionary events in the context of post-1989 Romania. Laying out seven radical future pasts, these are stories that could have been but never happened...feminist unions, Eastern European migrants antifacsist organizing, anti-capitalist campaigns, solidarity movements between students and coal miners.
May 13
FMST/CRES Book Talk: All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence
Emily Thuma, Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies, UC Irvine
During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. In this grassroots history of resistance to gender violence and the carceral state, Emily Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners' and psychiatric patients' rights, and gender and sexual liberation.
April 17
Grad Book Launch: Counterpoints: Bay Area Data and Stories for Resisting Displacement
FMST grad student Erin McElroy and members of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project preview their new atlas manuscript, to be released by PM Press in Spring 2020. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data visualization, digital cartography, and multimedia collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area that aims to inform, empower, and activate communities impacted by housing inequity and displacement, supporting the work of collectives fighting for housing justice.
Book Talk: Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures
Neda Atanasoski, Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC, with discussant Nick Mitchell, Associate Professor, FMST, UCSC
Winter 2019
Spring 2018
Winter 2018
February 21
Cultural Studies Colloquium: Fire & Flood: Settler Collonialism and Pessimistic Indigenous Futurisms
Jodi Byrd, Associate Professor, English / Gender & Women's Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign / Faculty Affiliate, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Caught within the both/and of despotic collapse, the colonial fantasies of American futurities often reproduce themselves through nineteenth-century signs of the struggle for colonial dominance. Jodi Byrd is a Chickasaw decolonial thinker, writer, teacher, and videogamer, whose talk closely reads HBO's Westworld alongside LeAnne Howe's Indian Radio Days to consider how procedural elements of technological play produce dystopia visions of American collapse as the failure of indigenous futures.
Cultural Studies Colloquium: Reversible Human: Rectal Feeding, Gut Plasticity, and Racial Control in the US Carceral Warfare
Neel Ahuja, Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC
Professor Ahuja presents his research exploring the relationship of the body to forms of imperial warfare and security. Focusing on the association of rectal feeding, used as a form of medical rape in CIA prisons, and bodily plasticity, the presentation argues that the terrorist body is not only a useful discursive figure in the current wars, but also an experimental material that can be used to modulate time, sensation, and resistance toward forms of racial control.
February 7
Academic (Re)Considerations: ‘Non-Humans’ and/as Research Objects, Subjects, and Co-laborers
A Works-in-Progress roundtable discussion and workshop with professors Felicity Schaeffer (FMST) and Laurie Palmer (ART); convened by garduate students Krisha Hernandez, Vivian Underhill, and Taylor Wondergem.
February 1
Food for Thought: Paradoxes of Diversity In and Beyond the Trump Era
Nick Mitchell, Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC
January 25
Feminist Approaches to Peace and Reconciliation for Tibet
Dr. Losang Rabgey, Executive Director / Co-Founder of MACHIK, Social Innovation for Tibet.
Fall 2017
December 7Work-in-Progress Talk: Unwaged War: Black Studies as Casualization from Below
Nick Mitchell, Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC
Professor Mitchell investigates the social arrangements of knowledge and the work of knowledge in shaping social worlds. Mitchell is currently working on two book projects that elaborates on the claim that a necessary task for the emerging field of critical university studies is not to theorize the university but rather to learn to ask how the university makes its presence felt in the common sense of what we call theory.
November 3
FMST Colloquium Series: Agrarian Questions in Urban India
Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota & Priti Ramamurthy, University of Washington
Based on recent life histories of urban migrants who work within informal sector occupations in Delhi and Hyderabad, we ask how “agrarian questions” orient workers’ attitudes to forms of labor and habitation. By also considering gender and caste, we ask how these, as embodied imprints of the agrarian, impose limit conditions on possible politics for urban migrants.
October 11
FMST Colloquium Series: Body Mike: Alternating Words on the Afghan Frontier
Fatima Mojaddedi, Ph.D., President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley
This talk examines how the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan relies on a fetishistic misrecognition of speaking as inspiration, and takes linguistic expression as the dissemination of terroristic violence through oral networks of exchange and emboldening.
Spring 2017
May 4
FMST Colloquium Series: QT Reproduction: Queer and Transgender Use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies
Doris Leibetseder, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley / Researcher, Centre for Gender Research, University of Uppsala, Sweden
Investigating an allied queer-feminist and transgender ethics of reproduction, this talk looks at ARTs and how they raise challenges for transgender and queer people, with a focus on the ways these technologies confront queer and people with normative expectations concerning biological sex, gender, sexuality, kinship relations and the right to procreate, and how this leads to medical migration.
May 17
FMST Colloquium Series: What Transpires Now: Transgender History and the Future We Need
Susan Stryker, Associate Professor, University of Arizona
History is a story we tell in the present that links what we know of the past to a future we envision. In this talk, drawn from her forthcoming book of the same title, gender theorist and historian Susan Stryker examines the trans-temporal dimensions of what gets labelled “transgender” today, but which can be thought of as a more general capacity for life to exceed whatever current configurations it might have.
June 1
FMST Colloquium Series: We Bring Home the Roots: African American Women Touring Brazil and Bearing Their Nation
Patricia de Santano Pinho, Associate Professor, LALS, UCSC
The talk presents a chapter of Pinho's nearly completed book manuscript Diaspora Detours: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil. Previous chapters examine the effects of national identities on the connections between black diaspora communities. In this chapter I analyze how gender impacts these transnational relations while simultaneously differentiating the experiences of female and male travelers.
Winter 2017
January 12
FMST Colloquium Series: Parenting Binary Trans Children on the Edge of the Bay Area
Soma de Bourbon, Lecturer, Feminist Studies, UCSC
Parents feel the urgency to mitigate the disproportionally high rates of depression and suicide among trans youth. There is evidence (Olson et al. 2016) that a gender-affirming environment can, in part, accomplish this. Many Bay Area families are gender supportive, but is the larger Bay Area?
February 2
FMST Colloquium Series: Towards Other Scenes of Speaking and Listening: Palestinian Anticolonial Queer Spatialities
Mikki Stelder, Visiting Scholar / PhD Candidate, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam
In 2010, Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions called upon international queer communities to support the Palestinian call for BDS. My dissertation emerged as one way to respond. First, I lay out the terms within which scholars and activists have engaged with PQBDS’ call and conditions of possibility within which responses emerged. Secondly, I discuss an event that undermined the logics of settler colonialism and sexual imperialism in Israel/Palestine...
March 2
FMST Colloquium Series: The Iranian Women's Movement: Rights, and Difference
Omid Mohamadi, Lecturer, Feminist Studies, UCSC
This talk centers on the Iranian women’s movement and the One Million Signatures Campaign that seeks equal rights for all Iranian women within the laws of the Islamic Republic. Focusing on the campaign’s central text, The Effect of Laws on Women’s Lives, and activists’ testimonies, Mohamadi shows how the Iranian women’s movement appeals to (and also challenges) multiple sites simultaneously, and highlights and critiques scholars who subscribe to a shared historical narrative suggesting that the current unity between secular and religious feminists is evidence that the women’s movement has superseded a century of internecine conflict and possibly ideology itself.
Fall 2016
October 13FMST Colloquium Series: Ethnofuturism and the Archeology of the Future
Sara Mameni, UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
In her video project, “In The Future They Ate From The Finest Porcelain” (2014), Larissa Sansour enters the fictional world of a resistance group who bury porcelain remains of an imaginary civilization to influence history and support their claims to land and sovereignty. Similarly, Morehshin Allahyari’s project titled “Material Speculation” (2015) reconstructs archeological artifacts destroyed by ISIS in 3D format, archiving lost objects by including a digital memory card inside each newly constructed artifact. Unlike archeology’s attachment to stable land, Sansour and Allahyari propose a virtual archeology of lands and artifacts lost, defying temporality by claiming their politics in the imaginative space of the future and the speculative space of hope.
November 3
FMST Colloquium Series: Rethinking Gender, Art and Geopolitics through Post-national War Rhetoric
Redi Koobak, Visiting Scholar, FMST, UCSC / Assistant Professor, Department of Thematic Studies & Gender Studies, Linkoping University, Sweden
After its 50-year occupation by the Soviets, current political discourse in Estonia revolves around the importance of proving that despite being small, Estonia is a courageous and highly reliable NATO ally to defend against Russia. In search of voices that question the general consensus about Estonia’s participation in NATO missions, this talk zooms in on the artworks of Estonian artist Maarit Murka, invited to visit Estonian troops in Afghanistan on the commission of the Estonian Military Museum, and how artistic interventions might denaturalize gendered and nationalized notions of violence and justifications for war.
December 1
FMST Colloquium Series: Queer x Trans x Feminist x Ecology: Toward a Field Science Practice
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow
Ecologists are on the front lines of the sixth mass extinction, as intimates die at alarming rates. What radical politics and transformative potentials can arise from witnessing these transgressive intimacies, even or especially among more-than-human others dying because of human (in)action? This talk searches for signs of resistant ‘world making’ (Muñoz) in ephemeral moments where scientists speak their grief at extinction and love for their study species, exploring resonance between queer and trans theory and indigenous theory that foregrounds multispecies ethics and relational practices.
Spring 2016
May 27Ruling Passions: Sexuality, Science and the (Post)Colonial State
The past decade or so has witnessed a rapid rise in scholarship that seeks to seize or transform the language of “science” for liberatory ends. Attachment to the reparative and/or divisive logic of “science” is most evident in minoritized knowledge-formations such as sexuality studies and colonial/postcolonial studies. In the face of contemporary challenges about the limits of scholarship bowing to the forces of globalization, the colloquium will examine what is at stake for sexuality studies and postcolonial studies to carve out a critical relationship to histories of science.
Fall 2015
October 16
Comparative Empires
Histories of empire have been tethered over-determinedly to singular histories of nation-states, temporalities and/or geopolitics. Rather than locate empire as a stable or temporal concept, this day-long colloquium attends to the imaginative possibilities offered by a turn to a more comparative relationship to empire within a south-south framework. To do so, we turn to two clusters of critical attachments that are rarely configured through and against the language(s) of empire: (1) How do we understand empire delinked from locality, and locality delinked from geopolitical territory? (2) How do we attend to a politics of comparative empires that would be less about given political identities and geographies and more about vernacular epistemologies shaping, social and human collectivities? The colloquium foregrounds south-south engagement and brings together work on empire from South Asia, African diaspora studies and aboriginal/indigenous histories.
Fall 2014
October 16
Colonial Difference and the Neoliberal Present
Lisa Lowe, Professor, Tufts University
This lecture casts the history of liberal modernity as a complex, braided project, which includes at once the universal promises of rights, emancipation, wage labor and free trade, as well as the global divisions and colonial asymmetries upon which those promises depend, and according to which such liberties are reserved for some and denied to others. A history of the present, which defamiliarizes given narratives of the present social formation, may reveal the subsumption of colonial difference in the history of modern progress, and query the assumptions regarding the continuity of the neoliberal present as either the apotheosis or betrayal of the liberal project.
October 6
A Conversation with Kris Perry
Kris Perry, a Merrill College alumna, was one of the key litigants in the Supreme Court ruling (Perry v. Schwarzenegger) to overturn California’s controversial proposition eight, the ban on same sex marriage. This case was critical in paving the way for federal protection and social progress in one of the most fundamental struggles for justice and equal civil liberty for all Americans in modern history. Please join us for a presentation and discussion with civil liberties champion Kris Perry at Kresge TownHall.
Spring 2014
May 2-3Feminist Interventions: On Gender and South Asia
This conference seeks to explore the interrelated, epistemological frameworks of gender studies and area studies in the multiple articulations of what constitutes the subjects and studies of the terrain of “South-Asia.” We are particularly interested in work that builds on feminist theory to extend histories of regions via a discussion of translation, diaspora, migration, militarism and nationalism, to name a select few.
Winter 2014
February 26Conversation & Book Party: Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity
Neda Atanasoski, Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, with Lisa Rofel & Shelley Stamp
When is a war not a war? When it is undertaken in the name of democracy, against the forces of racism, sexism, and religious and political persecution? This is the new world of warfare that Neda Atanasoski observes in Humanitarian Violence, different in name from the old imperialism but not so different in kind. In particular, she considers U.S. militarism—humanitarian militarism—during the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the 1990s wars of secession in the former Yugoslavia.
February 21
Gender. Region. Slavery.
For slavery studies, engagements with the geopolitical have robustly shifted the angles through which the field might begin to imagine collusions, collaborations and conversations with regions of the world. Historians, in particular, have contributed to our understanding of the forces at work in the making of ‘regions’ and ‘slavery’ between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries. However, such scholarship has minoritized gender relations in the making of such geographies. This colloquium reverses the trend by foregrounding the question: what would regional histories of ‘slavery’ look like if interrogated as formulations of gender?
Fall 2013
December 4
Saints & Citizens: Book Reading & Discussion
Lisbeth Haas, Professor, History / Chair, Feminist Studies, UCSC
Saints and Citizens is a bold new excavation of the history of Indigenous people in California in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how the missions became sites of their authority, memory, and identity. Shining a forensic eye on colonial encounters in Chumash, Luiseño, and Yokuts territories, Lisbeth Haas depicts how native painters incorporated their cultural iconography in mission painting and how leaders harnessed new knowledge for control in other ways. Through her portrayal of highly varied societies, she explores the politics of Indigenous citizenship in the independent Mexican nation through events such as the Chumash War of 1824, native emancipation after 1826, and the political pursuit of Indigenous rights and land through 1848.
November 13
Food for Thought: The Meaning of Freedom of Speech: Surveillance, Incarceration & the Politics of the First Amendment
Bettina Aptheker, Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC
Bettina Aptheker co-led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964. Professor Aptheker will give a brief retrospective and then consider the different ways in which race, gender, class and sexuality effect the exercise of freedom of speech as a collective right established by the First (and Fourteenth) amendments. Bettina will clarify the difference between freedom of speech and academic freedom, and ask us to think about both in the context of Tea Party politics, mass incarceration, and the unprecedented technologies of surveillance.
November 4
Sympoiesis: Becoming-with in Multispecies Muddles
Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness/Feminist Studies, UCSC
Professor Haraway's work through publications such as Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science; Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, has redefined the concepts of numerous fields, including Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Studies, as well as Cultural and Visual Studies. Haraway's contributions as a theorist and interlocutor across disciplines are underscored by the role of her scholarship as foundational texts across multiple fields of study.
October 25
UCSC Screening: Free Angela! And All Political Prisoners
Free Angela! documents the sensational murder and kidnapping trial of Black Communist and UCLA Professor Angela Davis in the early 1970s, featuring archival footage and interviews with Davis, her trial lawyers, and the activists who led a massive international movement for her freedom. Deeply involved in a movement to help save the lives of three Black prisoners known as the Soledad Brothers, and also active in the Black Panther Party and the anti-Vietnam war movement, Angela Davis was indicted as a co-conspirator in an attempt by San Quentin prisoners to escape during a Marin County trial that resulted in the death of the judge and others. When she was "unavailable," Davis was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.
October 23
Egyptian Women in Struggle: Then and Now
Gihan Abou Zeid, Egyptian human rights activist, journalist and author
An authority on women’s rights in the Arab world, Gihan Abou Zeid was part of the revolution of 2011 that brought millions of people to Tahrir Square. She is the managing editor for the magazine Politics and Religion and writes for the Qatari newspaper Al Arab. Gihan is developing a regional strategy for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on cooperation between UN agencies and faith-based organizations. Previously, she served nine years as vice president of the NGO’s Forum for Women in Development, and was a policy adviser for the Ministry of Family and Population in Egypt.
Undisciplining Feminism Symposium
Bringing together a core group of UC and Cal State faculty working at the intersections of feminist studies and ethnic studies, we will generate a curricular vision that, rather than being negatively constructed as a critique (of patriarchy, mainstream feminism, “wave”-based periodizations, etc.) begins with concepts like race, empire, and settler colonialism. Conversely, we imagine ethnic studies as foundationally organized around gender and sexuality, centered on concepts such as reproduction and sexual violence. While critiques of Women and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies as disciplinary formations have long existed, we hope that by generating shared curricular materials, we can further engage the intellectual repercussions of (inter)disciplinarity and strategize ways to make institutional interventions. We aim to collectively generate the kind of work called for by such critiques, and to share strategies for the careful institutionalization of such work.
Spring 2013
May 22
Book Reading: New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut
B. Ruby Rich, Professor, Film & Digital Media, UCSC
Please join us for a special reading by author B. Ruby Rich, who will read selections from New Queer Cinema, followed by a book signing. Professor Rich designated a brand new genre, the New Queer Cinema (NQC), in her groundbreaking article in the Village Voice in 1992. This movement in film and video was intensely political and aesthetically innovative, made possible by the debut of the camcorder, and driven initially by outrage over the unchecked spread of AIDS. The genre has grown to include an entire generation of queer artists, filmmakers, and activists.
May 15
Undisciplined Studies & the (Geo)Politics of Knowledge: Challenges for a north-south dialogue
Richard Miskolci, Professor, Sociology, Federal University of São Carlos, São Paulo State, Brazil
Why does knowledge continue to travel only from North to South? To understand the powerful continuity in this exchange, this presentation will start with a historical reconstitution of its creation and functioning, and explore the hegemony of academic exchange in which North produces theories and South is seen as a space for collecting data or applying Northern theories to particular cases.
May 1
Idle No More: Indigenous Feminism & Allied Critiques of Settler Colonialism
Scott Lauria Morgensen, ethnographr and historian of social movements
Revisiting Indigenous critiques of the sexualization and racialization of colonial rule, Morgensen highlights how such power is challenged by the Indigenous movement Idle No More. As explained by participants, the leadership of Idle No More by Indigenous women as founders and spokespersons exposes heteropatriarchy in Indigenous communities for change by challenging racial and sexual legacies of Canadian colonization. These legacies include the Indian Act, which preferentially exiled over four generations of Indigenous women and their descendants from their nations and lands; and in the everyday landscapes of gender and sexual violence faced by Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people.
Winter 2013
March 18
Practicing Domestic Violence Law
Nancy K.D. Lemon, Lecturer, Domestic Violence Law / Director, Domestic Violence Practicum, Boalt School of Law, UC Berkeley
Nancy Lemon was a student founder of UCSC’s Women’s Studies Program. She graduated from the program in 1975 and went on to graduate from Boalt Hall School of Law, U.C. Berkeley. Professor Lemon has taught Domestic Violence Law continuously for 25 years at the school. She authored Domestic Violence Law, the first U.S. textbook on this topic, and co-authored Child Custody and Domestic Violence: A call for safety, and Working Together to End Domestic Violence. She has worked on numerous pieces of California state legislation and has conducted hundreds of trainings on domestic violence topics for many professional groups. She is a Co-founder and Legal Director of the Berkeley Family Violence Appellate Project.
Love Is a Dangerous Promise
Karen D. Thompson
Karen Thompson gained national recognition following the 1983 car accident of her partner Sharon Kowalski, who sustained a traumatic brain injury. After the accident, Sharon’s biological family refused to acknowledge or accept her relationship with Karen and kept them apart for nearly four years. After an eight-year battle, Karen was awarded legal custody of Sharon. Thompson now speaks across the country to raise awareness for human rights issues, including the legal protection of LGBTQIA relationships.
February 21
Asian America: Triangulations about a Semisphere
Karen Tei Yamashita, Professor,
Exploring the past 45 years of Asian American and Ethnic Studies with respect to the present and future speculations, Karen Tei Yamashita will read excerpts from her forthcoming book: Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance, as well as from the novel, I Hotel, and essay "Borges & I." Followed by an informal conversation with Aimee Bahng and Alondra Nelson.
Fall 2012
November 28
"Civilizing" the Pillagers
Mattie Harper (Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe), University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz
This talk centers on the identity of Susan Bonga, who was a member of the Pillager band of Ojibwe Indians residing in northern Minnesota and the daughter of a prominent fur trader of mixed African-Ojibwe ancestry.
November 29
A Night of Poetry & Music with M. NourbeSe Philip
M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist and playwright who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. She practiced law in the City of Toronto for seven years before leaving to write full-time. She has published poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction. Among her best known published works are She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks; Looking for Livingstone; An Odyssey of Silence; and Harriet's Daughter, a young adult novel. Her most recent work, Zong!, is a genre-breaking, book-length poem which engages with ideas of the law, history, and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade.
Spring 2012
May 23
Orienting Margins: Sexuality's Geopolitics
The Cultural Studies Colloquium Series Presents: Anjali Arondekar Associate Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSC
Histories of sexuality routinely mediate geopolitical difference(s) through the narrative forms of marginality, disenfranchisement and loss. What happens if we shift our attention from the reading of sexuality as marginality to understanding it as a site of vitalized abundance-even futurity?
April 25
A Tribute to Adrienne Rich
In 1973, in the midst of Black and women’s liberation movements, the Vietnam War, and her own personal distress, Adrienne Rich wrote and published Driving into the Wreck, which garnered her the National Book Award in 1974. In the decades that followed, Rich’s poetry, essays, and books addressed issues of feminist politics, lesbian experience, and Jewish identity, and deeply engaged the critical concerns of racial and imperial oppression, war and environmental degradation. She is considered one of America's greatest poets. In tribute, members of our campus community will read from her work.
April 10
Activating the Feminist Body and the Curating of Feminist Art
Amelia Jones, editor of Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History
This paper takes off from a brief history of the curating of feminist art in the North American and European contexts. My aim is to think about the exhibition, and the feminist show in particular, as a junction between practice and theoretical thought, a place of intersection between art making, the writing of art history, and the positing of critical interventions in institutions.
