Feminist scholars, activists, and practitioners across the Americas are challenging gendered hierarchies in their communities, nations, and region. Whether or not they explicitly identify as feminists, their work is transforming contemporary politics and cultural relations. Through the stories of Latin American feminist networks, women-led grassroots organizations, and lesbian collectives, this panel examines the transnational strategies employed by activists across the Americas. Panelists...

Over the past two decades, the archive has emerged as a central site of feminist knowledge production and activism. Feminist archives and special collections have been able to document activist movements and make previously obscured forms of knowledge visible. This panel brings together a group of feminist librarians, archivists, scholars, and activists to explore this archival turn in contemporary feminism. Panelists include Jenna Freedman (Barnard College), Alana Kumbier (Wellesley...

Continuing education in the humanities is an extremely important, yet often overlooked subset of higher education. Over the years, BCRW has sought to support continued opportunities for feminist learning through a diverse series of course offerings. Current and past BCRW instructors, along with scholars of feminist literature, will discuss the value of intergenerational feminist education. Panelists include Leslie Calman, Heather Hewett and Stephanie Staal. This discussion, moderated by Lori...

Gloria Anzaldua's groundbreaking volume Borderlands/La frontera juxtaposes poetry and prose, and research and personal narrative, forming a bridge between activism and scholarship. This panel looks at Anzaldua's work, along with the work of two border poets, Margaret Randall and Ruth Irupe Sanabria, to explore what poetry and other creative engagements can bring to activist practices. Panelists include Margaret Randall (poet, photographer, and activist), Ruth Irupe Sanabria (poet and...

Writing, blogging, social networking, and other forms of media are vital channels of communication for feminist activists. Panelists Mandy Van Deven (activist and writer), Ileana Jimenez (blogger at FeministTeacher.com), Veronica Pinto (Hollaback!), and Susanna Horng (Girls Write Now) discuss their own media projects and how they have used new forms of communications to support and build their movements. This discussion, moderated by Courtney Martin (writer and editor at Feministing.com),...

Women's and gender studies programs have been an integral part of the feminist movement for the past four decades. Over the years, the field has grown and expanded - and so has the proliferation of other disciplines devoted to the study of intersectionality, including queer studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. What are the challenges currently facing the fields of gender and sexuality studies? Panelists Kandice Chuh, Ann Pellegrini, and Sarita See reflect on the history...

In her keynote lecture at Activism and the Academy: Celebrating 40 Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action, Alvarez discusses her latest intellectual and political project, the forthcoming co-edited anthology Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Americas. This lecture took place on the first day of Activism and the Academy, a two-day conference held September 23-24, 2011 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

BCRW Director Janet Jakobsen delivers opening remarks at Activism and the Academy: Celebrating 40 Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action. This two-day conference was held September 23-24, 2011 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

The inaugural event in BCRW's Salon series, this engaged dialogue brings together several prominent and influential scholars whose work explores how affect and emotion influence public life. Just as feminism has sought to identify the ways in which the personal and the political are linked, the study of 'public feelings' draws our attention to how and why feelings and emotion (assumed to be a private, personal experience) influence politics and notions of social belonging and intimacy. This...

In this year's Rennert Forum lecture, "Created in God's Image: Intersections of Judaism, Gender, and Human Rights," Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster '01 reflects on her work as a human rights activist, mobilizing the Jewish community on campaigns against US-sponsored torture and modern slavery. Rabbi Kahn-Troster has worked tirelessly to bring about change in US foreign and domestic policy and to educate the public about the reality of torture and detainee treatment as a moral issue. In organizing...

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a range of iconic female forms emerged to dominate the global pictorial landscape. Female athletes and adventurers, chorine stars, flappers, garconnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, suffragettes, and trampky were all facets of the dazzling and urbane New Woman who came to epitomize modern femininity in photographs and on film. This construct existed as a set of abstract ideals, even as it varied when...

This forum, organized by DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association and co-sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard Women's Studies, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, engages scholars, policy advocates, activists, and allies about the situation of immigrant women domestic workers with the Philippines as a case study. The forum is moderated by Leah Obias, Catherine Sameh gives opening remarks, and the list of speakers and topics includes: Neferti Tadiar, Professor and...

Simi Linton delivers opening remarks to the Heidi Latsky Dance Company's Performance of The GIMP Project at The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2011, Movements: Politics, Performance, and Disability, on February 26. Simi describes dance as the place where disability rights, disability culture and disability studies come together. She is introduced by Janet Jakobsen.

This discussion on Aesthetics and Politics in Action was the morning panel at The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2011 - Movements: Poltics, Performance and Disability. This panel examines cultural, historical and transnational constructions of disability. Making connections between cultural production, performance, aesthetics, activism and scholarship, panelists explore the many contributions of disability activists to social justice. Following introductory remarks by Janet Jakobsen,...

In this lecture, Professor Carla Freccero argues for a queering of temporality that would undo our nationally circumscribed and periodized fields of literary study in order to work through figures that haunt texts across historical eras. Her case study involves cynanthropy, the merger of human man and dog; it takes as its starting point the Columbian New World encounter, from reports of dog-headed cannibals to accounts of the devouring dog as the ubiquitous weapon of Spanish colonizers; and...

Focusing specifically on sexuality, the panelists discuss the ways in which transnational and non-governmental Christian organizations have an impact on legal and social policies in different areas where Christians may comprise a small minority or a larger percentage of the population. In addition, sexuality continues to rankle and even divide Christian churches themselves, as evidenced by the recent tensions in the Anglican Communion over LGBT clergy members. This panel explores debates...

This panel discussion moderated by Laura Flanders of GRITtv features Sylvia Henriquez (Executive Director, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health), Lynn Paltrow (Executive Director, National Advocates for Pregnant Women), and Miriam Yeung (Executive Director, National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum). The panel was part of the daylong conference Critical Intersections: Reproductive and Economic Justice sponsored by The New York Women's Foundation and BCRW.

This panel discussion features a group of reproductive justice activists and birth doulas who work across the spectrum of pregnancy, birth, and women's health, connecting the traditional reproductive rights movement with new social justice activism that considers the complete physical, political, and economic well-being of girls and women. Panelists include Aisha Domingue, doula coordinator at the Brooklyn Young Mothers Collective; Mary Mahoney, assistant director of the Pro-Choice Public...

Janet Jakbosen moderates this discussion on Development and Sustainability, the second panel at The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2010, "Feminism and Climate Change." Panelists include Rachel Harris, Susan Shaw, Marcela Vasquez-Leon and Eleanor Sterling.

Janet Jakbosen introduces Anene Ejikeme who moderates this discussion on Economic, Health and Social Justice, the first panel at The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2010, "Feminism and Climate Change." Panelists include Nancy Biberman, Laila Iskandar Kamel, Peggy Shepard and Winona LaDuke.

Joni Seager delivered the morning keynote address at The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2010, "Feminism and Climate Change." Already among the most vulnerable populations worldwide, women and other marginalized groups have been the most acutely affected by the instabilities produced by climate change. Issues such as water scarcity, drought, and other environmental problems threaten the world's food supply, making it more difficult for disadvantaged groups to obtain the basic necessities of...

This talk offers a new reading of postcolonial women's writings. The conventional model since the 1980s has been to emphasize issues of silence and invisibility, the desire for voice and narrative space, and self-representation as a form of empowerment and transformation. What is often eclipsed as a result is a valuable political ethic based on coalition and solidarity with oppressed and marginalized figures. By working across an expansive literary archive, stretching from Mary Prince's slave...

This conversation, which took place on Grace Paley's birthday, December 11, 2009, explores how imagination, truthtelling, and courageous action flow out of Paley's life and work. A prolific writer, Paley's fiction highlights the everyday struggles of women, what she calls "a history of everyday life." In addition to her writing, Paley was also a committed activist, passionate about numerous issues, including women's rights, the Vietnam War, nuclear non-proliferation, and most recently, the...

Catherine Waldby is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at The University of Sydney, Australia. In this lecture, delivered on November 6, 2009 at Barnard College, Professor Waldby explores the emerging tensions between women's voluntary (public good) donation of reproductive tissues for stem cell research and the increasing resort to transactional forms of tissue procurement, for example egg sharing and egg vending. She locates this tension in both a...

Introduced by Janet Jakobsen, Saba Mahmood delivered the lecture, "The Politics of Freedom: Geopolitics, Minority Rights and Gender" on October 5, 2009 at Barnard College. Originally titled "Should Feminist Ethics Matter to Religious Politics?" Mahmood's talk marked the sixth annual Helen Pond McIntyre '48 lecture. Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Mahmood is an expert on issues of secularism, gender, and modernity within the context of Islamist movements in...