Category Archives: News

Call For Papers for Undergraduates: On Our Terms

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call-for-papersCall for Submissions: please forward to students
Due: December 15

Undergraduates and recent graduates are invited to submit their work to On
Our Terms, the online academic journal of the Athena Center for Leadership
Studies at Barnard College.  The journal will feature undergraduate
research across all disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and the
STEM fields, on the broad topic of women and leadership.

Now, more than ever, the theme of women and leadership is being discussed,
questioned, and explored — giving scholars and researchers new ways to
think about leadership as an emerging academic discourse.  On Our Terms
will capture and showcase these discussions through our peer-reviewed
process.  We are a journal created for students, by students, and our goal
is to provide a platform for student thought, debate, and voice.  As your
work is published and presented online, you will be connected to the
network of students from all over the world doing similar research and
engaged in related discussions.

We are looking for submissions – written articles or multimedia pieces –
that re-imagine and redefine the ideas pivotal to women and leadership.
Submissions that relate to any one of the follow themes are encouraged,
though we welcome your creativity!

• women in activism and social movements
• female change-makers in politics, literature or history
• progressive women thinkers and intellectuals
• capturing women’s leadership in fine arts, music, and dance
• women’s influence in a changing global economy

Our priority deadline is rolling until *November 15th*.  Our final deadline
is *December 15*.  We encourage papers in varying stages of completion.  If
you are submitting a piece that is not yet finished,  be sure to include an
abstract or outline of the paper you intend to submit.  To be
considered for our Spring 2013 issue, first submissions must be
completed papers.  Please note that we will need a final piece by our second
deadline, December 15th. Final submissions may be in the form of a research
article, a creative exploration, or an excerpt taken from a larger work.
In your email, please indicate the title of the piece, author(s), and an
abstract or description. All writing samples should be cited in the format
appropriate for the discipline of the paper.

To submit your work, or if you have any questions, please email
onourterms@barnard.edu

Women’s Colleges “More Important Than Ever in an Increasingly Global World”

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“Heavy lifting remains to be done in the developing world and women’s colleges are the incubators for the leaders capable of weathering those storms.”

RSchulz_Crop2

Rebekah Schulz – Liberia, October ’13

Following our announcement of the student winner of the 2013 essay competition, we are thrilled to name Rebekah Schulz, class of 2006, as our winner in the alumna category! Rebekah wrote a powerful response to the prompt, “Women, education and the future… what do women’s colleges have to offer?” Like many Mawrtyrs, Rebekah did not feel a strong sense of “sisterhood” throughout her college years. It was only later, when she began to apply her Bryn Mawr education to the challenges of post-graduation personal and professional life, that the value and impact of her women’s college experience became clear. Her essay tells the story of how she has learned to apply the “secret reserve of Wonder Woman-like strength and the uncanny ability to solve problems” that she gained from Bryn Mawr in her demanding work in West Africa.

Rebekah gradated from Bryn Mawr in 2006 with a double major in Mathematics and History of Art. She currently works for the US AID Excellence in Higher Education for Liberian Development (EHELD) project.  She is based at the College of Agriculture and Sustainable Development at Cuttington University in Suakoko, Liberia, where she teaches geology and soil science and helps to run the library. “Bryn Mawr prepares you to dig in anywhere and anyhow!” She is pictured above at Cuttington Unviersity in October 2013 at a freshman matriculation program with two students that she is sponsoring while they look for scholarships. Rebekah blogs about Liberia and teaching at
lifemagnanimous.wordpress.com.

…

In an increasingly global world women’s colleges are more important than ever before.  The goal of higher education is to prepare the next generation of leaders with a moral and intellectual foundation that will keep them grounded during stormy conditions.  The women’s movement has made great strides in recent decades and it’s tempting to think women no longer need to be galvanized and steadied for success in a man’s world.  Unfortunately that isn’t true in most parts of the world and in the western countries we easily forget that nasty truth.  Heavy lifting remains to be done in the developing world and women’s colleges are the incubators for the leaders capable of weathering those storms.

Like most young people I didn’t appreciate college until it was over.  At Bryn Mawr I laughed at “sisterhood” and wondered what I’d been thinking.  I was sure I could compete with men and I was hungry to prove it!  What we all know, however, is that Bryn Mawr teaches you that the only person worth competing against is yourself.  You are forced to plant your feet on the ground, focus your eyes, and clear your voice.  The opportunity to attend a women’s college is a gift and graduates receive much more than a diploma.  They graduate with a decoder ring and a cape (sorry, Double Star, the superhero kind).  They graduate with a secret reserve of Wonder Woman-like strength and the uncanny ability to solve problems.

I didn’t realize I had or needed any of that until I moved to West Africa.

In 2011 I joined the Peace Corps and accepted an assignment to teach high school math in Liberia.  Boasting Africa’s first female president, Liberia has a lot of girl power.  It also has a lot of heartbreaking problems.  Girls are less likely to be educated than boys.  They are forced into early marriages and start having children at a young age.  Women suffered the worst atrocities imaginable during the 14-year civil crisis yet they are ashamed to talk about it.  Rape is a family matter.

Walking onto campus as one of two female teachers, the first female math teacher ever, I was intimidated.  Then I realized I had the cape and decoder ring.  I remembered the only person worth competing against was myself.  I didn’t have to compete with the ‘boys’ and I didn’t have to prove anything to anyone.  All I had to do was put my feet on the ground, clear my throat, and do the best job I could.  When someone said something I didn’t like (such as referring to me as “that little girl”) I had the confidence to politely correct him.  When people saw me as a woman and only a woman I had the courage to prove them wrong.  When my girl students said, “I can’t” I pointed at myself and said, “Yes, you can!”

I have met remarkable women from all over the world working here. The uniting factor among them is that most attended a women’s college or an all-girls high school.  And you can always tell.  As soon as she starts talking you can tell she gets it.  She sees the world through the same lens you do.  She doesn’t let a lack of solutions keep her from trying to solve problems.  She has a loud laugh and is unapologetically honest.  She’s “almost a man!” as I overheard one such woman described.

In my new job with US AID I teach at an agricultural college, again one of only two female faculty members.  It is the definition of a boys club and everyday I say a little prayer of thanks for Bryn Mawr.  My four years without men gave me the confidence and strength to compete with them when the stakes are high.  It gave me scaffolding and armor for the sexual harassment and ignorance women face everyday in the rest of the world.

When you’re always carrying a weight you forget about it.  Attending a women’s college is an opportunity to put that weight down for four years and use that energy for more productive things, like improving yourself.  The weight women endure may be reducing in the west, but our sisters in the rest of the world continue to struggle under it, often unknowingly.  If we’re serious about changing the world and improving their lives, our lives, we need women’s colleges.  The storm may be lifting in America, but it is far from finished.

…

Do you have thoughts about the place of the women’s college in the twenty-first century educational landscape? Have there been aspects of your experience that have shaped your understanding of education for women in the world today? Respond in the comments, or tweet us @GreenfieldHWE!

Call For Papers: United Methodist Women’s History – Voices Lost and Found

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To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the United Methodist Women, Methodist Theological call-for-papersSchool in Ohio will host a conference on this historic organization on May 28-30, 2015. Papers that explore the history, significance, prominent persons, and defining issues in the development of UMW and its predecessor organizations are welcome. The anniversary year itself will be 2019.

The conference theme is United Methodist Women’s History: Voices Lost and Found. Proposals of 250-500 words for 30-minute presentations must be received by May 1, 2014. Please include a short academic profile. Submit proposals to: slancaster@mtso.edu. Presenters will be notified of their selection by September 15, 2014.

The conveners hope to publish a volume of selected essays from the conference. Presentation of a paper at the conference does not guarantee selection for the book. Papers selected for publication will need to be 7,000-8,000 words and must be submitted by May 1, 2016.

Call For Papers: Gender, Generation and the Body

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Gender, Generation and the Body:
call-for-papers21st Annual Conference of the West of
England and South Wales Women’s History Network

This conference will be held at Cardiff University on Saturday 21st June 2014. The conference will explore the relation of ideas and experiences of gender, generation and the body in a range of historical contexts. The keynote speaker is Dr. Garthine Walker (Cardiff University).

Potential topics for papers include:

– the interrelation of gender and age in historical representations and experiences of the body;
– the importance of different understandings and experiences of the gendered body in mediating inter-generational relationships, both within and beyond the family;
– the practical, emotional, and social dimensions of bodily care in past societies;
– the intersection of the biological and the social at differently gendered life stages (for example, ‘coming of age’ through menstruation or initiation into masculine adulthood through work);
– the role of subjective reassessments of gendered and bodily experience in life-writing through the ages.

We encourage participants to consider the relation of gender and the body to ‘generation’ in its many possible meanings: an expression of demographic fact; as shorthand for shared cultural characteristics (“the lost generation”); a description of age; and an act of origination, production, or procreation. We welcome the involvement of postgraduate researchers.

The West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network is able to offer a limited number of competitive bursaries to contribute towards attendance at the conference. For further details, see: http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/swhisnet/grants-bursaries.html.
Abstracts of 200 words should be sent to Tracey Loughran (LoughranTL@cardiff.ac.uk) by April 18th 2014.

Call for Papers: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice

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call-for-papersCall for Abstracts and Expressions of Interest for a Special Thematic Cluster of Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice

Belaboured Introductions: Critical Reflections on the Introductory Course in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Co-editors: Melissa Autumn White, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst and Jennifer Musial

Criticism is an act of love, and like writing it is the response to what has come before, to what is coming into being even now.
–Paul Bové, reflecting on Edward Said.

The Hugo Schwyzer scandal has reignited longstanding debates within and beyond the interdisciplinary field of women’s, gender and sexuality studies (WGSS), centering on questions like the one posed by Tara Conley on the international email discussion forum WMST-L: “What qualifies one to teach topics related to women’s studies at the undergrad level?”, and in Colleen Flaherty’s journalistic coverage of the WMST-L debate for Inside Higher Ed, “Who Should Teach Women’s Studies?” (August 21, 2013). But more than questions of qualification, credentials and professional identity, the discussions that have emerged from the Schwyzer dust-up rather predictably call into question the institutional grounds and ambitions of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. We contend that this is a crucial moment in which to redirect these discussions through a focused analysis of, and reflection on, the status of the introductory course as a vital institutional object and generative remainder in this interdisciplinary field. We therefore invite extended abstracts and expressions of interest for papers that critically engage the pedagogy, aspirations and economies of “WGSS 101.”

This special thematic cluster aims to open critical space for reflection on the epistemological, material, and institutional frameworks that differentially enable and/or constrain the introductory course; the conscious and unconscious desires at play in the work of crafting and teaching the introductory course; approaches to intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, transnationalism, decolonization, indigenization in the introductory course; and the stories and genealogies of the field crafted through specific introductory syllabi and assignments.

We are especially interested in papers that engage with (but are not limited to) the following questions:

– How/Is it possible to maintain a feminist, anti-racist, learner-centered pedagogy in a large enrollment introductory class? How might programs and/or departments move toward more intimate classes within fiscal and administrative contexts that threaten the survival and vitality of WGSS and other “pedagogies of minority difference” (Ferguson 2012)?

– What do we want our courses to do in the university and beyond? More specifically, what do we want our courses to do in the lives of our students? What political and psychic aspirations, investments, and affective economies come into play in the development of critical WGSS pedagogy? What is the place of the introductory course in those circulations and movements of desire?

– What role does the introductory course play in crafting stories and genealogies of the field? What stories do we tell ourselves, our curriculum committees, our Deans, and our students about the place and aims of the introductory course in and beyond the university? How do we get stuck in the stories we stick by about WGSS, and with what effect (cf. Hemmings 2011, Wiegman 2012)?

– (How) does the still relatively uncommon Ph.D. in gender, women’s, and sexuality studies shape the introductory course? What are the outcomes and issues in hiring someone with/out a Ph.D. in WGSS to teach the introductory course? How/does granting tenure in WGSS affect curriculum and program development, particularly as it relates to a sustainable, compelling and rigorous introductory course?

– What are the labor politics—racialized, sexualized, gendered, material, affective—of the introductory course? Who teaches the introductory course and why? What, if any, is the relationship between introductory enrollments, departmental budgets, and tenure lines? What role does the labour of the introductory course play in the vitality of institutional, intellectual and mentoring cultures in WGSS?

– How are austerity discourses and university budget cuts impacting the introductory WGSS course as a particular mode of social labor? What are the strategic and/or troubling implications of ascribing value to the introductory course institutionally by articulating it as meeting “social justice”, “sustainability”, “global citizenship”, “civic engagement”, and “diversity learning” outcomes? Might and should the introductory course change to suit emerging educational markets?

– What archives of knowledge are entrenched and/or challenged by the labor of the introductory course? To what extent do/should the analytic categories of “gender,” “women,” and “sexuality” remain central in the introductory course given the racialized spatial politics that transnational, decolonizing and indigenizing feminist approaches emphasize, along with the destabilizations of “the categories themselves” (Valentine 2004) through queer and trans- studies?

– Paying attention to the role of eros and desire in teaching and learning, what does it mean when students are “transformed” by the introductory class and in the process displace those feelings onto the (sexualized) professor? How do WGSS faculty and instructors navigate the fine line between “being charismatic” and “developing a following”? What is the role of seduction in critical pedagogy, especially in programs whose survival depends on cultivating majors and minors (cf. Takacs and Chambliss, 2014)?

We invite essays, reflections, interventions, strategic documents, and/or archives of institutional development, written by well-known WGSS scholars and commentators, new instructors of the introductory course, those who serve on curriculum and/or steering committees, chairs of WGSS programs, inter/disciplinarily-trained professors, those who could teach the class but avoid it, those (precariously) assigned to teach the course on a semester’s notice, and those who hold Ph.D.’s in the field and/or have served a role in developing the Ph.D. program.

At this time, the special thematic cluster editors invite expressions of interest, in the form of an extended abstract of 500-750 words, detailing central questions and modes of inquiry by December 15, 2013 to atlantisgws101@gmail.com. Please include a 100 – 150 word bio with affiliation.

Full paper submissions will open in March 2014 and close in June 2014 with a formal announcement on the Atlantis website: http://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/announcement. Following a full peer-review process, the special thematic cluster will appear in Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice in December 2014.

Please contact the co-editors with any questions:atlantisgws101@gmail.com.

Co-editors’ Biographies

Melissa Autumn White is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, where the introductory course, “Gender, Race, Sexuality and Power,” is taught in two parts at the Okanagan campus, enrolling 200 and 60 students respectively. Under the working title “Ambivalent Belongings: Affective Governance and the Politics of Queer Migration in an Age of Global Apartheid,” her first book examines how queer migration and asylum politics dis/engage with the nation-state as a primary site of identification.

Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at St. Francis Xavier University. Her introductory class enrolls 55 students, and in 2014-15 will become a part of the StFX Social Justice Colloquium (http://sites.stfx.ca/sjc/). Her book manuscript, “Surface Imaginations: Cosmetic Surgery, Photography, and Skin” is presently under review, and she is co-editor of Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis with Angela Failler and Sheila Cavanagh (Palgrave 2013). Currently she is working on a decolonizing re-reading of colonial photographs in North America.

Jennifer Musial is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at Dickinson College, where she teaches “Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies” in a small class environment. Before arriving at Dickinson, she was at Northern Arizona University where she offered the introductory course, “Women, Gender Identity, and Ethnicity” to 105 students each semester. Her research centers on reproductive citizenship, grievability, and gendered racialization, and her first book, “Pregnant Pause: Reproduction, Death, and Media Culture,” is in progress. Her Ph.D. in Women’s Studies is from York University (Toronto).

(PDF of call for abstracts can be downloaded at: http://bit.ly/1e5dmSH. Please share!)

Call for Papers: Women’s Studies on the Edge

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The Women’s Studies Program at Texas Tech University book-stack
proudly announces a call for proposals for the 30th Annual Conference on the Advancement of Women, “Women’s
Studies on the Edge”, which will take place on the campus,  April 17-19, 2014. We invite papers and panel proposals
that explore the manifold meanings of movement and change as connected to, created by, and/or caught up in the presence of women’s, gender, and identity issues, in both contemporary
and historical frameworks. Interdisciplinary proposals, as well as those from disciplines and specialty subject areas are also encouraged to submit. Send a 250-word abstract including
the proposal title, name, affiliation and contact information for  all author(s) to patricia.a.earl@ttu.edu before February 28, 2014.

Fellowship: History of Women in Medicine

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The FOUNDATION FOR THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN MEDICINE
will provide library imageone $5000 grant to support travel, lodging, and incidental expenses for a flexible research period between  JULY 1ST 2014 – JUNE
30TH 2015. Foundation Fellowships are offered for research related to
the history of women to be conducted at the CENTER FOR THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston,
Massachusetts. Preference will be given to projects that deal specifically with women physicians or other health workers or medical scientists, but proposals dealing with the history of women’s health issues may also be considered.

Manuscript collections which may be of special interest include the
recently-opened MARY ELLEN AVERY PAPERS, the LEONA BAUMGARTNER
PAPERS, and the GRETE BIBRING PAPERS (find out more about our
collections at WWW.COUNTWAY.HARVARD.EDU/AWM). Preference will be
given to those who are using collections from the Center’s Archives
for Women in Medicine (see the full list of collections HERE), but
research on the topic of women in medicine using other material from
the Countway Library will be considered. Preference will also be given
to applicants who live beyond commuting distance of the Countway, but
all are encouraged to apply, including graduate students.

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

Applicants should submit a proposal (no more than two pages)
outlining the subject and objectives of the research project, length
of residence, historical materials to be used, and a project budget
(including travel, lodging, and research expenses), along with a
curriculum vitae and two letters of recommendation by MARCH 15TH,
2014. The fellowship proposal should demonstrate that the Countway
Library has resources central to the research topic.

Applications should be sent to: Women in Medicine Fellowships,
Archives for Women in Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of
Medicine, 10 Shattuck Street, Boston, MA 02115. Electronic submissions
of applications and supporting materials and any questions may be
directed to CHM@HMS.HARVARD.EDU.

The fellowship appointment will be announced in April 2014.
Countway Library
10 Shattuck St.
Boston, MA 02115
United States

Women and Social Movements Luncheon at the AHA Meeting in Washington, DC

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Conference icon to use on blog postsWomen and Social Movements co-editors, Tom Dublin & Kitty Sklar,  are hosting a luncheon at the upcoming AHA meeting on Friday, January 3, 12:15-1:45, in the Omni Shoreham, Executive Room. A slide lecture will describe recent additions to both the online database Women and Social Movements, International and
the online journal/website Women and Social Movements in the United States. The luncheon is free but places are limited. To reserve a place
email your interest to tdublin@binghamton.edu.

Call For Papers: Disabling Domesticity

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call-for-papersDomesticity – “The quality or condition of being domestic;” “Home life
or devotion to it;” “Household affairs.”  Vital work has been done within
disability studies to reimagine sex, sexuality, and disabled bodies and
scholars in a number of fields, including for example, feminist and  queer
theorists and women’s historians, have  worked to deconstruct dominant
heteronormative notions of domesticity and show the broad force with
which domesticity and domestic life get deployed in various cultural and
political settings. In this edited collection of new and original scholarship,
contributors will focus on the varied “domestic” sites where intimate
human relations are formed and maintained. Sites that are at once
private and racially, economically, and politically inflected and make
up the social, cultural, ideological, and physical spaces where families,
friends, workers, and lovers come together and form the bonds that
ultimately sustain and in some cases destroy our variegated existence.
When we analyze “domesticity” through the lens of disability, it forces us to
think in new ways about family and household forms, care work, an ethics
of care, reproductive labor, gendered and generational conflicts and
cooperation, local and global economies and political systems. Disabling
Domesticity will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students,
specialists, and general academic readers in a broad range of fields. It
seeks to model the interdisciplinary strengths of disability studies.
Potential contributors may propose work that focuses on any temporal or
geographic location. Proposals from all (disability studies) fields of
study, as well as the work of activists and artists are welcome.

Some chapter details:

Chapter length – 5,000-7,000 words (20-25 pages – excluding
footnotes/endnotes)
Essays may have more than one author
Disability and Domesticity may be broadly defined
All temporal and geographic contexts are welcome.
Essays must be new and original scholarship (no reprints will be
accepted)

Prospective Authors:

Please send CV or Resume and a brief (300-500 word) abstract of your
project by Friday, 3 January 2014.
Full chapter drafts of the project will be due by February 2015.
Submissions and questions to marembis@buffalo.edu

Thinking Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute

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pages-flipThinking Transnational Feminisms is a collaborative  five-day summer
institute (July 6-11, 2014, Columbus, Ohio) organized by and for
feminist scholars who are engaging the transnational as a process, a
critique, a paradigm, and/or a characteristic of social movement in
their scholarship to make sense of these multiple, sometimes
contradictory, approaches and concepts.  We invite graduate students,
emerging, and established scholars to join us in exploring and
sharpening our understanding of where the field of “transnational
feminisms” is and where it is going by sharing and critiquing each
others’ work in progress.  We especially invite non-U.S. based scholars
to participate in this institute to contribute to the work of
decentering U.S. academic practices in thinking through transnational
feminist knowledge production and engagements.

The institute will feature two types of sessions:

1.         Paper workshops that help authors refine their research and
writing and advance our collective understanding of transnational
feminism.  We envision limiting these sessions to 24 authors to
facilitate in depth engagement among all institute participants.

2.   Roundtables that tackle “big” issues in transnational feminism.

To see the full CFP, the proposed roundtable themes, the estimated
costs, and to apply for the summer institute, please see:
https://frontiers.osu.edu/transnational-feminisms-scholar-institute-2014.  Applications are due Dec. 15, 2013.  Questions can be directed to frontiers@osu.edu with the email title Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute.

Institutional sponsors collaborating in organizing and supporting this
conference include Arizona State University Women and Gender Studies,
The Ohio State University Department of Women’s Gender and Sexuality
Studies, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Department of Women
Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Frontiers:  A Journal of Women’s
Studies.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Co-Editor of Frontiers:  A Journal of Women’s Studies
(http://frontiers.osu.edu/)
Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio
State University