BCRW has long been interested in supporting social justice movements that reach
beyond the limits of traditional feminist activism. In past semesters, we have hosted
programs that have taken up a variety of intersectional projects that join feminist
activism and analysis with other progressive movements, including reproductive justice,
workplace rights across the economic spectrum, and the links between sexual and
economic justice, to name a few. This panel on New Feminist Activism will explore
how young feminist activists are engaging with struggles for justice in areas such as
education, the environment, and race and class. By using new forms of media and
building alliances, these activists (and many others like them) are creating a strand of
feminist activism that is fundamentally concerned with social justice and social change.
Panelists include: Mia Herndon, Executive Director of the Third Wave Foundation,
a feminist, activist foundation that works nationally to support young women and
transgender youth; Ai-jen Poo, Lead Organizer at Domestic Workers United, an
organization working for fair labor standards for nannies, housekeepers, and other
domestic workers in New York; and Rinku Sen, President and Executive Director of the
Applied Research Center, a racial justice think tank and home for media and activism,
publisher of Color Lines magazine, and the author of Stir It Up: Lessons in Community
Organizing and The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of
Globalization.
This two-day conference continues the groundbreaking work of Eileen O'Neill '75
by examining the standard narrative of the history of philosophy from a feminist
perspective. O'Neill's pioneering scholarship has brought to light the texts and ideas
of women in the early modern period, and demonstrated the substantial contributions
they made to philosophy. Her work has encouraged the analysis of thinkers as diverse
as Marie de Gournay, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anna
Maria van Schurman, Mary Astell, Émilie du Châtelet, and Damaris Masham. It has also
challenged philosophers to reconsider methodological assumptions that have hidden
these women and their works from view. The eminent international scholars gathered
for this conference will continue this exploration and discuss the methodological,
pedagogical, and philosophical implications of O'Neill's work. The conference also
celebrates the impact of O'Neill's commitment to women in philosophy more generally.
Participants include Lanier Anderson (Stanford), Martha Bolton (Rutgers), Desmond
Clarke (University College Cork), John Conley (Loyola College, Maryland), Marguerite
Deslauriers (McGill University), Karen Detlefsen (University of Pennsylvania), Ann
Ferguson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Alan Gabbey (Barnard College),
Dan Garber (Princeton University), Don Garrett (New York University), Karen Green
(University of Monash, Australia), Gary Hatfield (University of Pennsylvania), Sarah
Hutton (Aberystwyth University), Dan Kaufman (University of Colorado), Anne
Marie Keyes (Marymount Manhattan College), Marcy Lascano (California State,
Long Beach), Ernan McMullin (University of Notre Dame), Stephen Menn (McGill
University), Christia Mercer (Columbia University), James Ross (University of
Pennsylvania), Marleen Rozemond (University of Toronto), Tad Schmaltz (University of
Michigan), Lisa Shapiro (Simon Fraser), Alison Simmons (Harvard University), Robert
Sleigh (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Alice Sowaal (San Francisco State
University), Connie Titone (Villanova University), Mary Ellen Waithe (Cleveland State
University), Sue Weinberg (Hunter College, CUNY), and Eileen O'Neill (University of
Massachusetts, Amherst).
Sponsored by: Barnard Center for Research on Women; The Philosophy
Departments of Barnard College, Columbia University, Nassau Community College,
Princeton University, Queens College (CUNY), Simon Fraser University, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, University of Notre Dame, and University of Pennsylvania;
the Provost of Barnard College; the Institute for Research on Women and Gender,
Columbia University; Office of the Dean of Arts & Humanities, Harvard University; NYU
Issues in Modern Philosophy Conference Series, sponsored by the NYU Department
of Philosophy and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Dean of Humanities, Department
of Philosophy, and Program in Feminist Studies, Stanford University.
With her 2005 book Los Demonios del Edén (Demons of Eden), author and human
rights activist Lydia Cacho revealed the existence of organized sexual abuse of
minors in Mexico. Following the publication of her book, she was subject to police
harassment and became a symbol of a growing movement for greater freedom of
the press. As a result of the attempts to silence her, Mexico has seen an increasing
awareness of the obstacles facing both independent journalists and victims of sexual
abuse. After a screening of a documentary based on Los Demonios del Edén, and her
work on behalf of victims, Lydia Cacho will respond to questions from the audience.
Cacho is the recipient of the 2007 Amnesty International Ginetta Sagan Award for
Women and Children's Rights and the 2008 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press
Freedom Prize. An investigative journalist and a specialist on gender-based violence,
she is the founder and Director of the Refuge Center for Abused Women of Cancun
and is also the President of the Center for Women's Assistance.
In this lecture, Alexander Alberro, Virginia Bloedel Wright Associate Professor of
Art History at Barnard College, explores forms of art and spectatorship that have
emerged in the past two decades and are referred to as "contemporary." The new
modes are varied, covering a span from digital productions and sculptural installations
that overwhelm cognition and produce sheer affect, to relational practices that seek
to immerse art in the world of everyday life. Together, they have significantly realigned
the manner in which art addresses its spectator—indeed, they have constructed the
spectator in a new way.
Professor Alberro is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. His
essays have appeared in a wide array of journals and exhibition catalogues. He has
also edited and co-edited a number of volumes, most recently Art After Conceptual
Art and Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists' Writings.
This year's Roslyn Silver '27 Science Lecture will be presented by Melissa Franklin,
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University. An experimental particle physicist
who studies hadron collisions produced by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, she
works in a collaboration of over 600 international physicists who discovered the top quark,
the most massive of known elementary particles. Her work is focused on looking for new
particles, which can only be produced by colliding protons at very high energies. She will
also be collaborating with 2000 other physicists on experiments using data from the Large
Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, when
the LHC is turned on this fall. Professor Franklin will discuss her research and its potential
to answer questions about how these elementary constituents of matter come together to
create more complex forces, including those forces that may have created the universe.
She will also discuss the challenges in navigating the university and the international
laboratory in order to make a contribution to this effort, and the importance of having "a lab
of one's own" to allow for independent thinking.
Professor Franklin received her B.Sc. from the University of Toronto and her Doctorate
from Stanford University. She worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley Lab,
an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and as a Junior
Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, before joining the Harvard faculty in 1989 and
becoming the first woman to gain tenure in the department of physics in 1992.
Elizabeth Freeman is Associate Professor of English at the University of California,
Davis. She specializes in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies, and
her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. Her first book was The
Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, and she is the
editor of Queer Temporalities, a special double issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian
Gay Studies 13.2/3 (Winter/Spring 2007). Her second book, Time Binds: Queer
Temporalities, Queer Histories, will be published by Duke University Press next
year. Her talk will be drawn from this forthcoming project and frame the project of
erotohistoriography—loosely, a project of encountering the past in which the body is
an instrument—in terms of its place in a revised history of sexuality. It seeks to offer
a revised history of sexuality by centering queer pleasures and proposing the body
as site of historical encounter, in and across time. Through these encounters across
time, we might get a glimpse of historically specific pleasures and ways of organizing
a life that exceed the current cramped politics of same-sex marriage as end game of
sexual liberation.
Established in 2004 in honor of Barnard alumna Helen Pond McIntyre '48, the McIntyre
lectureship highlights the work of scholars who have made extraordinary contributions to
the field of Women's Studies. In past years, the lecture series has welcomed numerous
feminist icons, including legal scholar Patricia Williams; human rights advocate Dorothy
Q. Thomas; feminist science pioneer Anne Fausto-Sterling; and scholar and activist
Angela Davis. This fall, we are pleased to highlight the work of Saba Mahmood,
Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California and expert on issues
of secularism, gender, and modernity within the context of Islamist movements in the
Middle East and South Asia. Professor Mahmood will reflect on why ethical practice
and forms of embodiment matter to questions of feminist politics and analysis. By
engaging some common misreadings of her 2005 book Politics of Piety, Mahmood
urges feminist scholars to critically re-think the normative status accorded to secular
conceptions of the self and body in contemporary debates about religion.
Saba Mahmood is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California
Berkeley. She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject, which received the 2005 Victoria Schuck award from the American Association
of Political Science. Mahmood is the recipient of the 2007 Carnegie Corporation
Scholar's award, and the Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of
Learned Societies (2009-10). Her current project focuses on the politics of religious
freedom in the Middle East.
Catherine Waldby is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social
Policy at The University of Sydney, Australia. In this presentation, Professor Waldby
will explore 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. It will locate this
tension in both a feminist biopolitical analysis and in the broader dynamics of the global
bioeconomy.
The presence of women in the ranks of contemporary Zapatismo is a
feature that has become visible in various ways, and which the insurgent
movement has had to integrate. Sub-commander Marcos is not making light
of the issue when he states that women belong in Zapatismo not because
it is a feminist movement, but because they have earned their place in
it. Women have opened spaces within the movement and have articulated
this space with specific demands that make them visible under a new
light, even—and most importantly—in their own eyes. This talk will
approach some of the forms of visibility that indigenous women have
adopted and explore how they have gradually altered the traditional
order of gender relationships by redefining the experience of feminine
indigenous subjectivity as well as transforming the way they are
perceived by national society.
Conventionally, immigrant "illegality" has come to signify a status, assigned by law to
migrants residing in the United States who arrive outside of authorized channels and
without proper documentation. Conceptualizing illegality simply as status, however,
overlooks the social consequences that this legal category has on the lives of the
undocumented. In her study of Mexican migration to New England, Jacqueline Olvera,
Term Assistant Professor at Barnard College, examines how migrants, who are
constructed as socially invisible yet physically present, negotiate the complexities that
illegality introduces in their everyday lives. Arguing that illegality is a social sphere that
unauthorized immigrants occupy, Olvera shows how illegality shapes the decisions
and actions of the undocumented, and of citizens as well.
Professor Olvera teaches courses on immigration, poverty, communities and social
change, and ethnic conflict. Prior to teaching at Barnard, she taught at Connecticut
College and held a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the
University of Michigan's National Poverty Center. Professor Olvera has received
funding from the Russell Sage Foundation for her research on Mexican migration in
New England.
On Grace Paley's birthday, we present a conversation exploring 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 war in Iraq. Her death in 2007 was a great loss, but her work
continues to inspire. Speakers, coming from a range of generations, will include
politically engaged writers, artists, and activists in such causes as immigration rights,
housing, human rights, gay and lesbian issues, foreclosure actions, anti-militarism and
other important struggles. The speakers have all drawn inspiration from Paley's work
and life and demonstrate various affinities to the amazing woman, artist and thinker who
described herself as a "combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist."
Speakers will include: Yvette Christiansë, poet and novelist; Ynestra King, ecofeminist activist and
educator, and editor of Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population,
Environment, and Development; Nancy Kricorian, New York-based writer and activist,
author of Zabelle and Dreams of Bread and Fire, and coordinator of the New York City
chapter of CODEPINK Women for Peace; Amy Swerdlow, founding member of
Women Strike for Peace and author of Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood
and Radical Politics in the 1960s; and a member of the Center for
Immigrant Families (CIF), an inter-generational, collectively-run
organization of low-income immigrant women of color and community
members in Manhattan Valley.
This event is co-sponsored by the Columbia Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWAG).
