From a Senate race in New Hampshire to the Presidential palace in Chile; from a team of high school debaters in New York City competing to participate in the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute's Citywide Debate Competition to the halls of Parliament in Rwanda, women are becoming empowered. What inspires them, drives them, and keeps them at the top? In this documentary, originally aired on PBS's weekly news program "NOW," Maria Hinojosa '84 embarks on her own personal journey to discover the struggles women and girls face as they embrace power and seek to change the world. The film provides an intimate behind-the-scenes look at the high-stakes risks, triumphs, and in some cases defeats, of being a woman leader today. A discussion with Hinojosa, a Barnard alum, will follow the screening.

Maria Hinojosa, an award-winning journalist and author, joined the PBS news show "NOW" as senior correspondent in 2005. Hinojosa, who formerly covered urban affairs for CNN, also serves as anchor and managing editor of National Public Radio's "Latino USA," a weekly national program reporting on news and culture in the Latino community. Hinojosa is the anchor of her own Emmy Award-winning talk show on WGBH in Boston, "One on One with Maria Hinojosa." Hinojosa has garnered many awards and honors, including an Emmy in recognition for her work covering the September 11th attacks, a lifetime achievement award in media by the Hispanic Organization of Latin Actors, and a Robert F. Kennedy award in radio for her reporting on the disadvantaged. Her personal experiences as a Mexican-American career woman, wife and mother living in New York were published in 1999 in her critically acclaimed memoir, Raising Raul: An Adventure Raising Myself and My Son. In 1995 she published Crews: Gang Members Talk with Maria Hinojosa, a book based on her award-winning NPR report.

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Transgender, transsexual and other gender non-conforming people face persistent and severe discrimination in employment, education, health care, social and legal services, criminal justice and many other realms. Dean Spade '97, legal expert on transgender issues and founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, will discuss what trans politics can mean in the current political context and how we might understand strategies for trans legal equality in these times. What role does or should radical gender politics play in a historical moment marked by trends of privatization, labor and environmental deregulation, and the elimination of health and welfare programs, all of which contribute to an overall upward distribution of wealth and decreasing life chances for the poor? Neoliberalism's hallmarks are cooptation and incorporation, meaning that the words and ideas of resistance movements are frequently recast to become legitimizing tools for oppressive political agendas. These trends have had significant impacts on social movements in the U.S., whose moves toward professionalization and away from radical demands for redistribution have drastically changed the context of resistance. What can trans activists and our allies learn from these trends and how can we conceptualize trans strategies that prioritize those who are the objects of the violence produced by neoliberalism? This talk will offer some examples of approaches being taken by trans activists to confront these dilemmas.

Five years after graduating from Barnard College, Dean Spade founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. SRLP also engages in litigation, policy reform and public education on issues affecting these communities and operates on a collective governance model, prioritizing the governance and leadership of trans, intersex, and gender variant people of color. While working at SRLP, Dean taught classes focusing on sexual orientation, gender identity and law at Columbia and Harvard Law Schools. Dean is currently an assistant professor of law at Seattle University Law School. Prior to joining the faculty of Seattle University, Dean was a Williams Institute Law Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law School and Harvard Law School.

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Moderated by Lisa Duggan, Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU, and Richard Kim, Associate Editor, The Nation Magazine.

Featured Speakers: Katherine Franke, Professor of Law and Director, Gender & Sexuality Law Program, Columbia University, and Dan HoSang, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies & Political Science, University of Oregon.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the American Studies Program, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Religious Studies Program (FAS, NYU); the Department of Performance Studies at NYU; The Nation Magazine, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

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The post 9-11 deployment of unfettered neoliberalism (i.e. deregulation, privatization, downsizing, outsourcing) has led to a plethora of critiques of the U.S. as ushering in a new rise in empire building, global imperialism, and disaster capitalism. Examining the notion of the "American Empire," from an indigenous perspective, Sandy Grande, associate professor of education at Connecticut College and visiting associate professor and director of of the education department at Barnard, argues that while it may be necessary to continually analyze the colonialist project through contemporary lenses, it is critically important to perceive its current incarnations as an extension of, rather than a departure from the historical project that began in 1492.

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Conference Website and Online Registration

Increased demand for assisted reproductive technology (ART) and transnational adoption has been propelled by a number of factors, including the development of new technologies and changes in familial form—such as childrearing in second or third marriages; lesbian, gay, and transgendered families; and delays in childbearing and subsequent difficulties in conception—that make ART helpful. Other relevant factors include environmental changes that have negatively affected fertility levels, new levels of transnational migration and interaction that have fueled awareness of babies available for and in need of adoption, and concerns about genetic diseases and disabilities. Effectively, the various imperatives and the desires, both cultural and personal, that the use of ART fosters and responds to, have created a "baby business" that is largely unregulated and that raises a number of important social and ethical questions. Do these new technologies place women and children at risk? Should there be limits on how reproductive technologies are used? How should we respond ethically to the ability of these technologies to test for genetic illnesses? And how can we ensure that marginalized individuals, for example, people with disabilities, women of color, and low-income women, have equal access to these new technologies and adoption practices? These questions and many others on the global social, economic and political repercussions of these new forms of reproduction will be the focus of this year's Scholar and Feminist Conference.

Conference Opening by Debora Spar, Barnard College and Keynote Address by Sarah Franklin, Lancaster University.

Participants include: Lori Andrews, Chicago-Kent College of Law; Laura Briggs, University of Arizona; Claudia Casta–eda, Brandeis University; Wendy Chavkin, Columbia University; Dana-Ain Davis, State University of New York, Purchase; David Eng, University of Pennsylvania; Sarah Franklin, Lancaster University; Faye Ginsburg '76, New York University; Michele Goodwin, University of Minnesota Schools of Law, Medicine, and Public Health; Rebecca Haimowitz, filmmaker, Made in India; Leith Mullings, City University of New York; Rayna Rapp, New York University; Loretta Ross, SisterSong; Lesley Sharp, Barnard College; Vaishali Sinha, filmmaker, Made in India; Debora Spar, Barnard College; Kalindi Vora, University of California at Berkeley; Faith Wilding, subRosa; and Hyla Willis, subRosa.

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Registration fee for entire series: $100.
Individual sessions $25 each.
Barnard Women will receive a 20% discount when they register at St. Bart's Central, 212.378.0222

Many sociologists and students of organized religion agree that women have played a major role in religion in America. Even when women were not included in the official power structure, they were the force that kept churches, synagogues and mosques functioning effectively. How has the role of women changed in the last 25 years? How has the emergence of women as clergy and lay leaders changed the face of religious denominations? What does the future hold? Is this only an American phenomenon?

The Anglican Church
Thursday, March 5 at 6:30 p.m.
The Rt. Rev. Catherine S. Roskam
(Photo: top left)
Roskam is Bishop Suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. A former New York actor and producer as well as a parish priest, she was consecrated as a bishop in 1996.

Islam
Thursday, March 12 at 6:30 p.m.
Anisa Mehdi
(Photo: top right)
Mehdi is a filmmaker who directed and produced "Inside Mecca," a special sponsored by National Geographic Society and broadcast on the PBS network. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and Columbia School of Journalism.

Judaism
Thursday, March 26 at 6:30 p.m.
Dr. Claudia Setzer
(Photo: middle left)
Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College in Riverdale, Setzer earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary.

Hinduism
Tuesday, March 31 at 6:30
(Note different day of the week)
Dr. Rachel F. McDermott
(Photo: middle right)
Professor of Religion at Barnard College and Columbia University, McDermott earned her Ph.D. at Harvard.

Roman Catholic Church
Thursday, April 2 at 6:30 p.m.
Dr. Jeannine Hill Fletcher
(Photo: lower left)
Professor of Religion at Fordham University, Fletcher earned her doctorate at Harvard Divinity School.

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This conference is free and open to the public. All are welcome.

Opening Remarks and Keynote Addresses
(9:00-11:00)

• Joan Tronto, Hunter College and City University of New York
• Elizabeth Jelin, CONICET, University of Buenos Aires
• Shahra Razavi, UNRISD

Session 1:
State Responses to Social Change
(11:00-12:50)

• Mary Daly, Queen's University, United Kingdom
• Ito Peng, University of Toronto, Canada
• Eleonor Faur, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Argentina
• Jorge Papadopulos, CIESU, Uruguay

Session 2:
Extensive Familialism
(13:50-15:00)

• Juliana Martínez Franzoni, University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica
• Rajni Palriwala, University of Delhi, India

Session 3:
Public, Private and Community Care Workers
(15:00-16:50)

• Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts Valeria Esquivel, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Argentina
• Marjorie Mbilinyi, Tanzania Gender Networking Programme, Tanzania

Session 4:
Creating a Policy Agenda for Care
(16:50-18:00)

• Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
• Kate Bedford, University of Kent, United Kingdom

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Bacteria, primitive single-celled organisms, communicate with chemical languages that allow them to synchronize their behavior and thereby act as enormous multicellular organisms. This process is called quorum sensing and it enables bacteria to successfully infect and cause disease in plants, animals, and humans. Investigations of the molecular mechanisms underlying quorum sensing are leading to the development of novel strategies to interfere with the process and, thus, prevent disease. These strategies form the basis of new therapies that might be used as antibiotics. Bonnie Bassler, Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and this year's Distinguished Women in Science lecturer, will present her research on quorum sensing and elaborate on how biologists are discovering new ways to prevent and treat disease.

Bonnie Bassler is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, where she also chairs Princeton University's Council on Science and Technology and is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Molecular Biology Department. Bassler received a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Davis, and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Johns Hopkins University. She performed postdoctoral work in Genetics at the Agouron Institute, and she joined the Princeton faculty in 1994. In 2008, she received Princeton University's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. Bassler is an editor for Molecular Microbiology and Annual Reviews of Genetics, and she is an associate editor for the Journal of Bacteriology.

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Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett (top image, left) and news anchor and correspondent Elizabeth Vargas (second image, left) will engage in a discussion on the specific challenges facing professional women as they juggle work and family commitments. In her recent book, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps, Sylvia Ann Hewlett takes a critical look at how companies can attract and retain professional women while providing greater "arc-of-career" flexibility. Hewlett will share her expertise in advising companies on how to make their workplaces and career tracks more accessible to talented women at all stages in their lives, and will be joined in conversation by Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News, who will share her experiences as a professional woman balancing the demands of work and family.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist and the founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy (a nonprofit think tank) where she leads the "Hidden Brain Drain" Task Force, a group of 47 global companies and institutions committed to fully realizing female and multicultural talent. She also directs the Gender and Policy Program at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. She is the author of seven critically acclaimed books and has taught at Barnard College, Columbia, Cambridge and Princeton Universities and held fellowships at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard. In the 1980s she become the first woman to head the Economic Policy Council, a think tank composed of 125 business and labor leaders. A Kennedy Scholar and graduate of Cambridge University, she earned her Ph.D. degree in economics at London University.

Elizabeth Vargas is co-anchor of ABC News' "20/20." As an award-winning anchor and correspondent, Vargas has traveled the world covering breaking news stories, reporting in-depth investigations and conducting newsmaker interviews. During the historic Iraqi elections in December 2005, she anchored "World News Tonight" from Baghdad. She anchored for both "World News Tonight" and "20/20" from the U.S. Gulf Coast, covering Hurricane Katrina's devastation. Vargas was credited by the New York Times in November 2004 as reinvigorating the newsmagazine format with her "intellectually brave" reporting of an examination of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young man whose murder gained national attention as an anti-gay crime. In July 2003, she hosted "In the Shadow of Laci Peterson," an ABC News special that examined the disappearances of several young women in northern California and why their stories failed to attract significant media attention. Vargas graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo., where she began her broadcasting career as a reporter/anchor for KOMU-TV.

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BCRW's 2008 "Scholar and Feminist" Conference examined the state of democracy, and now that the election results are in and a new President has just been inaugurated, we turn to the state of feminism in the aftermath of the election. There is no question that the results of the 2008 U.S. presidential election were monumental. For the first time in the nation's history, an African-American man has been elected to the highest political office in the country. The presidential campaigns themselves were also full of other important milestones in the fight for truly diverse political representation. Hillary Clinton obtained over 18 million votes in the Democratic primaries, and for the second time a woman was chosen as the Vice Presidential candidate for a major political party. Now that the dust has settled from last November's election, it is time for feminist scholars and activists to regroup and begin a conversation about the impact of these events and the changes they represent. Have the politics of civil rights changed fundamentally? At all? Has the meaning of feminism broadened? Or narrowed? Will these changes set the stage for future movement toward justice in the United States? To lead us in a conversation about what occurred, as well as to discuss future political alliances, possibilities, and risks, we have invited Patricia J. Williams, renowned legal scholar and expert on race in the U.S., to join Laura Flanders, Barnard alumna and feminist activist and journalist.

Laura Flanders is host of "GRITtv," a daily, news, discussion and take-action program seen on Free Speech TV, and of "RadioNation," the nationally-syndicated weekly radio program of The Nation Magazine.

Patricia J. Williams is professor of law at Columbia University, and author of numerous books, including the critically acclaimed The Alchemy of Race & Rights.

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Long after formal peace treaties have been signed, war continues to shape social institutions and interactions. Young people who have grown up amid violent conflict often experience its lingering effects through the loss of family, estrangement from local communities, destruction of the physical environment, or the instability of the government. This panel takes an interdisciplinary look at young people's lives following conflict in various places and time periods. It will show how, in spite of the tremendous constraints placed on them, young people are social actors who have their own parts to play in social reconstruction. Furthermore, it insists on treating young people not as a homogeneous group, but as individuals whose lives are constructed through relations of social difference and inequality. Taking gender to be a critical dimension of difference, panelists will reflect on the challenges facing girls and boys in post-conflict situations, as well as their active negotiation of culturally, historically, and age-specific masculinities and femininities.

Panelists include Jessaca Leinaweaver, assistant professor of anthropology at Brown University; Megan Callaghan, visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Bard College; and Nara Milanich, assistant professor of history at Barnard College. Abosede George, assistant professor of history at Barnard College, will moderate.

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In 1875, the Anglo-American landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge traveled to Central America as a guest of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. The trip resulted in an album of luxurious views that document the impact of U.S. involvement in the politics and economics of the region. In addition to producing picturesque views of the shady plantations in the Guatemalan highlands, Muybridge also turned his camera on the Mayan natives who worked there. Situating these pictures in the contexts of ethnographic photography and fine art from the 1870s, Elizabeth Hutchinson, assistant professor of art history at Barnard College, traces the overlapping discourses of gender, class, race, and empire that give them meaning.

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For many decades, Adrienne Rich (second image, left) and Antjie Krog (top image, left) have been at the forefront of the dissident tradition within their respective language worlds, writing poetry and prose that pushes the limits of form while questioning the structures of political violence in which they live. Both are among the most lauded writers of their generation, receiving acclaim and prizes around the world despite but also because of their insistent critique of the status quo. Both have created works of inimitable beauty and force. Both have championed justice and equality, and each woman has read and admired the works of the other across the miles and oceans.

Antjie Krog has published 14 volumes of poetry, two of which are in English. She has also worked as a journalist and translator. She is best known for her account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull. Down to My Last Skin, her first collection of poetry in English won the inaugural 2000 FNB Vita Poetry Award. Among her many other awards are the Eugene Marais Prize, the Dutch/Flemish Reina Prinsen-Geerligs Prize, the Rapport Prize for best literary work in a particular year, and the Hertzog Prize for the best poetry volume over three years. For her journalistic work Krog has received the Pringle Award as well as the Foreign Correspondent Award and has been honored by the Hiroshima Peace Foundation. She has also been the recipient of the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.

One of America's most distinguished poets, Adrienne Rich has published more than sixteen volumes of poetry and four books of nonfiction prose. Rich's work has achieved international recognition and has been translated into German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, and Japanese. She has received numerous awards, fellowships, and prizes, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize for Poetry, the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Lambda Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, the Poet's Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and, most recently, the Dorothea Tanning Prize of the Academy of American Poets and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Institute for Comparative Literature, the Heyman Center for the Humanities, and Barnard Women Poets, with additional support from the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the Department of English, the Center for Literary Translation, and the Dutch Language Program of the Department of Germanic Languages.

Free and open to the public. Tickets and additional information will be available as of April 1, from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Visit www.columbia.edu/cu/icls/ or call 212.854.4541 for more information.

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Last year, BCRW hosted the first National Domestic Workers Alliance conference, bringing together domestic workers from across the country to develop a national agenda, and to discuss how best to educate the public and strategize to achieve fair labor standards for domestic workers, including a living wage, basic benefits, and health care. This year, we will once again host the National Domestic Workers Alliance for a conference that will discuss issues that are of particular importance to domestic workers on the East Coast. A largely invisible but supremely vital segment of the economy, domestic workers care for children and the elderly and perform domestic and housekeeping work, often making less than minimum wage and working long hours without paid sick days, vacation time, or other basic protections that most other workers in the U.S. enjoy, all the while making it possible for their employers to balance work and family. Support for domestic workers not only makes our society and economy more just, but also benefits employers who rely on the labor of others for childcare, elder care, and housekeeping in order to meet their work and family obligations. Please join BCRW and the National Domestic Workers Alliance to raise awareness on how to extend basic protections to all working women.

This public event, "Women and Work: Building Solidarity with America's Vulnerable Workers," will take place during the East Coast Regional Meeting of the National Domestic Workers Alliance at Barnard College and will feature a video presentation of women leaders across the country who are raising their voices to support the work being done on behalf of domestic workers in this country. There will be over 100 domestic worker organizers in attendance, along with feminist scholars, activists, legislators, and other allies. The event is co-sponsored by the Program in the Study of Women and Gender at Princeton University, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU and the Institute for Women and Work at Cornell.

For the past 5 years, domestic workers have come together across communities to organize for dignity and respect, and demand the passage of a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State, including notice of termination, severance pay, sick days and holidays, and an annual cost of living wage increase. In the wake of the economic crisis, the conditions facing domestic workers have worsened. Facing alarming rates of lay-offs, cut wages and extended hours, without notice, severance pay or any safety net, now more than ever—domestic workers need a bill of rights.

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