Center for Women’s & Gender Studies

April 27 – 29
Four Seasons Hotel, Austin, TX
Fore more information, please visit this site.

Building on the historic 2009 Summit and its acclaimed Austin Manifesto, the Center for Women in Law will once again convene selected leading women in law to explore how women lawyers can attain and exercise power, and use that power for themselves and on behalf of other women. With an audience of judges, law school deans, general counsel, and law firm managing partners, the Women’s Power Summit is poised to transform the face of the legal profession. A detailed agenda for the event may be found at the link directly below.

Keynote speakers:
Gloria Feldt, Author, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power
Linda Strite Murnane, Colonel, USAF, Ret. and Chief, Court Management and Support Services International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Ph.D., Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Author, Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t
Patricia Sellers, Editor at Large, Fortune and Co-Chair, Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit

WHAT: ALG Screening of Howl (2010)
WHERE: Parlin 301
WHEN: Thursday, April 14 at 6:30 p.m.

—

Dear best minds of my generation (and other generations),

Please make plans to attend the year’s last screening of the ALG Cinemas Series. To usher in the end-of-the-semester madness, we’ll be watching Howl (2010), starring everyone’s favorite lit. student, James Franco, as poet Allen Ginsberg. Our esteemed post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Susannah Hollister, will introduce the film and lead discussion afterwards.

If you’re teaching “Banned Books” (or another complimentary class), please invite your students. This film deals largely with the obscenity trial that accompanied the poem’s publication.

JOB POSTING
2011 Summer Internship with the Bernard and Audre
Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice

Contact: William Chandler wchandler@law.utexas.edu 512-232-4857

How to Apply: Please submit materials to William Chandler via email at wchandler@law.utexas.edu (Subject: Graduate Internship) or in person in TNH Room 3.119D at the Law School.

Deadline: 12:00 PM on Friday, April 8.

Description: Professor Karen Engle is seeking to hire two to three law or graduate students to work at least half-time (20 hrs/week) as summer fellows at the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.

Projects may include the following:

Work with human rights archives at UT to develop online exhibits and programming;
Work on the publication of the Center’s 2010—2011 Annual Review by writing and editing articles, compiling photographs, designing layout and working extensively with the software program InDesign; Engage in human rights research, writing and curriculum development;
Other tasks may include mentoring Center undergraduate interns, helping with outreach to students and faculty at the law school and across campus, assisting in the planning of the speaker series and annual conference to take place during the 2011-12 academic year, expanding the Center’s social media and web presence, and assisting with grant writing and fundraising.

Funding is available for the positions.

Required Application Materials: Cover letter, resume, list of three references, and an unofficial transcript that includes the courses you are currently taking. Please indicate any InDesign or Photoshop software skills and foreign language proficiency.

This fellowship is open to all law and graduate students.

Dr. Julie Mertus, American University

Monday, April 18, 3:30 – 5:30 p.m., TNH 2.111 (The Sheffield Room at the Law School)

Join us for the Rapoport Center Human Rights Happy Hour on April 18, for an afternoon with Dr. Julie Mertus, Professor at the School of International Service (American University). Dr. Mertus is Co-Director of the MA Program in Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs.
Drawing on 25 years of experience working with a host of governmental and nongovernmental human rights organizations, Professor Julie Mertus explains the many mistakes and the few successes in two decades of human rights advocacy. The future, she predicts, rests with today’s students who must navigate the many speed bumps and pot holes frustrating social justice and participatory democracy today. See you there!

Social Workers Enriching Lation Leadership
Social Justice Action Coalition present a film series on
Immigration

The following movies will be screened at the UTOPIA:
Machete – 3/29/11 @ 6:00pm
Papers – 4/6/11 @ 1:00pm
Letters from the Other Side – 4/21/11 @ 1:00pm
9500 Liberty – 4/27/11 @ 6:00pm

Lawmakers have introduced three bills (SB 354, HB 750, HB 86) that would force universities to permit guns in classrooms in Texas. Given the midterm elections, we have very little chance of defeating the bills in the House, where they already has more than enough authors to pass — but we believe we can stop them in the Senate.

We cannot do this without you. A lot of legislators think they can slide this bill through without students noticing.

WHAT: Lobby Day
WHEN: Thursday, February 17th
WHERE: Texas Capitol
WHO: SG, GSA, and Students for Gun-Free Schools in Texas

We’ll be down at the Capitol all day, showing lawmakers that students really don’t want guns in classrooms.

You don’t need to come all day — just stop by whenever you can, and we’ll give you some offices to visit.

Joining us will be Virginia Tech survivor Colin Goddard, who is in town for a screening of Living for 32 (a Sundance Official Selection about his work).

If you are attending, please fill out this petition: http://bit.ly/tx-petition and write down at the end what times you’re available Thursday.

Please share the Facebook page with your friends, or forward this email to fellow students.

Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=130583317007893

Please join the CWGS/Rapoport Center Research Cluster on Women, Gender, and Human Rights for its first meeting of the Spring semester. We are pleased to welcome Dr. Jennifer Suchland of Ohio State University to begin our semester series. Please share this announcement.

“Sex Trafficking and the Making of a Feminist Category of Analysis”
Dr. Jennifer Suchland, Ohio State University
Tuesday, February 8, 4:30 -6pm, GEB 4th Floor Conference Room

What is at stake in how we define and combat sex trafficking? Since the end of the Cold War, the issue of sex trafficking has been dominated by debates regarding agency and violence against women. My talk will discuss why this is the case looking specifically at how a “violence against women” approach to anti-trafficking can privilege particular understandings of trafficking that obscure the role of the state and transnational flows of capital in sustaining the informal and formal economies that make up sex trafficking. I ask how we can advance a human rights approach to anti-trafficking that links economic and sexual rights.

Dr. Jennifer Suchland is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. Her research is on comparative gender studies and issues of culture, law and political discourse. Her most recent essay, “Is Postsocialism Transnational?”, is forthcoming Summer 2011 in “Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society.” She will be discussing research from her current book project which includes work on the evolution of global anti-sex trafficking discourse and its impact on postsocialist Russia.

For more details on the event, please contact Lydia Crafts Putnam at crafts.lydia@gmail.com.

The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice of the University of Texas at Austin is proud to announce the launching of the Rapoport Center Human Rights Working Paper Series.

We encourage submissions from scholars of all disciplines as well as from activists and advocates that contribute to the Rapoport Center’s mission to build a multidisciplinary community engaged in the study and practice of human rights that promotes the economic and political enfranchisement of marginalized individuals and groups both locally and globally.

The Working Paper Series is being launched online in a blog-style format. This approach offers authors the ability to actively receive feedback and encourages readers to engage in debates surrounding human rights and social justice through posted comments.

Please visit the website to read our first working papers, which are the finalists of the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights. You may also find submission and blogging guidelines on the website.

Greetings from the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas School of Law.

We are pleased to invite you to register for our seventh annual conference. Entitled “Aftershocks: Legacies of Conflict,” this year’s conference is designed to coincide with performances of The National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch at the University of Texas, an award-winning play written by Scottish playwright Gregory Burke and based on actual interviews with Scottish soldiers from the Black Watch regiment who were deployed to fight in Iraq in 2003. The conference will convene an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore some of the same intersections of violence, the colonial past, memory, and trauma that Black Watch invokes, as well as the unique role that performance might play in the analysis. It will consider these issues in a variety of geographic spaces and places, with a special emphasis on the legal and political regimes that are meant to preserve memory while also transitioning into post-conflict.
Lawrence Wright, journalist, playwright, and New Yorker Magazine staff writer, will deliver the keynote address on Thursday, February 17, to be followed by a pre-show panel with the playwright and a performance of Black Watch at Bass Concert Hall. The conference proceedings will continue throughout the day on Friday at the UT School of Law. The schedule is pasted at the bottom of this email.

This event is co-sponsored by Texas Performing Arts, the Humanities Institute, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, UT Libraries, the South Asia Institute, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, Performance as Public Practice, British Studies, and the Kozmetsky Center of Excellence in Global Finance (at St. Edward’s University).

You can learn more about the participants and register by visiting the conference website. This event is free and open to the public. Because space is limited at parts of the conference, we would appreciate your registration as soon as possible. Early registrants will be eligible for a 15% discount on tickets to Black Watch.

http://www.utexas.edu/law/conferences/aftershocks/index.php

We hope that you will be able to join us for what we are sure will be an exciting and thought-provoking event!

Best wishes,

Karen Engle

Cecil D. Redford Professor in Law & Director
Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice
University of Texas School of Law
727 East Dean Keeton
Austin, Texas 78705

http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/

Schedule
Thursday, February 17, 2011 — UT School of Law
4:00 p.m.
Conference Opening: Lawrence Wright, Journalist, Playwright, New Yorker Magazine staff writer
Keynote Lecture sponsored by the UT Humanities Institute
5:15–6:30 p.m.
Pre-Show Panel: “Performance and Human Rights”
Chair: Charlotte Canning, University of Texas at Austin
Gregory Burke, Playwright of Black Watch
Nicholas Cull, University of Southern California
6:45-7:45 p.m.
Reception in Bass Concert Hall
8:00 p.m.
Attend performance of Black Watch by the National Theatre of Scotland at Texas Performing Arts’ Bass Concert Hall.
Friday, February 18, 2011 — UT School of Law
9:00-9:30 a.m.
Continental Breakfast
9:30–11:00 a.m.
“Colonial Legacies”
Panelists:
Chair: Benjamin Brower, University of Texas at Austin
Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois
Priya Satia, Stanford University
Ralph Wilde, University College London, University of London
11:00–11:15 a.m.
Break
11:15 a.m. –12:45 p.m.
“Traumatic Legacies”
Panelists:
Chair: Barbara Harlow
Neloufer de Mel, Colombo University, Sri Lanka
Laura Edmondson, Dartmouth University
Jeffrey Helsing, United States Institute of Peace
1:00–2:15 p.m.
Lunch
2:15–4:00 p.m.
“Institutional and Legal Legacies ”
Panelists:
Chair: Karen Engle, University of Texas at Austin
Kate Doyle, The National Security Archive
Paul Gready, University of York
Helen Kinsella, University of Wisconsin/Madison
Fionnuala D. Ni Aolain, University of Minnesota, University of Ulster, Belfast
4:00–4:15 p.m.
Break
4:15–5:30 p.m.
Closing Panel
Invited participants from each of the previous panels

As many of you know, the Texas After Violence Project is an independent non-profit organization conducting qualitative research about human rights violations, including serious violence, the criminal justice system, incarceration, and state executions.

We work primarily through a person-centered form of oral history in which we ask very few questions; we listen to and digitally record the first-person narratives of lived experience. When narrators have reviewed and approved the D.V.D.s and transcripts of their interviews, we make these narratives public in the manner and to the extent that their authors explicitly permit. We’ve started posting the materials online at the
Human Rights Documentation Initiative of the UT Libraries:

http://rmedia.lib.utexas.edu/index.php/Category:Texas_After_Violence_Project

Currently, we are also conducting a survey. With the support of Dr. Matt
Richardson and Diana Claitor, and with the organizational support of allgo: a queer people of color organization and the Texas Jail Project, we are surveying Texas county jails concerning their practices and policies regarding transgender inmates.

If you, your friends, students or colleagues want to participate in serious, purposeful qualitative research, please join us. We offer two eight-week training sessions this fall. Both will begin this week, one on Thursday nights 6 -8 on the U.T. campus, and one on Friday afternoons, 1:30 – 4:30 p.m. at our office by South Congress Avenue & Riverside Drive.

Wednesday, November 17 at 5:30 PM at the LBJ School, Building SRH, Room 3.122.

The documentary provides raw insight into what has been called a humanitarian crisis affecting Central American migrants crossing Mexico. It tells the story of women kidnapped by Los Zetas, victims of trafficking, and unexpected moments of hope along the way. PAACC (Public Affairs Alliance for Communities of Color) will be providing drinks and snacks.

The documentary was made by Salvadoran filmmaker Marcela Zamora, a graduate of the Escuela de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio in Cuba. She was part of a team of six journalists, fotographers, and filmmakers who spent a year living with undocumented migrants crossing Mexico to reach the American dream. The project is called En El Camino/On The Road, and was produced and published by ElFaro.net, Latin America’s first completely web-based, digital newspaper. Read more about it here: http://www.elfaro.net/?tpl=707.

View the trailer here: http://vimeo.com/16240592. In Spanish with English subtitles. For more information, contact Allison Ramirez at .

“From Beirut to Kabul: War, Occupation, and Resistance”
a talk by journalist Nir Rosen

Wednesday, November 17, 2010
7 p.m.
University of Texas at Austin
Thompson Conference Center auditorium (TCC 1.110)

http://www.utexas.edu/maps/main/buildings/tcc.html

TCC is next to the LBJ School at Red River and Dean Keeton.

There is free convenient parking for motorists in the large lots along Red River. http://www.utexas.edu/cee/tcc/img/maps/TCCparkingmMap.pdf
The conference center is on Bicycle Route 42; see http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/bicycle/downloads/bicycle%20map_07.pdf.
For bus routes, use the trip planner at http://www.capmetro.org/.

Independent journalist Nir Rosen will speak about his reporting in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan — sectarianism and civil war, occupation and resistance, terrorism and counterinsurgency. His most recent book, Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World, was just released last month by Nation Books.

Rosen, a Fellow at the Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law, is also the author of The Triumph of the Martyrs: A Reporter’s Journey into Occupied Iraq. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and his documentary film “No End in Sight” about the occupation of Iraq won a Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Rosen is a frequent guest on Democracy Now!, CNN, al Jazeera International, and various other television and radio shows in the United States and abroad.

Rosen has traveled extensively in the Middle East and Central Asia, including more than two years in Iraq reporting on the American occupation, the relationship between Americans and Iraqis, the development of postwar Iraqi religious and political movements, interethnic and sectarian relations, and the Iraqi civil war. His reporting on the origins and development of Islamist resistance, insurgency, and terrorist organizations has also taken him to Afghanistan, Somalia, Jordan, and Pakistan.

Articles, interviews, and information about Rosen’s book are online at:

http://aftermathbook.com/

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/10/hbc-90007749

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/09/nir-rosen-aftermath-afghanistan

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR35.6/rosen.php

The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, Third Coast Activist Resource Center, Department of Government, School of Journalism, and International Socialist Organization. For more information, go to http://www.utpalestine.org/.

Mon, November 22, 2010 • 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM • School of Law 3.214 (faculty lounge)

Did you know that the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice holds periodic Happy Hour Speaker Series? They are usually on Mondays from 3:30pm to 5:30pm at the School of Law 3.214 (faculty lounge).
The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies will co-sponsor one of the Human Rights Happy Hour Speakers on Monday, November 22, 2010. Her name is Paola Bergallo, and she is a professor at the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her talk will be about “Cycles of Right to Health Litigation: The Elusive Argentine Experience”.

Professor Bergallo’s research interests center on feminist critiques of the law, socio-legal theory and constitutional and human rights issues. She served as a researcher and consultant in projects of the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad (CEDES), the Center for Reproductive Rights, the UN Fund for Population (UNFPA) and the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) on gender and law, women human rights and sexual and reproductive rights. She is a founding member of Red Alas, Red de Académicas Latinoamericanas, a network which aims to reform Latin American legal education from a gender and sexuality perspective. In addition to an LL.B. with honors earned from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (1994), Professor Bergallo also holds a Masters of Law Degree from Columbia University (2000) and has completed a Masters in Legal Research (2003) from Stanford University where she is a J.S.D. candidate.

We hope to see you there!

Sponsored by: Rapoport Center, Center for Women’s and Gender Studies

Brown Bag Lunch Topic

Tue, November 30, 2010 • 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM • Gebauer, 3rd Floor Conference Room

Paola Bergallo, Professor of Law, Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires

Professor Bergallo has consulted on women’s human rights and sexual and reproductive rights for the Center for Reproductive Rights, the UN Fund for Population, and the Pan-American Health Organization. She is a founding member of Red de Académicas Latinoamericanas, a network to reform Latin American legal education from a gender and sexuality perspective.

Please join us for this event in connection with the new CWGS/Rapoport Center Research Cluster on Women, Gender, and Human Rights. The Research Cluster on Women, Gender, and Human Rights is a new monthly conversation among faculty and students; the discussion supports critical engagement with human rights discourse, connects researchers across campus working on women, gender, and human rights, and facilitates resource sharing for an interdisciplinary approach to advocacy and education for women, gender, and human rights. We invite current and new Research Cluster participants as well as all university community members. All are welcome.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Women’s & Gender Studies and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights & Justice

Dear friends, colleagues, and students,

I am writing to remind you of our next Human Rights Happy Hour Speaker. University of California, Berkeley’s Associate Professor of Rhetoric Samera Esmeir will present a lecture, focusing on the Palestinian liberation movement, entitled “Temporalities of Struggle: National Liberation Movements and International Strategies of Rule.” UT Law Professor Derek Jinks will serve as respondent to her talk. The lecture is free and open to the public and will take place this coming Monday, November 8, from 3:30-5:30, in a new location: JON 5.206/207 at the University of Texas School of Law. Please note the change in room location. This space is part of the new Susman Academic Center. It can be accessed by taking the elevators by the library entrance in the Susman Godfrey atrium.

Professor Esmeir’s research interests span issues around British rule in Egypt, violence, war and the security state in regards to the contemporary Middle East, and legal history, including the colonial histories of “comparative law” and the legal history of treason in Israel. Her recent publications include “The Violence of non-Violence: Law and War in Iraq” (Journal of Law and Society, March 2007), “On Making Dehumanization Possible” (PMLA: The Journal of Modern Languages Association, October 2006), “In the Name of Security: Introduction” (Adalah’s Review, 2004), and “1948: History, Memory, Law” (Social Text 75, Summer 2003). Professor Esmeir received a Ph.D. in Law and Society from New York University. She has worked as a lawyer and co-founded and co-edited Adalah’s Review, a sociolegal journal published in Arabic, Hebrew and English, focusing on Palestinian rights in Israel.

More information on Professor Esmeir can be found on our website at: http://www.utexas.edu/law/centers/humanrights/events/speaker-series.php#esmeir/.

Finally, pasted below is the remainder of the schedule for the Happy Hour series this fall. We hope to see you at one or more of these events.

All Best,
Sarah Cline

Thursday, November 18, 2010
Thomas Pogge (Philosophy, Yale University)
Title: “The Health Impact Fund: How to Make New Medicines Accessible to All”
3:30—5:30 in TNH 3.124
Part of the Law & Philosophy Program’s workshop series, co-sponsored by the Rapoport Center.

Monday, November 22, 2010
Paola Bergallo (Law, Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires)
Title: “Cycles of Right to Health Litigation: The Elusive Argentine Experience”
Co-sponsored by LLILAS and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies.