Center for Women’s & Gender Studies

Save the dates: Dr. Julie Mertus, American University, will speak on feminism and human rights on April 18; the week before her visit, the CWGS/Rapoport Center Research Cluster on Women, Gender, & Human Rights will hold an informal reading group to talk about her work.

1.
“Leap Frog Feminism: Learning about Human Rights Institution Building from Local Actors”
Dr. Julie Mertus, American University
Professor at the School of International Service
Co-Director of the MA Program in Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs

Monday, April 18, 3:30-5:30p
CCJ 2.310 (Eidman Jury Room: http://www.utexas.edu/law/about/maps/index.php?level=2)
Rapoport Center Human Rights Happy Hour
Sponsored by the CWGS/Rapoport Center Research Cluster on Women, Gender, and Human Rights

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.

2.
Optional Reading Group before the talk by Dr. Julie Mertus
Monday, April 11, 11:00-12:30p
SZB 422

In preparation for Dr. Julie Mertus’ talk on April 18, “Leap Frog Feminism: Learning about Human Rights Institution Building from Local Actors,” please join us for an informal discussion of selections from Dr. Mertus’ recent publications. (Dr. Mertus will not be in Austin for the 4/11 discussion.)

For this discussion, please read any or all of these selections:
1. Human Rights Matters: Local Politics and National Human Rights Institutions. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009.
“Chapter 1: Operationalizing Human Rights at the Local Level,” 1-13
“Chapter 7: Conclusion,” 129-140
2. Mertus with Nancy Flowers. Local Action Global Change: A Handbook on Women’s Human Rights. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008.
“Prologue: From the Kitchen Table to the Burmese Border,” xv-xviii
“Introduction to Women’s Human Rights,” 1-28

If you would like PDFs for these readings for the 4/11 discussion, please email Kristen Hogan at hogank@mail.utexas.edu.

The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies
Childhood and Youth Research Cluster

presents a lecture by

ROBIN BERNSTEIN
Associate Professor, Harvard University
Harrington Fellow, University of Texas at Austin

Thursday, April 21, 3-4:30 pm
Texas Union, Chicano Culture Room 4.206

PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE OR RESISTANCE?
RE-EVALUATING THE CLARK DOLL TESTS

From 1939 through the mid-1950s, psychologists Mamie Clark and Kenneth Clark
conducted their famous “doll test” in which they asked African American
children whether they preferred black or white dolls. Most children identified
white dolls as “nice” and African American dolls as “bad”—proof, the Clarks
argued, that segregation damaged black children psychologically. The doll test
figured pivotally in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that
ruled against segregation in public schools, and it installed in American
common sense the belief that doll preference indexes racial self-esteem. Since
Brown, social scientists have identified many flaws in the Clarks’ experiment,
but in the popular sphere, the tests have lost none of their persuasive power.

Bernstein relocates the “doll test” from its familiar history—that of the Civil
Rights Movement—to another, defamiliarizing one: the history of
representational play involving racialized dolls. She re-reads the Clarks’
experiment through the lens of this tradition of performance in everyday life.
A black child’s rejection of a black doll might, as the Clarks argued, reveal
internalized racism; but it could also constitute a rejection of the violently
racist practices of performance-play that had, for a century, been coordinated
through black dolls. Bernstein makes a case for this second possibility. This
talk recuperates the Clarks by defending the doll test not as flawed social
science but instead as brilliant dramaturgy. Furthermore, this argument
redeems the Clarks’ child subjects by offering a new understanding of them not
as passive internalizers of racism instead as resistors to inherited traditions
of performance.

Robin Bernstein, a current Harrington Fellow in the Department of Theatre and
Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, is a faculty member of Harvard’s
Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and Committee
on Degrees in History and Literature. Her new book, Racial Innocence:
Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, is forthcoming from
NYU Press.

Please join us for this wonderful talk, “Helping Children and Families When a Parent Has Cancer: Current Evidence to Enhance Practice,”
Friday, April 22, 1:00 pm-3:00 p.m., in the School of Social Work’s UTOPIA Theatre.

Dr.Frances Lewis holds the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professorship at the University of Washington School of Nursing. She will review the scientific evidence on the impact of parental cancer on dependent children, summarize results from a randomized clinical trial, the Enhancing Connections Program, and outline activities that providers can do to foster beneficial outcomes for the child and affected ill parent.

http://www.utexas.edu/ssw/news/lewis-parental-cancer/

rsvp to Farya Phillips ffarya@gmail.com

Please join us for the seventh installment this semester of our Lecture Series to be held this upcoming MONDAY, March 28th from 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. in the new Anthropology Conference Room in SAC 5.118

We are honored to welcome Prof. AMIRA MITTERMAIER from the University of Toronto whose lecture is entitled:

BEYOND SELF-CULTIVATION: EGYPTIAN DREAMS AND SUBJECTIVITIES

Lecture abstract: How do Egyptian dream-stories complicate the paradigm of self-cultivation which has in recent years become hegemonic in the anthropology of Islam? Drawing on narratives of visitational and prophetic dreams, Dr. Mittermaier suggests that self-cultivation works well to describe certain practices that are central to the Islamic piety movement, but it obscures other modes of religiosity that revolve around neither acting-against nor acting-within but that revolve around being-acted-upon. These other modes of religiosity are just as prominent in Egypt today and, as the talk aims to show, pose an even more radical challenge to the liberal autonomous self.

This event is generously sponsored by the UT Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

A *light* lunch will be served.

Loretta Ross, the national coordinator of SisterSong Women of Color
Reproductive Health Collective, co-author of Undivided Rights: Women
of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, and longtime human rights,
anti-racism, and anti-sexual violence activist, will be speaking to
the public in April at the University of Texas at Austin. We invite
everyone to join us for this inspiring event.

Who: Loretta Ross
Date: Saturday, April 2
Time: 2:00pm-3:15pm (doors open at 1:45)
Place: Utopia Theater, School of Social Work Building, 1925 San
Jacinto Boulevard, Austin, TX
Cost: Free

Feminist Action Project, a student group at UT, is sponsoring Ms. Ross
as part of their student-run activist conference, “Feminism is for
Every(body),” on April 1 and 2. For more information on the event or
to register, please contact feministactionproject@gmail.com or go to
http://feministactionproject.blogspot.com/. For more information on
Ms. Ross and her work, please see her Speak Out biography here:

http://www.speakoutnow.org/userdata_display.php?modin=50&uid=113

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!

The John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, with support from the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the African Diaspora Studies Department present The Diaspora Talk Series: Poetics of Relation-Thinking, Caribbean, Diaspora.

“Pan-Africanism, Feminism and the Black Radical Intellectual Tradition”
Dr. Carole Boyce Davies, Professor of English & Africana Studies
Research Center, Cornell University

Friday, February 25th
3:00 pm
ISESE Gallery/Warfield Center
201 East 21st, Jester Center A232A

Dr. Carole Boyce Davies has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994) and the LEft of Karl Marx. Claudia Jones, Black/Communist/Woman (Duke University Press, 2007). In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Boyce-Davies has also published several critical anthologies.

“Language Lessons in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour”

Lecture by Alan Ackerman
Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto
Editor, Modern Drama

Thursday, Feb. 24th, 5:00 p.m.
Parlin 203

Alan Ackerman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Portable Theatre: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage (The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), Seeing Things: From Shakespeare to Pixar (U of Toronto P, forthcoming 2011), and Just Words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America (Yale UP, forthcoming 2011). He also co-edited the collection Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006). He is the editor of the journal Modern Drama.

Sponsored by the Department of English. For more information please contact David Kornhaber at david.kornhaber@mail.utexas.edu.

Lecture and Opening

Familias Mexicanas/Mexican Families
by Óscar Sánchez
A photographic series depicting the daily life and intimate spaces of gay, lesbian and transgender families in Mexico
Feb 17 – Mar 21

Opening Lecture on Same-Sex Marriage in Mexico City
by Dr. Leticia Bonifaz Alonzo (UNAM, Mexico City)
Thursday, Feb 17, 6-8pm

FAB UT, Fine Arts Building. 23rd and Trinity

Sponsored by the Queer Studies Cluster, Lonzano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, Center for Latin American Visual Studies, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and FONCA

Curated by Gabriela González Reyes

Please join writer and novelist Aminatta Forna for a discussion of her writing and work in the UK and Sierra Leone on Monday, January 31, at 3pm in WAG 101, and a reading/signing of her new novel The Memory of Love Monday, January 31, at 7pm at Book People.

Both events free and open to the public

Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow and raised in Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom. She is the award-winning author of The Memory of Love, Ancestor Stones (2006) and The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002).

Her new novel The Memory of Love (Bloomsbury/Atlantic Grove), published in April 2010, is a story about friendship, war and obsessive love in post-conflict Sierra Leone. It has been selected as one of the Best Books of the Year by the Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times and the London Times.

The Devil that Danced on the Water, a memoir of her dissident father and of Sierra Leone, was runner up for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2003, chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers series and serialised on BBC Radio and in The Sunday Times newspaper. Ancestor Stones was a New York Times Editor’s Choice book, selected by the Washington Post as one of the Best Novels of 2006.

In 2002 Aminatta helped to build a primary school in her family’s village of Rogbonko. The building of the school was the first step in what would become known as the Rogbonko Project: a community effort to create an escape route from poverty through multiple initiatives in the spheres of education, agriculture, infrastructure and health.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor, University of Virginia, Department of Media Studies & School of Law

Friday, February 4th at noon in Burdine 116

A guest lecture sponsored by the American Studies Department and the Radio-Television-Film Department

As the academy endures financial and political pressure of unprecedented gravity, many scholars are struggling with the need to make intellectual work seem relevant with the fears of being labelled shallow and market-oriented. In addition, scholars who step into public debates risk harassment from critics on cable news and talk radio. This talk will explore the pros and cons of new, untenured scholars asserting themselves into public debates and attempting to generate a public voice. It will consider the potential risks and costs to the quality of one’s prospects for employment and tenure. And it will consider the rewards that can come from doing high-profile work.

Siva Vaidhyanathan received his BA in History and his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas. He is a professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia. Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Dissent, MSNBC.Com , andSalon.com , and he maintains a blog, www.googlizationofeverything.com . He is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and has appeared in a segment of “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. Vaidhyanathan is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. In March 2002, Library Journal cited Vaidhyanathan among its “Movers & Shakers” in the library field. In the feature story, Vaidhyanathan lauded librarians for being “on the front lines of copyright battles” and for being “the custodians of our information and cultural commons.” In November 2004 the Chronicle of Higher Education called Vaidhyanathan “one of academe’s best-known scholars of intellectual property and its role in contemporary culture.” He has testified as an expert before the U.S. Copyright Office on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Vaidhyanathan is the author of three books: The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011); The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004); and Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001). He also is the co-editor of Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (editor with Carolyn de la Peña) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

The LBJ Foundation, Harry Middleton Lectureship is pleased to be joined by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who will speak with Larry Temple, Chairman of The Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation. The lecture will be held in the LBJ Auditorium on Tuesday, November 30 at 6:00 p.m.

Justice O’Connor was appointed by Ronald Reagan as the first female member of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981 and served for 25 years before retiring in 2006. Previously, she served on the Arizona Court of Appeals, as Judge of the Maricopa County Superior Court, in the Arizona State Senate, and as Assistant Attorney General of Arizona. A product of the southwest, Justice O’Connor was raised in El Paso, Texas, and graduated from Stanford University and Stanford Law School.

Tickets: Seating is limited, and tickets are required for entry. TICKETS ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC. We will form a standby line that evening and will fill in any empty seats from that line about five to ten minutes before the program begins. However, there is no guarantee of entry.

Free tickets are available to students with a U.T. student ID at the Texas Union ticket office (UNB 4.300). Limit one per student I.D.

Location and Parking: Free parking will be available in the LBJ Library visitors’ lot (lot #38) and, after 5:00 p.m., in lots #37 and #39. The LBJ Auditorium is located on the lower level of the LBJ complex at 2313 Red River Street. Access to the Auditorium will be through the lobby of the LBJ School of Public Affairs or through the south Auditorium doors by the LBJ Fountain.

For more information please visit: http://lbjfoundation.org/middleton/

Jasbir Puar will give a public lecture – ‘Lifelogging: Digital Archives of Affect, Memory, and Intimacy’ – on November 17th at 3:30 pm at the ISES Gallery (JES A230) – Warfield Center for African and African American Studies.

Professor Puar is a faculty member in the department of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Professor Puar is also a contributor to The Guardian, Art India as well as Bully Bloggers and Oh! Industry.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Sociology, the Department of English, The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, The John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, the Department of American Studies and The South Asia Institute.

Speaker: Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield

Friday November 5th, BURDINE 214, 1:30-3:00pm

Sociology of emotions research has focused on the ways that emotional performance can reproduce gender inequality, particularly in various occupations and organizations. Yet this research often overlooks the racial character of professional workplaces and how emotion work is experienced by racial/ethnic minorities. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews with black professionals, this talk addresses this gap in the literature by examining the ways that race shapes emotional performance in the professional work environment. I conclude that some emotions are, to an extent, marked “whites only” by virtue of the tokenization that black professionals experience in the workplace.

Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield (PhD John Hopkins, 2004) teaches sociology at Georgia State University. She has written widely on social stratification, work and occupations, and the intersections of race, class and gender. Professor Wingfield is the author of “Doing Business with Beauty: Black Women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy” (2008, Rowman and Littlefield), “Yes We Can? White Racial Framing and the 2008 Presidential Campaign” (with Joe Feagin, 2009 Routledge), and “Changing Times for Black Professionals” (2011, Routledge).
Department of Sociology Race and Ethnicity Speaker Series, in conjunction with the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies.

For more info: http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwsoc/4313.html

Speaker: Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield
Date and time: Friday November 5th, BURDINE 214, 1:30-3:00pm

Sociology of emotions research has focused on the ways that emotional performance can reproduce gender inequality, particularly in various occupations and organizations. Yet this research often overlooks the racial character of professional workplaces and how emotion work is experienced by racial/ethnic minorities. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews with black professionals, this talk addresses this gap in the literature by examining the ways that race shapes emotional performance in the professional work environment. I conclude that some emotions are, to an extent, marked “whites only” by virtue of the tokenization that black professionals experience in the workplace.

Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield (PhD John Hopkins, 2004) teaches sociology at Georgia State University. She has written widely on social stratification, work and occupations, and the intersections of race, class and gender. Professor Wingfield is the author of “Doing Business with Beauty: Black Women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy” (2008, Rowman and Littlefield), “Yes We Can? White Racial Framing and the 2008 Presidential Campaign” (with Joe Feagin, 2009 Routledge), and “Changing Times for Black Professionals” (2011, Routledge).

Department of Sociology Race and Ethnicity Speaker Series, in conjunction with the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies.

For more info: http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwsoc/4313.html