BCRW@50 Launch
Link to the the BCRW@50 Archival Exhibit
Current and former students, Eve Kausch ‘18, Alex Volgyesi ‘22, and Tapiwa Gambura ‘24, and former BCRW directors Temma Kaplan (1983-1991), Janet Jakobsen (2000-2015), and Tina Campt (2015-2018) will discuss the making of the online archival exhibit and the making of BCRW history over the last fifty years, zeroing in on labor, reproductive justice, abolition, and Black feminisms.
About the Archival Exhibit
BCRW was founded in 1971. The Center emerged alongside massive changes at colleges and universities across the country, where student uprisings mobilized in concert with anti-war, Black power, Third World liberation, women’s movements, and gay and lesbian movements outside the university, and demanded changes within the university. The well-known protests of 1968 resulted in the formation of the first ethnic studies program at San Francisco State University, and the first women’s studies program at UC San Diego, and the first women’s center, BCRW. Over the last fifty years, the space and meaning of BCRW, like ethnic studies and women’s studies as academic fields, has changed with the demands as well as limitations of the times.
Beginning in 2019, BCRW Post Baccalaureate Fellow Eve Kausch ‘18 and Alex Volgyesi ‘22 began an archival exhibit to reflect on BCRW’s first fifty years of collaborations with community organizations and activists, cultural workers, and scholars. As they culled materials, a few key themes emerged, which in turn have organized the exhibit: Abolition Feminism, Women’s Art and Women’s Writing, Queer and Trans Politics, Feminist Scholarship and Women’s Studies, Reproductive Justice, Black Feminism, Housing Justice, the Politics and Ethics of Care, and Work and Economic Justice. Some of these topics remain at the forefront of BCRW’s programming, research, and publications. Others, once vital to the Center and the feminist movement as a whole, are now memories and markers of past political moments. How did we get to where we are today? What throughlines survived, and which topics have been relegated to the archives? This archival exhibit traces this historical and genealogical inquiry.
The exhibit teaches us about our institutional past, but it also casts light on the broader conversations taking place in around feminism, working-class and racial justice politics, city politics, and many other spheres of collective life.
About the speakers
Eve Kausch ‘18
Alex Volgyesi ‘22 is a Barnard senior majoring in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and History. She has worked as a research assistant for the Barnard Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is a docent at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn.
Tapiwa Gambura ‘24
Janet R. Jakobsen is the Claire Tow Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She served for 15 years as Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and she has also served as Barnard’s Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development and Chair of the President’s Committee on Online and On-Campus Learning (COOL). As Director of BCRW, Professor Jakobsen founded the webjournal Scholar & Feminist Online (https://bcrw.barnard.edu/publication-sections/sf-online/), along with the New Feminist Solutions series of activist research projects with community-based organizations, such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Queers for Economic Justice, the New York Women’s Foundation, and A Better Balance: Work and Family Legal Center (https://bcrw.barnard.edu/publication-sections/nfs/).
Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. A black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and a founding researcher in Black European Studies, Campt heads the Black Visualities Initiative at the Cogut Institute for Humanities at Brown and is the convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. Campt is author and editor of five books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), Listening to Images (2017), Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Hirsch, Hochberg and Willis, 2020) and most recently, A Black Gaze (2021).
Temma Kaplan is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History at Rutgers University and was Director of BCRW from 1983-1991. A longtime teacher, scholar, and activist in pursuit of social justice, she has brought all these commitments to bear in her studies of the Spanish anarchists, Picasso in Barcelona, women’s struggles to fight environmental and political racism in from South Africa to North Carolina, and in the worldwide attempts of ordinary people to create and sustain the democratic institutions that would enable them to live together in justice and peace.
Accessibility
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all. RSVP here.