Strengthening Empirical Reasoning Across the Curriculum
Discussion about the need for stronger STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, especially for women and girls, abounds in the media, classrooms, and centers of policy across America. In a society focused on big data, how can women’s colleges ensure that students have the skills they will need in an evolving landscape that increasingly […]
No One is Disposable: Everyday Practices of Prison Abolition
REGISTER EVENT INFORMATION VIDEOS QUESTIONS RESOURCES Event Informaton In a series of four short online videos produced by BCRW, activists Tourmaline and Dean Spade discuss prison abolition as a political framework, exploring why this is a top issue for those committed to supporting trans and gender-nonconforming people. These videos look at how to build societies […]
Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices
REGISTER DESCRIPTION SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS PROGRAM VIDEOS & MORE Tweets about “#sflocations” Description REGISTER for Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices. Keynote address by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Speakers include Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, Attiya Ahmad, Toby Beauchamp, Abigail Boggs, Tina Campt, Chris Cynn, Nadia Fadil, Abosede George, Harjant Gill, Magdalena Grabowska, Laura Hale, Maja Horn, […]
Maya Krishna Rao
Maya Krishna Rao performs Ravanama, an excerpt from her solo piece on an actor in search of a character, Ravana, and The Walk, an applied theatre piece made in response to the December bus rape case in Delhi.
At the Intersection of Queer Studies and Religion
As part of a broader research project, “Interdisciplinary Innovations in the Study of Religion and Gender: Postcolonial, Post-Secular and Queer Perspectives,” hosted by Utrecht University, the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the Barnard Department of Religion present a discussion on the intersections of queer and religious studies. How has queer studies in religion […]
Mathematics and Beauty
Does beauty have a mathematical foundation? If so, can machines learn to identify it? Mina Teicher, professor of mathematics and neural computation at Bar-Ilan University, traces the mathematics behind beauty from the Golden Age in Spain to the 21st century, from the essence of visual experience to machine “vision,” in order to explore what beauty […]
Sexual Difference in a Time of Terror
On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people and wounded many others in a bombing and mass shooting in Norway motivated by his extreme right-wing ideology. In his manifesto, “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” Breivik identified cultural Marxism, Islam, and feminism as the main causes of Europe’s decay. Arguing for the superiority […]
Faustilla the Pawnbroker and Other Tales of Gender and Finance in the Early Roman Empire
This lecture discusses female involvement in the public management of money during the first century of the Roman Empire. An ideology of gendered “separate spheres” was prevalent in the ancient world, emphasizing the importance of women’s place in the private, domestic realm, while assigning the space of business and finance to male citizens. Yet significant […]
Frontiers in Jewish Studies: The Clever Ox, the Escaping Elephant, and Other Talmudic Animals
Is Judaism good or bad for animals? Beth Berkowitz hopes to bring us beyond this reductive question, with its frequent focus on the first two chapters of Genesis and Jewish dietary laws, to offer instead a more complex approach to the animal in Judaism and to spotlight some less predictable Jewish texts. Professor Berkowitz, newly […]
Habitual New Media: Exposing Empowerment
New media technologies provoke both anxiety and hope: anxiety over surveillance and hope for empowerment. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals that these two reactions complement rather than oppose each other by emphasizing how exposure is necessary in order for networks to work. Addressing the key ways that gender plays—and has historically played—into negotiating media exposure, […]
Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues: Dilemmas of the Nonprofit Tradition in LGBT Politics
Over the last four decades, the formal, non-profit institutional structure has come to dominate social justice work in the US, replacing prior traditions of volunteer-led organizations, membership-based organizing and other more horizontal and participatory mechanisms of civic engagement. Nonprofit organizations have grown in part because of their designation by governments as sub-contractors for the delivery […]
Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation
In her new book, Redefining Rape, Estelle Freedman ’69, professor of history at Stanford University and longtime friend of BCRW, explores not only the ways in which rape has defined citizenship throughout American history, but also how aspiring citizens have tried, repeatedly, to redefine rape. Long before second-wave feminists adopted an anti-rape platform, generations of […]
Feminist Constellations: Intercultural Paradigms in the Americas
The main objective of this participatory conference is to provide a platform for feminist scholars and activists to engage in a meaningful dialogue about their struggles from their positions at the forefront of contemporary debates on democracy, economic, cultural and racial justice. By inviting scholars and activists who bridge Latin American, Africana, Native American, Latino, […]
The Fully Functional Cabaret
Collectively written, produced by, and starring an all trans women cast, The Fully Functional Cabaret: Trans Women’s Secrets… REVEALED! is a self-described “love letter to and from trans womanhood.” Facilitated by Annie Danger and featuring the performances of Star Amerasu, Ryka Aoki, Annie Danger, Red Durkin, Bryn Kelly, and Shawna Virago, this vaudevillian style cabaret […]
Backtalk/Crosstalk: Gendered Stories, Colonial Archives and Sexualized Subjects
Backtalk/Crosstalk is a series of dialogues initiated by the Africana Studies Program to set members of the Africana faculty in conversation with diasporic scholars, artists and activists. The series highlights the gains of institutional recognition for Diaspora Studies, while encouraging and insisting on the impertinent, insolent and disruptive work that achieved such recognition. Backtalk/Crosstalk stages […]
“The Lady with the Whip”: Gendered Violence and Social Death in Manderlay and Django Unchained
How do we conceptualize gender, violence and political organizing in Black life? What does it mean to understand slavery as an ongoing relationship? Join us for a talk by Frank Wilderson, Professor of African American Studies and Drama (UC-Irvine) and award-winning author of Incognegro and Red White and Black. Esther Armah (political commentator, playwright, and […]
Teaching and Writing Transnational Hispaniola: Haiti and the Dominican Republic
Even though popular and widely circulated images show Caribbean cultures as productively and inspiringly creolized, a fully transnational Caribbean reality has proven far more difficult to enact than to envision. Historically and contemporarily, the diverse Caribbean geographies are in many ways impermeable to one another. Almost nowhere are issues of nation-language borders and their resultant […]
Rights, Religion, and Secularity Salon
Acclaimed scholar of history, gender and colonialism Tanika Sarkar joins BCRW for the third event in the annual Salon Series, which offers an opportunity to dive into the implications of texts that make a critical intervention in their field. A diverse group of historians and area scholars respond to Sarkar’s latest work, “A Just Measure […]
The Politics of Solidarity: Gender, Sexuality, and Transnational Organizing
REGISTER DESCRIPTION PROGRAM Description REGISTER ONLINE at http://politicsofsolidarity.eventbrite.com Gender and sexuality have been central issues for activism and transnational affiliations. At the same time, they are often used by governments and nongovernmental organizations alike to reinforce the very forms of hierarchy and hegemony that activists seek to break down. This teach-in will examine movement building, […]
The Future of Online Feminism
Tweets about “#femfuture” Courtney Martin ’02 and Vanessa Valenti present the latest New Feminist Solutions report, which details the development of a robust network of online feminist activism. Inspired by the current level of online activism but discouraged by high burnout rates and a lack of compensation, Martin and Valenti turned to a diverse group […]
On Human Bondage in Ancient Egypt
Around 1500 B.C.E., the subjects of this lecture first appear in the tombs of Egyptian nobles. Just a half-century prior, the Egyptian Delta had been dominated by rulers from the north, but the Egyptians had since conquered their conquerors and exerted sway as far as the Euphrates River. The sudden appearance, activities, and gradual disappearance […]
THATCamp Feminisms East
Register online at http://feminismseast2013.thatcamp.org Barnard joins The Humanities And Technology Camp movement of informal, collaborative “unconferences” dedicated to exploring innovation in the digital humanities. We will help to build the strand that focuses on feminist interventions. Bringing together faculty, students, information professionals and activists from across the Northeast, THATCamp Feminisms will delve into both the […]
Strategic Scrapbooks: Nineteenth Century Activists Remake the Newspaper for African American History and Women’s Rights
Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks—the ancestors of Facebook and blogging. Women’s rights scrapbook makers documented women’s pioneering participation in the public realm and experimented with ways to present it. African Americans created massive compilation scrapbooks that acted as repositories of communal knowledge and passed along a critical, […]
Utopia
LIVE-TWEETING DESCRIPTION PROGRAM VIDEOS & MORE Live-Tweeting Tweets about “#sfutopia” Participant Twitter Handles Gwendolyn Beetham @gwendolynb K. Tempest Bradford @tinytempest Melanie Cervantes @Meloniousfunk Francesca Coppa @fcoppa Design for America – Lulu Mickelson, Andrew Demas, Kendall Herman @DFAColumbia Cassie Flynn @cassie_flynn Amber Hollibaugh – Queers for Economic Justice @Q4EJ Valery Jean @Valery_Jean Ileana Jiménez @feministteacher Elisa […]
Utopia Opening Night: Wildness
We’ll kick off this year’s Scholar & Feminist Conference on Utopia with a screening of Wu Tsang and Roya Rastegar’s film Wildness, a magical and explosive exploration of “safe space,” queer community, creativity, and class. Set in the historic Silver Platter, a Los Angeles bar that has been a home for Latin/LBGT immigrant communities since […]
Worlds of Shange
In a culture in which black women’s stories have been consistently marginalized, Ntozake Shange ’70 unflinchingly delved into experiences of “colored girls” in America, transcending genre and defying expectations with several of the most powerful and lyrical works of art in the twentieth century. This February, the Africana Studies Program, the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary […]
Performing Shange
Playwright and poet Ntozake Shange ’70 has been a defining voice of African American experience since the production of her Obie Award winning masterwork, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, in 1975. To help kickoff the daylong conference, “The Worlds of Ntozake Shange,” Shange joins acclaimed dance artist Dianne […]
Feminism and Beyond: Young Feminists Take on Activism and Organizing
Young feminists have long battled invisibility. Countless media articles bemoan young women’s lack of activism or suggest that movements that “go viral,” like SlutWalk or Occupy Wall Street, have come out of nowhere. In fact, feminism among young people is as active as ever, constantly pushing boundaries both inside and outside feminist communities and engaging […]
Gender Amplified Music Festival
The Gender Amplified Music Festival will celebrate women in music production, their works, and their stories. This event will bring women from around the United States together for a free, day-long festival in New York City to discuss the state of women in music production, brainstorm ways to increase their visibility, and to make music. […]
Did You Kiss the Dead Body? Visualizing Absence in the Archive of War
Rajkamal Kahlon, Artist-In-Residence at the American Civil Liberties Union, speaks about her ongoing project Did You Kiss the Dead Body? Kahlon works with U.S. military autopsy reports, death certificates and torture related government documents from Iraq and Afghanistan to explore the bureaucratization of death, as it intersects questions of empathy and the construction of memory. […]