Rage, Struggle, Freedom: Unveiling Feminist Perspectives on Global Crises
Live transcription is available here.
This special event launches the fall 2024 issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, “Rage, Struggle, Freedom,” with guest editors Margo Okazawa-Rey and Elif Sarican and contributors Gwyn Kirk and Şervîn Nûdem, moderated by Premilla Nadasen. Our panelists will expand on some of the issue’s central themes: feminist responses to global crises from Kurdistan to Argentina to Poland, the transformative power of feminist rage, alternative constructions of security and self-defense, feminist accountability and complicity, and the role of love and care in building resilient communities. We look forward to opening up the dialogue with our audience, providing a space for exchange, reflection, and action planning. Read the full issue here.
This is an online event. Stay tuned for a link to the issue on the day of the event. A link to the livestream will be provided.
About the Speakers
Gwyn Kirk is a scholar-activist concerned with genuine security and a sustainable world. She has taught women’s and gender studies at US universities and colleges for thirty years. She published a textbook/anthology, Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2019) co-edited with Margo Okazawa-Rey, and has written widely on ecofeminism, militarism, and women’s peace organizing. She holds a PhD sociology from the London School of Economics. Kirk is a founding member of the International Women’s Network Against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, the US-based group in the network. She co-directed the documentary, “Living Along the Fenceline” (2012) featuring grassroots women leaders from South Korea to Puerto Rico whose communities are affected by US military presence in their backyards. She has also written scripts and designed outfits for Fashioning Resistance to Militarism, a popular education project.
Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is past president of the National Women’s Studies Association, the inaugural recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize, a former Fulbright Fellow, and a member of the Society of American Historians. She has been involved in grassroots social justice organizing for many decades and has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grassroots community organizing. She is the author of two award-winning books, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (2005), Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (2015), and Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (2023). She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba.
Şervîn Nûdem is a member of the Jineolojî Academy. She has been involved in collective education, writing, and research works in different regions of Rojava / North and East Syria. She has given seminars and organized education programs on Jineolojî, women’s history, and social movements, also in collaboration with Rojava University and international academic and activist networks. She has published articles in multiple languages on Jineolojî, the history of women’s freedom struggles, and models of democratic self-administration. She has had ongoing regular features in the Kurdish women’s newspaper Newaya Jin and is also the editor of the book Bingeha Dírokî û Siberoja Şoreşa Jinê [The Historical Basis and Future of the Women’s Revolution – Results of Sociological Research and Analysis on Women and Society in Rojava / Northern Syria] (Şîler Publications, 2021).
Margo Okazawa-Rey is Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University, an activist, and educator working on issues of militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women examined intersectionally. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network Against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security and is President of the Board of Directors of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). Her recent publications include “Building a Culture of Life: A Conversation on Abolition, Feminism, and Asian American Politics” (Frontiers, 2023), “Two Decades of Feminist Organizing for Genuine Security: Understandings from the International Women’s Network Against Militarism” in Feminist Conversations on Peace (Bristol University Press, 2022), “Nationizing Coalition and Solidarity Politics for US Antimilitarist Feminists” (Social Justice, 2020), Gendered Lives: International Perspectives with Gwyn Kirk (Oxford University Press, 2020), and “No Freedom without Connections: Envisioning Sustainable Feminist Solidarities” in Feminist Freedom Warriors: Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope (Haymarket, 2018). She was also a founding member of the Combahee River Collective.
Elif Sarican is a writer, editor, curator, and translator who collaborates with cultural institutions and universities around the world. As an independent researcher, she has worked on parliamentary inquiries and with artists, curating their archives. Elif is an author of the edited volume ‘She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped The World.’ She is the Education Manager of Left Book Club, a historic radical publisher in the UK established in 1936.
Accessibility
ASL Interpretation will be provided. For additional accessibility needs please email skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This is an online event, free and open to all. Registration is preferred.
Image Credit
Image credit: Gwyn Kirk