Events
Engaging our communities
Critical Intersections: Reproductive and Economic Justice
This conference, co-sponsored with the New York Women’s Foundation, will explore how reproductive justice and women’s economic security are inextricably linked and will highlight the work being done in these areas by 17 organizations here in New York. With the leadership predominantly of women of color and young people, these organizations focus on diverse issues […]
Read MoreActivists Who Yearn for Art that Transforms: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States
Lisa Collins
Through this offering of comparative cultural and intellectual history, Professor Collins exposes links between the Black Arts Movement and the Feminist Art Movement in the United States to address a critical question that is too often tackled without seeing these movements as central: How did postwar cultural workers deeply immersed in sociopolitical movements in the […]
Read MoreAfter the Good Life, an Impasse: Notes on the Cinema of Precarity
Lauren Berlant
“After the Good Life” works with two films of Laurent Cantet [Ressources humaines/Human Resources (1999) and L’Emploi du Temps/Time Out (2001)] to engage the new affective languages of the contemporary economic atmosphere across Europe: languages of anxiety, contingency, and precarity that take up the space where social democracy, upward mobility, and meritocracy used to reign. […]
Read MoreWomen’s History as Personal and Political: An Event in Honor of Jane S. Gould ’40
Louise Bernikow '61, Christina Greene, Temma Kaplan, Elizabeth Minnich, Fanette Pollack '71, and Catharine R. Stimpson
In honor of both Women’s History Month and one particular woman, Jane S. Gould ’40, first permanent director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, we present a discussion that remembers Jane and places her life and work in the context of the feminist movements that have improved our lives in so many ways. […]
Read MoreNegotiating ‘Illegality’ in New Immigrant Destinations
Jacqueline Olvera
Conventionally, immigrant “illegality” has come to signify a status, assigned by law to migrants residing in the United States who arrive outside of authorized channels and without proper documentation. Conceptualizing illegality simply as status, however, overlooks the social consequences that this legal category has on the lives of the undocumented. In her study of Mexican […]
Read MoreReproductive Justice in Action
Aisha Domingue, Mary Mahoney, Lauren Mitchell, and Miriam Pérez
This panel will feature a group of reproductive justice activists and birth doulas who work across the spectrum of pregnancy, birth, and women’s health, connecting the traditional reproductive rights movement with new social justice activism that considers the complete physical, political, and economic well-being of girls and women. Birth doulas, as trained sources of physical, […]
Read MoreFeminism and Climate Change
Keynote Addresses by Majora Carter and Joni Seager. Already among the most vulnerable populations worldwide, women and other marginalized groups have been the most acutely affected by the instabilities propagated by climate change. Issues such as water scarcity, drought, and other environmental problems threaten the world’s food supply, making it more difficult for disadvantaged groups […]
Read MoreErotohistoriography
Elizabeth Freeman
Elizabeth Freeman is associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies, and her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. Her first book was The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, and she is the editor of Queer Temporalities, a special double […]
Read MoreQuiet Revolutions: Postcolonial Women’s Writings and Structures of Solidarity
Alison Donnell
This talk offers a new reading of postcolonial women’s writings. The conventional model since the 1980s has been to emphasize issues of silence and invisibility, the desire for voice and narrative space, and self-representation as a form of empowerment and transformation. What is often eclipsed as a result is a valuable political ethic based on […]
Read MoreWhite Rights: What Apartheid South Africa Learned from the United States
Elizabeth Esch
Though widely regarded as the most racist regime on earth, the apartheid government in South Africa learned from policies and practices long extant in the United States. Before apartheid was institutionalized, South African social scientists, educators and politicians were among the most astute observers of racial segregation and white supremacy in the U.S. In this […]
Read MoreInternational Human Rights
Yvette Christiansë, Helen Lieberman, Virginia Magwaza-Setshedi and Jody Williams
This year’s Rennert Forum celebrates the life and work of Helen Suzman, the iconic South African leader who devoted her life to the fight against apartheid. The opening event, which coincides with the opening of an exhibition entitled “Helen Suzman: Fighter for Human Rights,” in the Diana Center, will feature world-renowned human rights activists Helen […]
Read MoreHelen Suzman: Fighter for Human Rights
Helen Suzman was a member of the South African Parliament for 36 years, from 1953-1989. She was the sole opposition voice condemning apartheid during the 13-year period (1961-1974) when she was the governing body’s only member of the Progressive Party. The exhibition explores nearly four decades of Suzman’s life and vision through photographs, personal letters, […]
Read More