Annual Report 2023-2025
Read the 2023-2025 Annual Report (PDF)
August 2025
Dear BCRW Community,
This year, the federal government made the extraordinary move to deny scientific consensus on the science of sex and gender, rejected decades of increasing legal and social recognition for trans people, and implemented scores of measures to punish programs promoting racial justice. This is the most challenging environment to undertake feminist intersectional research and programming since our founding more than 50 years ago. And we’re not going to stop.
Since January 2025, it’s been my privilege to serve as Interim Director of the singular enterprise that is BCRW. I took the helm at the same moment as these unprecedented attacks on our core mission began and just after BCRW completed both a year-long self-study and a rigorous external review that concluded “BCRW’s research and public scholarship impact is unparalleled by any feminist studies center in the world.”
That reputation was built by my visionary predecessors, most recently including Co-Directors Premilla Nadasen and Janet Jakobsen. In 2023-2024, BCRW’s stellar programming included the 49th Scholar and Feminist Conference on Anti- Colonialism, Black Radicalism, and Transnational Feminism; a groundbreaking conference honoring the legacy of Ella Baker (with a standing-room-only crowd for a conversation between Angela Davis and Barbara Ransby); the Reproductive Injustice Symposium; and the Feminist Freedom School, a free, week-long summer intensive bringing together students, scholars, and activists to strategize around urgent themes in feminist politics.
In Spring 2025, several events focused on surviving hard times through love and mutual aid. Nina Sharma, author of The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown, offered a humor writing workshop, and Dean Spade ‘97, renowned trans scholar and longstanding BCRW partner, presented Love in a F*cked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together. Feminist botanist Banu Subramaniam delivered the annual Roslyn Silver ‘27 Science lecture, drawing from her recent book The Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism to explore how feminist and scientific thought can be harnessed for more socially just practices of experimental biology. We were delighted to finish the semester in partnership with Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharris and Noam Sandweiss-Back from the Kairos Center of Union Theological Seminary, whose recent book You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take teaches us that we can organize in dark times and win. Moving forward, we will build on BCRW’s foundation as a “solidarity incubator” with intersectional feminist praxis as our north star, embracing the most expansive vision of feminist work, from queer and trans liberation to mutual aid and economic justice, from feminist science and technology studies to anticolonialism and transnational feminist solidarities.
With the current onslaught against civil rights and social recognition, trans people have faced particularly brutal attacks, including the denial of medical care and attempts to legally and socially erase trans existence. Against this backdrop, we’re thrilled to offer our “We Will Not Be Erased: Queer Archives, Trans Histories” series in fall 2025, a partnership between our longstanding collaborator, trans activist, writer, and artist Tourmaline and BCRW’s Creative Director, Hope Dector. Their collaboration will culminate in the completion of a groundbreaking film project on the untold early life of Marsha P. Johnson in 2026. Countering the erasure of trans people from history, Tourmaline’s work centers the lives of Black trans people not only as subjects of history, but as authors of their own legacies.
In preparation for our historic 50th Scholar and Feminist Conference in spring 2026, we’ve been mining the treasures in BCRW’s archives. The conference’s storied history teaches us that BCRW has with unflagging regularity met—and often anticipated—the moment with intersectional feminist knowledge and action, especially in periods of profound struggle. Activating the conference’s history of field-defining conversations and provocations, as well as its share of controversies, “Fifty Years of Meeting the Moment” will tackle the most crucial questions of the present, from feminist responses to authoritarianism and genocide to Black abolitionist strategies for visioning the world otherwise. You, our community of scholars and activists, share credit for our accomplishments. And we know you share our trepidation about the exceptionally difficult times in which we find ourselves. As we write this Annual Report, my colleagues and I are proud to recount the achievements of the past two years and excited to preview our 2025-26 research, publications, and events. At the same time, we are clear-eyed about the challenges facing critical inquiry projects in general, and intersectional feminist praxis in particular. So let me assure you: we are sober but more determined than ever to create feminist knowledge based in and geared towards real-world action for a more just world.
In solidarity,
Beck Jordan-Young