Student Seminars
These short-term, intensive seminars emerged out of a desire by BCRW and affiliated faculty to build more extensive intellectual and organizational connections between the Global Symposium host cities, sites of faculty research, and Barnard College. In creating this initiative, we wanted to: a) explore the ways in which global education demands encounters with the world within negotiations of difference, connection, and power; and b) create pedagogical, administrative and research practices that produce long-term, collaborative relations of equality and justice among seminar participants. Believing that research, teaching, programming, and activism can be intertwined at the global scale, the seminars consider how gender allows us to attend to systemic inequities as well as recurring commonalities, which then allow us to shape research, knowledge, and curricula within contemporary global conditions.
In August 2015, BCRW will return to Cape Town to co-host another seminar with the African Gender Institute.
Global Seminars
Mumbai
In January 2013, BCRW organized the initial Global Seminar in Mumbai in conjunction with Sophia College and Lady Shri Ram in Delhi. The seminar, “Mumbai at Home and in the World: Gender, Sexuality, and the Postcolonial City” focused on comparative perspectives between Mumbai and New York and featured a performance by a local activist theater group as well as lectures by Barnard faculty and visits to sites in Mumbai. This student seminar intersected with the “Subaltern Urbanisms” research project, which was also meeting in Mumbai this January, with faculty members from “Subaltern Urbanisms” folding the discussions from their research seminars into their lectures to Barnard and Sophia students.
Cape Town
In August 2013, BCRW collaborated with the African Gender Institute to offer a seminar on “Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary African Contexts.” This course was especially designed for students who wanted to forge new linkages between their knowledges of global political change, gender and sexuality, and activism. Students and faculty were drawn from University of Cape Town, Barnard College, and Rutgers University. AGI Director Jane Bennett also visited the Barnard campus in late March and early April 2013 for a parallel seminar, focusing more specifically on Southern Africa. She held the same seminar on the Barnard campus in October 2013.
Cave Hill
In July 2015, BCRW Associate Director Tami Navarro traveled to the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill as part of BCRW’s Transnational Feminisms Initiative in partnership with colleagues in the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) at the Cave Hill campus. While in Barbados, Dr. Navarro taught a module in the IGDS summer course, Caribbean Institute in Gender and Development (CIGAD). Dr. Navarro’s session, “Women and Global Markets: A View from the Caribbean,” provided students with an overview of development paradigms in the Caribbean and their gendered implications. During her visit, Dr. Navarro also delivered a lecture entitled Virgin Capital, which drew from her anthropological research in the US Virgin Islands.
