Note to participants for “Locations of Learning”
The Scholar & Feminist XXXIX
Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices
February 22, 2014
The 2014 Scholar & the Feminist conference, “Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Practices,” will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodern and Transnational Feminist Practice, and bring together scholars across different disciplines and regions to further their transnational feminist work.
The publication of Scattered Hegemonies marks a pivotal moment in the development of transnational feminisms. A collaborative project edited by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies examines the circulation of ideas, people, capital, goods and socio-political movements across different spatial and temporal fields, and how these processes necessitate our rethinking of key categories of feminist analysis, including gender, sexuality, nationalism, modernity, hegemony and power.
Twenty years after Scattered Hegemonies, the need to think and act transnationally is as crucial as ever. The Barnard Center for Research on Women’s 39th annual Scholar & Feminist conference “Locations of Learning: Transnational Feminist Praxis,” provides a collaborative space for transnational feminist scholars to interrogate and reassess the locations of our work, and advance emerging scholarship in our fields. Some of the topics and themes we will explore include:
- How might transnational feminisms help us to analyze and respond to recent global transformations, including the collapse of numerous national economies and economic sectors, the Arab spring, occupy movements and other widespread protests aimed at transforming existing systems of governance?
- Despite decades of work by scholars committed to transforming the academy, the spaces in which we produce our scholarship continue to be characterized by gendered, raced, classed and heteronormative exclusions (e.g. hiring, teaching, tenure and promotion, publication). How might we respond to these challenges?
- What is the impact of digital spaces on transnational feminist scholarship, and how has online engagement influenced the work and strategies for developing research and writing outside of academic walls?
- Transnational feminist works have long complicated disciplinary and area studies approaches, yet our scholarship largely circulates along disciplinary and regional lines. Are discussions that cross-cut these lines important, and if so, how might they be fostered, especially in the current climate of cutbacks?
- Transnational feminist praxis has long constituted a multi-dimensional space of analysis—has it always, implicitly if not explicitly, eschewed ‘paranoid’ readings and simplistic stories? Is the central focus of our praxis critique, and should critique continue to animate our work?
