Past Gender & Women's Studies Events

Relocating Queer Histories: Soundscapes of Desire in The Barber of East L.A.

Professor Karen Tongson

Karen Tongson is Assistant Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Before joining the faculty at USC, Tongson held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at UC San Diego, and a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Residential Research Fellowship at UC Irvine. Tongson's work on popular culture, queer studies, performance, music and literature has appeared in such journals as Social Text, GLQ, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and The International Journal of Communication, as well as in the anthologies Queering the Popular Pitch (Routledge), and The Blackwell Companion to LGBTQ Studies (eds. Haggerty and McGarry). Her first book, titled Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, is forthcoming in spring 2011 (NYU Press). Professor Tongsonis also co-editor-in-chief of "The Journal of Popular Music Studies"and co-series editor of the new NYU Press book series, "Postmillennial Pop."

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies

12 - 1:30 PM
602 Barrows

"Remix This: Indigenous Knowledge, Social Media and the Public Domain"

Speaker: Dr. Kimberly Christen, Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies, Washington State University

Lecture

Bio: Kimberly Christen is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at Washington State University. Her research focuses on contemporary indigenous alliance-making globally, but with specific attention to Australia. Her book, Aboriginal Business: Alliances in a Remote Australian Town (http://sarweb.org/index.php?sar_press_aboriginal_business) explores the complexities of Aboriginal modernities as they relate to a range of "business" ventures. She has worked collaboratively with the Warumungu community in Central Australia on a range of projects over the last ten years including an oral history and DVD, an educational website (http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/3/digitaldynamics/) and a community digital archive (www.mukurtuarchive.org). She is currently working with the Plateau Center for American Indian Studies, the Umatilla, Coeur d’Alene, and Yakama tribes and the Washington State University libraries designing the Plateau Peoples’ web portal and digital archive (http://libarts.wsu.edu/plateaucenter/portalproject/). Her current academic research grows from this work and focuses on the intersection of digital technologies, museum spaces, intellectual property rights and cultural heritage movements within indigenous communities and the global commons. In 2010-2011 Dr. Christen will be working with a range of collaborators including USC, WIPO and the Smithsonian Institution on an NEH grant funded digital project to create an open source digital archive and content management tool for indigenous communities globally. Dr. Christen maintains a blog, Long Road, (www.kimberlychristen.com), where she regularly addresses these issues and archives her publications and on-going projects.

Abstract: The now infamous and increasingly trite rallying cry by Internet enthusiast John Perry Barlow that "information wants to be free" bookends an all too often binary narrative about "open access" or "information sharing" online. In this scenario, information is either free or it is hidden behind a firewall. It is open to all or closed off by corporate greed. Questions about the ethics and politics of openness, access, and information circulation are often ignored as we battle over DRM or Microsoft's intellectual property regime. While these debates are waged in courtrooms, boardrooms, and classrooms the subtleties of knowledge management and the histories of access to information are pushed aside. In this presentation, I examine the questions of open access and knowledge circulation in relation to indigenous knowledge and content. Specifically, I will explore the creation of an indigenous digital archive as a conscious application of digital technologies to undo the default of open access that drives archival sensibilities.

Sponsored by GWS Li Ka Shing Lecture series | Co-sponsored by The Center for New Media, Blum Center, The Program in American Cultures

4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
BCNM Commons (340 Moffitt)

"Open Shutters Iraq: documentary, subjectivity and agency in post-invasion Iraq" By Maysoon Pachachi, London-based Film Maker and Director

"Games, Art and Activism" By Susana Ruiz, Doctoral student, Interdivisional Media Arts + Practice, School of Cinematic Arts, USC and Co-founder, Take Action Games Media Artist and Scholar

Panel Discussion and Project Demonstration

Maysoon Pachachi will discuss her approach to documenting everyday life in Iraq since 2003, from her perspective as an ex-patriot Iraqi filmmaker and the co-founder of the Independent Film and Television College in Baghdad, the first and only free school of its kind in Iraq. Maysoon challenges the approach of many media outlets who seek to "give Iraqis a voice" and questions what alternatives exist in today's complex world of global media. As her project demonstration, Maysoon will show extracts from IFTVC student films and (if time allows) present either a clip from her most recent documentary film

"Our Feelings Took the Pictures: Open Shutters Iraq" or some of the photographic and text work created by the women on the Open Shutters Iraq project.

Bio: Maysoon Pachachi is a London-based filmmaker of Iraqi origin. She worked for many years as a documentary and drama film editor in the UK, and since 1994 has worked as an independent documentary film director.  She has written several feature scripts and is now developing a fiction feature film to be shot in Iraq. She has also taught film directing and editing in Britain and Palestine.

Susana Ruiz will present some of her work, including Darfur is Dying and Finding Zoe, as well as an ongoing multi-platform piece entitled In The Balance, which addresses aspects of the American criminal justice system. In parallel, she will talk about Games For Change – a community that creates and promotes games that engage contemporary issues with the goal of fostering a more just, equitable and tolerant society.  She will also comment on additional influences to her work, such as the notion of documentary games as a mode or genre of discourse and practice; the impact design can have towards social change and learning; and game making as an art practice.

Bio: Susana Ruiz is a media artist and scholar working in the intersections between art, journalism, game design, documentary and ethics. In partnership with mtvU and a team of passionate and socially conscious students, Susana developed Darfur is Dying a pioneering game for social change, which received critical acclaim from experts, won numerous awards, and helped garner the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ prestigious Governors Award. The game was said to be one of the best representations of life in Darfur by Pulitzer Prize winner New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and was presented in Capitol Hill to members of the U.S. Congress. Her follow up project in collaboration with the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children – Finding Zoe - addresses gender stereotyping and teen dating abuse, and won the Ashoka Changemakers and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s global competition Why Games Matter: A Prescription for Improving Health and Health Care. Susana has presented at numerous media and game festivals as well as academic conferences, and has been interviewed by major news venues including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR’s Morning Edition, NPR’s All Things Considered, CNN, and ABC World News. She received a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and an MFA from the University of Southern California, where she is currently a doctoral student. She is the co-founder of the game design collective Take Action Games, which seeks to address critical social issues via innovative gameplay.

Sponsored by GWS Li Ka Shing Lecture series | Co-sponsored by The Center for New Media, Townsend Center for Humanities, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, The Program in American Cultures

4:00 PM - 7:00 PM
BCNM Commons (340 Moffitt)

"SexMoneyMedia"

Speaker: Dr. Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College
Organizer and Moderator: Professor Minoo Moallem

YouTube's Feminist Failures.

Known as the poster-child for freedom of expression and the democratizing possibilities afforded by user-generated digital content, YouTube provides free access to production and distribution of media while withholding other functionality sorely needed for meaningful personal and communal expression and activism. Feminist media has long made demands for expanded access alongside the growing of community, goals, history and literacy. We should not be satisfied with or placated by a free corporate platform. Rather, feminist work must occur within living communities enjoying shared commitments and viable micro-infrastructures. Juhasz will offer lessons from her current work as a scholar and teacher on YouTube, and as producer of the micro-budget collective lesbian feature, The Owls (Cheryl Dunye 2010), as examples of the highs and lows of user-generated, feminist digital possibility.

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005), and Media Praxis: A Radical Web-Site Integrating Theory, Practice and Politics, www.mediapraxis.org. She has published extensively on documentary film and video. Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. She recently completed the feature documentaries SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), Video Remains (2005), and Dear Gabe (2003) as well as Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998) and the shorts, RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Film (2000) and Naming Prairie (2001), a Sundance Film Festival, 2002, official selection. She is the producer of the feature films, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The OWLS (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about YouTube: www.youtube.com/mediapraxisme and www.aljean.wordpress.com. Her born-digital on-line "video-book" about YouTube, Learning from YouTube, is forthcoming from MIT Press (Fall 2010).

Sponsored by GWS Li Ka Shing Lecture series | Co-sponsored by The Center for New Media, Blum Center, The Program in American Cultures

4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
BCNM Commons (340 Moffitt)

Thousand Days and a Dream
Film Screening
Tanushree Gangopadhyay

Thousand Days and a Dream (78 minutes) is a film by Babu Raj and Sarathchandra about the success of a local struggle against the Coca Cola company that turned into a transnational movement against U.S. imperialism and the policies pushed by the State and Central Governments in India. The movement began in the tribal village of Plachimada, in the State of Kerala, in opposition to the Coca Cola company's monopolization of local water sources to the detriment of residents. The film captures the spirit of the anti Coca Cola struggle in interviews with its participants. It traces the history of the struggle and discusses the issues it raises.

Tanushree Gangopadhyay, a journalist with major newspapers with national circulation, has been deeply engaged in feminist research, publishing and activism in India over the past thirty years. During the 1980s she coordinated the Forum against Female Feoticide in Gujarat which eventually managed to get legislation passed to prevent the practice. In 1995 she was founder and president of the Media Women's Forum, Gujarat, and an active member the National Media Women's Fora. She was also a founding member of the feminist collective Chingari, based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Throughout she has been an activist in a range of people's struggles pertaining to human rights and critical of development policies, such as against the displacement of adivasis ("tribals") and Dalits ("outcasts"), against the Hindu right and Hindu nationalist violence against Muslims, and in the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada River Movement). For over thirty years Tanushree Gangopadhayay has publicized feminist struggles in her writing, has initiated and carried through activist groups on a range of feminist issues, and has brought a feminist analysis and her own intellectual and activist energies to many wider struggles on behalf of women and other subaltern collectivities in India.

Sponsored by Gender & Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Center for South Asia Studies

6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
370 Dwinelle

Film Screening-Bishar Blues
Tanushree Gangopadhyay

Bishar Blues (90 minutes) is a film by Amitabh Chakravorty about Islamic mystics of India. The film moves against the grain of many of the simplistic reductive controlling images of Islam in South Asia as it journeys across the countryside of West Bengal with Islamic fakirs. The subjects of the film don't believe in what otherwise pass for "traditional" forms of Islamic worship or rituals, and, contrary to widely di?used stereotypes, they are acutely gender sensitive. The film also centers the place of Lalan Fakir, an eighteenth century poet-singer who questioned the credence of religion, caste, and gender in a multitude of his songs, and who is revered by the film's subjects.

Tanushree Gangopadhyay, a journalist with major newspapers with national circulation, has been deeply engaged in feminist research, publishing and activism in India over the past thirty years. During the 1980s she coordinated the Forum against Female Feoticide in Gujarat which eventually managed to get legislation passed to prevent the practice. In 1995 she was founder and president of the Media Women's Forum, Gujarat, and an active member the National Media Women's Fora. She was also a founding member of the feminist collective Chingari, based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Throughout she has been an activist in a range of people's struggles pertaining to human rights and critical of development policies, such as against the displacement of adivasis ("tribals") and Dalits ("outcasts"), against the Hindu right and Hindu nationalist violence against Muslims, and in the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada River Movement). For over thirty years Tanushree Gangopadhayay has publicized feminist struggles in her writing, has initiated and carried through activist groups on a range of feminist issues, and has brought a feminist analysis and her own intellectual and activist energies to many wider struggles on behalf of women and other subaltern collectivities in India.

Sponsored by Gender & Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Center for South Asia Studies, Townsend Center Working Group on Muslim Identities and Cultures

4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
370 Dwinelle

GWS Spring Colloquia - "Women, Religion and Electoral Politics in the Islamic Republic"

Speaker: Dr. Homa Hoodfar, Professor of Anthropology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal

Lecture

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies, Li Ka Shing Lecture Series | Co-sponsored by Center for Middle Eastern Studies

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Center for Middle Eastern Studies Conference Room

GWS Spring Colloquia - "Post-9/11 Disease Scares and the Health-Security Industry: Racialized 'Biological Threats' and Gendered Biodefense"

Speaker: Dr. Gwen D'Arcangelis, Postdoctoral Scholar, UCSB Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology, Feminist Studies

Lecture

Dr. Gwen D'Arcangelis is a scholar of gender, culture and science. She is interested in public engagements-particularly of women and communities of color-with emerging science and technology. She has just completed a dissertation on post-9/11 disease scares and the science, health and national security policies implemented in their wake. Her results showed that the "biosecurity" and "bioterrorism" disease control measures implemented during the post-9/11 period not only diverted attention away from commonplace public health concerns with equitable distribution and access to healthcare, but also promoted racist representations of disease carriers and the funneling of frontline healthcare workers (who are primarily female) into an emerging national security-biodefense complex. In January 2010, she began as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the NSF/EPA UC Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnolgoy (UC CEIN), located at UC Santa Barbara, where she is working on a mixed methods qualitative/quantitative study of gendered and raced environmental risk perceptions about nano materials in the US and Canada. Gwen also has experience as a bioscience laboratory technician and is actively involved in community groups working toward the prevention of violence against women and people of color.

Organized by Li Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
370 Dwinelle Hall

GWS Spring Colloquia - "Making Miscarriage: Technologies of Early Pregnancy Loss"

Speaker: Dr. Lara Freidenfelds

Lecture

Lara Freidenfelds, Ph.D., is an historian of women's health, medicine and the body in America. She holds her doctorate from Harvard University in the History of Science, and her bachelor's degree from Harvard University in Social Anthropology. Her first book, "The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth Century America", was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009 (www.themodernperiod.com). Freidenfelds has taught courses in the history of reproduction, sexuality and gender at Wellesley College, the University of California at Berkeley, and as a graduate student instructor at Harward University.

Organized by Li Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
370 Dwinelle Hall

GWS Spring Colloquia - "Civilizing Images: Violence and the Visual Interpellation of Maori Women"

Speaker: Dr. Michelle Erai, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Riverside

Lecture

Originally from Whangarei, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Michelle Erai graduated from Victoria University, Wellington, with a BA in Sociology and Women's Studies, and with an MA (Applied) in Social Science Research. After several years working as a contract researcher, Michelle relocated to the United States where she completed a Ph.D in the History of Consciousness (with a parenthetical notation in Feminist Studies), University of California, Santa Cruz. Currently writing her first book, Civilizing Images: Violence and the Visual Interpellation of Maori Women, Michelle holds a University of California Office of the President's Post-doctoral Fellowship.

In addition to her academic work Michelle was a co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, and is involved with Amokura: A Family Violence Prevention Initiative governed by the seven northernmost Maori tribes in Aotearoa.

Michelle's tribal affiliations are with Ngapuhi, Ngati Whatua and Ngati Porou.

Her current research interests include: postcolonial feminist theories, visual culture, indigenous feminisms, violence, historiography and the Pacific.

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies, Li Ka Shing Lecture Series

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
602 Barrows Hall

GWS Spring Colloquia - "Movements of Feeling: (Post)Revolutionary Affect and the Search for Normative Neoliberal Selfhood in Luz Arce's The Inferno"

Speaker: Dr. Tamara Lea Spira, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Davis

Lecture

Tamara Lea Spira received her PhD in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at UC Santa Cruz and is currently a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in Spanish and Cultural Studies at UC Davis. Her research and teaching interests include feminist, queer and postcolonial theory; critical theories of race, affect and subjectivity; critical prison studies; fictions of the (post)dictatorship and the cultural politics of neoliberalism in the Americas. Her current manuscript, Movements of Feeling, theorizes the psycho-affective economies of neoliberalism through a transnational study of (post)revolutionary memory in the Chile and the United States. Dr. Spira is developing a second book project that examines the relationship between legacies of dictatorship in the Southern Cone and the rise of Zionism to further theorize the affective logics of contemporary formations of empire. Her publications include "Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire" (co-authors Agathangelou and Bassichis, The Radical History Review, 2008); "Global Sexualities, Transnational Desires: Towards an International Sexuality Studies in a Time of Empire" (Blackwell, forthcoming) and essays in the anthologies Transnational Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Contemporary Women's Writing (forthcoming) and Sustainable Feminisms (co-author Agathangelou, Elsevier, 2004).

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies, Li Ka Shing Lecture Series

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
602 Barrows Hall

GWS Spring Colloquia - "Spaces of Exception: Violence, Technology and the Transgressive Gendered Body in the Indian Call Center Industry"

Speaker: Radha S. Hegde, Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University

Lecture

With India being drawn into the global marketplace as the high-tech solution center for business problems and operations, new types of labor demands and work environments have surfaced. The growing influence of new media technologies and mediated workplaces have created conditions of labor for women that entangle the categories of the national and transnational, private and public. Through a close reading of the discourse that emerged after the rape and murder of a call center employee in Bangalore, this talk engages with the sexual politics of transnational work in India's call centers.

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies, Li Ka Shing Lecture Series

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
602 Barrows Hall

GWS Spring Colloquia - "Living Ideas: A Memoir of the Tumultuous Founding of Berkeley Women's Studies"

Speaker: Gloria Bowles

Book Reading, Conversation and Signing

Please RSVP to 510-642-2767
Books will be available for purchase ($22). The book is also available at Analog Books, 1816 Euclid near Hearst, 843-1816.

Gloria Bowles, is a writer and founding Coordinator of Women's Studies at UC Berkeley where she taught from 1976-1985. Her publications include Theories of Women's Studies, co-edited with Renate Klein (Routledge, 1983), Louise Bogan's Aesthetic of Limitation (Indiana University Press, 1987), and the recently completed memoir of her women's studies years at Berkeley, Living Ideas.

4:00 - 6:00 PM
Women's Faculty Club

GWS Spring Colloquia - "From the Rise of Medicine to Biomedicalization: U.S. Healthscapes and Iconography, circa 1890-Present"

Speaker: Dr. Adele Clarke, Professor of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of History of Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco

Lecture

Clarke extends Appadurai's concept of scape to construct "healthscapes" to include things that "matter" regarding health, healing, illness, disease, medicine, drugs, technologies, etc.---what ever is imaged / imagined as "things medical." Through historical iconography, she presents three healthscapes in the US: the rise of medicine c1890-1945; the era of medicalization c1940-1990; and the era of biomedicalization c1985-present. The iconography of "things medical" reveals changing patterns of visual cultural representations -from advertisements to movies to books and television programs. The rise of medicine healthscape featured physicians, surgeries and hospitals. The medicalization healthscape featured patients, providers as people and drugs. Today, the biomedicalization healthscape centers on various modes of technoscientific intervention, complex teams to execute them, and enhancements.

Adele E. Clarke is currently Professor of Sociology and History of Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research has centered on studies of science, technology and medicine especially the history of reproductive sciences and contraceptive technologies. Her book, Disciplining Reproduction, won the Basker Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology and the Fleck Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science. She has also published extensively on qualitative methods including Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn (Sage 2005) which won the Cooley Award of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. With colleagues, a forthcoming edited volume is Biomedicalization: Technoscience and Transformations of Health and Illness in the US (Duke 2010). Clarke is also a co-editor of the journal BioSocieties. Her current projects center on reproductive technologies transnationally, anticipation as an affective regime particularly salient to women and girls, and animal models in the history of life sciences.

Organized by Li Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
370 Dwinelle Hall

GWS Spring Colloquia - "Desirous Mistresses and Unruly Slaves: Property, Power and Desire in Black Lesbian Neo-Slave Narratives"

Speaker: Dr. Matt Richardson, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Lecture

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies, Li Ka Shing Lecture Series

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
602 Barrows Hall, GWS Conference Room

"Ms. Berne will share a disability justice perspective in which she contrasts the medical and social models of disability, cross-movement organizing, and the role of cultural work in health, sexuality, race, gender, and disability."

Speaker: Patty Berne, Director, Sins Invalid

PATTY BERNE is a Co-Founder and Director of Sins Invalid. Berne's background includes advocacy for immigrants who seek asylum due to war and torture; community organizing within the Haitian diaspora; international support work for the Guatemalan democratic movement; work with incarcerated youth toward alternatives to the criminal legal system; advocating for LGBTQI community and disability rights perspectives within the field of reproductive and genetic technologies; offering mental health support to survivors of violence; and cultural activism to centralize marginalized voices, particularly those of people with disabilities. She is pursuing a Psy.D. focusing on trauma and healing for survivors of interpersonal and state-sponsored violence. In 2008, she had a chapter published in the Routledge Press book, Telling Stories to Change the World, on the work and history of Sins Invalid. She currently chairs the Board of Directors at San Francisco Women Against Rape and is the 2009 recipient of the Empress I Jose Sarria Award for Uncommon Leadership in the field of LGBTQI and disability rights by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Sins Invalid is a performance project on disability and sexuality that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized from social discourse. Sins Invalid recognizes that we will be liberated as whole beings - as disabled/as queer/as brown/as black/as genderqueer/as female- or male-bodied - as we are far greater whole than partitioned. We recognize that our allies emerge from many communities and that demographic identity alone does not determine one's commitment to liberation.

Sins Invalid is committed to social and economic justice for all people with disabilities - in lockdowns, in shelters, on the streets, visibly disabled, invisibly disabled, sensory minority, environmentally injured, psychiatric survivors - moving beyond individual legal rights to collective human rights.

Sponsored by Science, Technology and Society Center

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
20 Barrows Hall

"Sexuality and Rights: Uneasy Bedfellows?"

Speaker: Dr. Alice Miller, Lecturer in Residence; Senior Fellow, Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, Boalt School of Law, UC Berkeley

Dr. Miller will speak about contemporary global conversations on sexuality and formal human rights, and the multiple political valences of nation neo instantiations of national culture that are shaping the impulse to make rights claims as well as the posture and scope of these claims in the UN settings. She will consider how health has been both a safe and constraining site for these developments, as exemplified by the 2004 report of a UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Health who attempted to limn out sexual rights as including but not limited to sexual health [health, he thought, having been made safe because of HIV/AIDS] and yet found himself the target of major attacks from both the US and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

Previously, Ali Miller was an Associate Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health & International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, teaching in the Columbia's Schools of Law, Public Health and International and Public Affairs. Miller's past work includes co-Directing the Center for the Study of Human Rights and the Human Rights Concentration at Columbia University, School of Public and International Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University from 1989. In 1998-1999, she was a Rockefeller Fellow in the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights at the School of Public Health. She is a visiting professor at the Sexuality and Rights Institute, Pune, India, for two weeks each year, and at the International School, Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture and Society, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for one week each July.

Professor Miller has over 20 years of policy and advocacy experience with non-governmental organizations, including directing the women's rights program at the Human Rights Law Group (now Global Rights) [at the Law Group, 1993-98]; Amnesty International USA's Program against the Death Penalty [1991-1993], and co-founding AIUSA's programs on women's rights, and LGBT rights programs. She continues to work with local and international NGOs, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and local and national NGOs such as the Women's Institute for Leadership Development (USA), and CREA and TARSHI (India) on human rights issues in the US and globally. Her scholarship and policy work has addressed gendering humanitarian law, safe migration and anti-trafficking policies, criminal law, and specifically abolition of the death penalty, women's rights, sexual rights, sexual and reproductive health and LGBT rights.

Li Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies | Sponsored by Science, Technology and Society Center

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
20 Barrows Hall

"New Media Documentary: Digital Art and Activism"

Speakers: Sharon Daniel, Professor of Film and Digital Media and Chair of the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Erik Loyer, an interactive media artist whose internationally-exhibited award-winning work uses tactile and performative interface in the service of audiovisual storytelling

Artist/activist/scholar Sharon Daniel and interactive media designer Erik Loyer will present two database-driven interactive documentaries, Public Secrets and Blood Sugar as case studies of alternative media activism. In Public Secrets incarcerated women reveal the secret injustices of the Criminal Justice System and the Prison Industrial Complex. Blood Sugar examines the social and political construction of poverty, alienation, addiction and insanity in American society through the eyes of those who live it. The online interfaces and extensive audio databases compiled for these two projects emerge out of the hybrid public art practice in which information and communication technologies are employed in the service of social justice and social inclusion. This talk will address both how these two interactive documentaries were created, and how they transcend the boundaries between art and political activism by engaging the question, "what can art do?" in relation to some of our most troubling social problems.

Beatriz da Costa will present her new work: Who Lives on Times Square?, an investigation into the possibilities of relating between humans and members of the lived non-human worlds that we are least likely to recognize as social actors within urban environments: microbes.

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Blum Center for Developing Economies, Berkeley Center for New Media, Li Ka Shing, Beatrice M. Bain Research Group

4:00 - 7:00 PM
BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt

"A Closer Look at the IOM's Recommendation to Loosen Restrictions on Using Prisoners as Human Subjects"

Speaker: Professor Osagie Obasogie, Associate Professor of Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law; Visiting Scholar, University of California, San Francisco; Senior Fellow, Center for Genetics and Society

Professor Obasogie received his B.A. with distinction from Yale University and his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and an editor for the National Black Law Journal. He also received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a fellow with the National Science Foundation.

Obasogie's research looks at the complex interplay between law and society with regard to American race relations. His most recent work involves developing regulatory schemes for reproductive and genetic technologies that encourage innovation, protect vulnerable communities, and promote the public good. His writings have spanned both academic and public audiences, with journal articles in the Law and Society Review (forthcoming), Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (forthcoming), Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, and the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics along with commentaries in outlets such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and New Scientist.

Professor Obasogie and the Center for Genetics and Society recently published a report on race and human biotechnology entitled Playing the Gene Card? The report focuses on three biotech applications that may have particular risks for African-Americans and other minority communities: race-specific drugs, genetic ancestry tests, and DNA forensics. For more information, please visit www.thegenecard.org.

Organized by Li Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies | Sponsored by Science, Technology and Society Center

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
20 Barrows Hall

"Rejiggering the Scholarly Imagination"

Speaker: Tara McPherson, Associate Professor, School of Cinematic Arts and Editor of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular

This presentation is designed to foment discussion about the future of publishing in electronic formats. While several journals have gone virtual in the past decade, very few have moved beyond the "text with pictures" style of traditional print publishing. I will survey the current state of the digital humanities while also imagining what other forms digital scholarship might take. Taking up as a provocative illustration the online journal, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, I will demonstrate how scholarship in the humanities might utilize new technologically- mediated forms of authorship to produce different modes of academic work and reach new audiences. Each issue of Vectors fosters deep collaboration between academics, artists, programmers, activists, and independent scholars, pushing toward new modes of scholarly reading and writing. Some questions I'll consider include: What happens when scholarship looks and feels differently, requiring different modes of engagement from the reader/user? What happens to argument when scholarship goes fully networked and multimedia? How do you "experience" an argument in a more immersive and sensory-rich space? Can these new modes of scholarship engage pressing issues of social justice, power, and globalization?

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Li Ka Shing and Berkeley Center for New Media, Beatrice M. Bain Research Group

4:00 - 6:00 PM
BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt

Gender and Women's Studies Open House

Join us for the beginning of the semester Meet and Greet. Get re-acquainted with faculty, staff and students! Come to the GWS Conference Room in Barrows to welcome new students or to find out more about activities for the new academic year. All welcome! Refreshments served!

4:00 - 6:00 PM
602 Barrows Hall

"Violence and (Self) - Killing Passion: Lethal Biopolitics or a New Formation of Self, or...."

Kazuko Takemura

Lecture

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Li Ka Shing, Beatrice M. Bain Research Group, Center for the Study of Sexual Culture

5:00 PM
602 Barrows, GWS Conference Room

"Perverse Ethics, Secularism and the Problem of Sex"

Janet Jakobsen - Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and Professor of Women's Studies, Barnard College

Lecture

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Li Ka Shing, Beatrice M. Bain Research Group, Center for the Study of Sexual Culture

4:00 PM
602 Barrows, GWS Conference Room

"Invisible Earthlings"

Introduction: Greg Niemeyer - Associate Professor, Art Practice and BCNM, UC Berkeley

Comment: Ilse Ruiz-Mercado - Ph.D. candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Designated Emphasis in New Media, UC Berkeley

Lecture: Beatriz da Costa - Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and School of Information & Computer Science, UC Irvine

Beatriz da Costa will present her new work: Who Lives on Times Square?, an investigation into the possibilities of relating between humans and members of the lived non-human worlds that we are least likely to recognize as social actors within urban environments: microbes.

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Li Ka Shing, Science, Technology and Society Center, Berkeley Center for New Media

12:00 PM
340 Moffitt

"Being Paid to Do a Job, Provide a Service, or Give a Gift: Egg and Sperm Donors' Perceptions of Compensation"

Rene Almeling - Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar, UC Berkeley/UCSF, and Assistant Professor of Sociology, Yale University

Lecture

Rene Almeling received a B.A. in Gender Studies and Religious Studies from Rice University in 1998 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2008. Her research interests include gender, economics, and medicine, and she is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Selling Genes, Selling Gender: Egg Donation, Sperm Donation, and the Medical Market in Genetic Material".

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Science, Technology and Society Center, Li Ka Shing, Berkeley Center for New Media, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
340 Moffitt, BCNM Commons

"To Have or Not Have"

Film screening | A Documentary on Reproductive Politics in Iran

Niki Karimi, Film Maker
Charis Thompson, Commentary
Minoo Moallem, Moderator

Niki Karimi, the Iranian actress and film maker in person!

Commentary by Professor Charis Thompson

Moderated by Professor Minoo Moallem

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Berkeley Center for New Media, Li Ka Shing, Townsend Center Working Group on Muslim Identities & Cultures, Institute of European Studies

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Stern Hall, Main Lounge

Keynote Address

"Nature, Nurture, Neither: Reconceptualizing Sex, Gender and Sexuality"

Anne Fausto Sterling - Professor of Biology and Gender Studies, Brown University

Keynote Address, to be followed immediately by reception

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies, Li Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science | Co-sponsored by Science, Technology and Society Center and Beatrice M. Bain Research Group

4:00 PM
Lipman Room

Film Series

A Conversation with Niki Karimi

Niki Karimi

Film screening

Two films will be shown, with English subtitles.

3:30 - Yek Shab (One Night): Yek Shab is the story of a young girl who decides to spend the night walking around the streets of Tehran so her mother can have some privacy at home with a guest. She subsequently meets three men with different stories to tell.

6:00 - Chand Rooz Ba'd (A Few Days Later): Chand Rooz Ba'd explores the life of Shahrzad, a famous graphic designer living in Tehran who is consumed by her work and daily life. She is faced with a hard decision as she contemplates leaving her boyfriend with whom she is raising a disabled son.

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies | Co-sponsored by Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Pacific Film Archive, Institute of European Studies, Townsend Center Working Group on Muslim Identities & Cultures

3:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Pacific Film Archive

"Feminism, the Political and the International"

Vivienne Jabri, Director of the Centre for International Relations and Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies, King's College London.

This lecture explores the implications for feminism of late modern manifestations of power. Specifically, and drawing on Michel Foucault's analytics of modern power, the lecture suggests that feminism's historical trajectory finds it comfortably located in liberal governmentality, in a sense rendering gender a technology in practices of government. At the same time, and in consequence, feminism is somehow complicit in liberal modes of power and domination now globally articulated. The challenge for a specifically internationalist feminism is hence centred on the capacity of its discourses to escape this hegemonic framing, while providing a distinct understanding of what it means to be political in the world today.

GWS Fall Colloquia | Co-sponsored by BBRG, CRG & CSSC

4:00 pm
602 Barrows Hall