In Memory of Marcia Wallace

For a TV fiend growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, like myself, Marcia Wallace was ubiquitous. She sold Jan Brady her infamous brown Afro wig.

As Bob Newhart’s wisecracking single gal secretary, she was the highlight of The Bob Newhart Show.

She played the magical drama teacher (aren’t they all?) who encourages Louise to find her powers in the musical Teen Witch, which played on HBO every day for at least 10 years.

I most know and love her for these characters, and hope that they won’t be overshadowed by her tour de force triumph as Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons.

 Ms. Krabappel could have been the poster woman for the frustrations of working in a public school system that undervalues teachers. However, like so many teachers, the character dealt with the educational system’s deep-rooted problems with an infectious wit and sense of strength that Wallace invested with her unique voice and performance style.

I’m one of the millions who will miss Marcia Wallace. Her face, voice, and way of being always provided me with immense comfort and happiness. We’re lucky to have known her gifts.

--Ben Raphael Sher

Marcia Wallace died on October 25, 2013.

Kim TallBear to give a Life (Un)Ltd. Lecture!

On November 5, scholar Kim TallBear will give a Life (Un)Ltd. Lecture at the Young Research Library. Her talk, titled “Beyond Life/Not Life: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation Practices and Ethics” examines cryopreservation, a scientific endeavor that, according to TallBear, “enables storage and preservation of bio-specimens—including those taken from indigenous peoples’ bodies, often within earlier ethical and racial regimes—into times and spaces beyond those inhabited by the (once) living bodies.” She investigates the ethical concerns that indigenous critics find with bioscience methodologies utilized by non-indigenous institutions.  She proposes “that indigenous responses to cryopreservation technologies and practices can be more fully understood not simply by recourse to ‘bioethics,’ but also by weaving together the approaches of indigenous thinkers historically with newer thinking in indigenous studies, feminist science studies, critical animal studies, and the new materialisms.”

TallBear has worn many hats both within and outside of academia. An enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota, she is also descended from the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.  She was raised on the Flandreau Santee Sioux reservation in South Dakota and in St. Paul, Minnesota by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. TallBear’s lineage has profoundly informed her work, which primarily grapples with the ways in which bioscience informs and is informed by indigenous life, culture, history, and politics. 

TallBear’s academic pursuits were first born of practice in some of the fields that she now studies.  She originally trained to become a community and environmental planner at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). From 1992-2001 she worked on various planning projects for national tribal organizations, tribal governments, federal agencies and in private consulting. She worked primarily on projects having to do with tribal government interests in nuclear waste management and on a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded project to explore the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) for indigenous peoples of human genetic research. 

Realizing that her deeper intellectual interests were in the cultures and politics of science and technology and their implications for tribes and other indigenous peoples, she received a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz in History of Consciousness. Her scholarship has developed new approaches to and knowledge based on some of the work that she did as a community and environmental planner. 

Her recent book, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, examines the ways in which genetic science is co-constituted with notions of race and indigeneity.  The book has been strongly praised by respected scholars in the field.

Troy Duster, Silver Professor of Sociology and Bioethics at New York University, writes that “Native American DNA is a book of far wider scope than its title, establishing the author as a leading authority on the topic. The politics of tribal DNA is but the starting point of a complex analysis that encompasses the whole framework in which DNA is appropriated in the study of human populations. Molecular geneticists, science studies researchers, legal scholars—and of course Native Americans—will find their horizons considerably broadened and newly engaged.” Alondra Nelson, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University, describes the book as “a gracefully written, powerfully argued, and urgently needed examination of indigenous identity and politics after the genomic turn,” proclaiming that TallBear’s work is “pathbreaking.”

On Tallbear’s website, www.kimtallbear.com, she points out that she is broadly interested both in how science and technology participate in the colonization of Native people (and others), and how such groups use technoscience in enacting their own agency. She writes:

“Because tribes and other indigenous peoples insist on their status as sovereigns, I am also interested in the increasing role of technoscience in indigenous governance. How do U.S. tribes and others resist, regulate, collaborate in, and initiate research and technology development in ways that support self-governance and cultural sovereignty? What are the challenges for indigenous peoples related to science and technology, and what types of innovative work and thinking occur at the interface of technoscience and indigenous governance? Finally, how will indigenous governance of and through research and technology development affect the priorities, practices, and values of technoscientific fields? I bring into my research, collaborations, and teaching indigenous, postcolonial, and feminist science studies analyses that enable not only critique but generative thinking about the possibilities for democratizing science and technology.”

One of her current research projects, Constituting Knowledge Across Cultures of Expertise and Tradition: Indigenous Bio-scientists, deals with the aforementioned issues.  TallBear explores the role of Native American scientists in the democratization (and making more multi-cultural) of bio-scientific fields. She is also interested in their potential role in the development of scientific governance within tribes.

In addition to her book, TallBear has published research, policy, review, and opinion articles on a variety of issues related to science, technology, environment, and culture in anthologies and journals including Aboriginal Policy Studies; Current Anthropology; The Journal of Law Medicine, and Ethics; Science; The Wicazo Sa Review, International Journal of Cultural Property; and Indian Country Today.  In popular media, TallBear has served as consultant and/or interview subject in various venues, including New Scientist, The Globe and Mail, ScienceDaily, and ABC7 (KGO-TV in San Francisco) News.  She also blogs on science, technology, and indigenous issues at www.kimtallbear.com, and tweets at NDN_DNANotes and STS_NDN.

TallBear’s teaching record is as varied, impressive, and interdisciplinary as her praxis and research.  Since graduating in 2005, she has taught at Arizona State University in Tempe (Department of American Indian Studies), University of California, Berkeley (where she held a postdoctoral appointment in both Gender and Women’s Studies and in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, before being hired as Assistant Professor in the latter), and University of Texas at Austin. At UT Austin, she was Donald D. Harrington Fellow in the department of Anthropology in 2012-2013, before being hired as Associate Professor of Anthropology and Native American & Indigenous Studies.     

TallBear has an instrumental roll in a variety of organizations related to her scholarship. She recently finished a 3-year term as an elected member of the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). She is a member of the Advisory Board to the Center for Integration of Research on Genetics and Ethics at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics; a member of the Advisory Board for the University of Illinois' Institute for Genomic Biology Summer Internship for Native Americans in Genomics (SING); and an Editorial Board member for the U.K.-based journal Science as Culture. She recently joined the SACNAS News Editorial Advisory Board, published by the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science. Finally, she has also advised the President of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) on issues related to genomics and indigenous peoples (demonstrating, once again, the ways in which scholarship, policy, and praxis can and should intertwine).

Outside of her academic work, Tallbear is devoted to documenting and contributing to Native American culture.  She is a member of the Oak Lake Writers’ Society, a group of Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota (Oceti Sakowin) writers. She is also Content Editor of their Web page: www.oaklakewriters.org.  The writing group’s works include This Stretch of the River (2006), a collection of memoirs, historical and critical essays, and poems. The volume documents Oceti Sakowin relationships with Mnisose (the Missouri River) and other rivers in their historic homelands, especially in the wake of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery Expedition. In August 2011, Living Justice Press (St. Paul, MN) published their collection, He Sapa Woihanble (Black Hills Dream), which documents Oceti Sakowin peoples' ongoing relationships with He Sapa, or the Black Hills.  

Susan Power, author of the national bestseller The Grass Dancer, wrote that “The voices of He Sapa Woihanble are a diverse and powerful chorus, offering critical testimony on one of America's most iconic sites. These authors chart an enduring relationship with sacred ground and remind us of our kinship to this exploited territory. Through oral histories, poems, legal documents, and scholarship, these voices swell with urgent grace until I am convinced the Black Hills themselves are singing.”

On her website, TallBear says that her work outside academia has, ultimately, inspired her writing methodologies in her social sciences scholarship. She says:

“I developed a conversational method of knowledge production, the ‘dialogue,’ that served as the basis for a multi-authored piece in This Stretch of the River. The method looped back to inform my social science work as I seek to build knowledge collaboratively with community members, scientists, and others that I might study. The Oak Lake Writers have also inspired me to take up in creative prose format my favorite academic topic, technoscientific cultural politics.”

Her creative prose approach to her academic interests can be found in a piece titled “Posts from En Route,” in the Black Hills volume. 

CSW is so excited to welcome this multi-talented scholar and visionary, as she shares with us work that will have the power to change the social politics of bioscience.

--Ben Raphael Sher

Ben Raphael Sher is a doctoral student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and a graduate student researcher at CSW.

“Beyond Life/Not Life: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation Practices and Ethics,” November 5, 4 to 6 PM at Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.  The event is co-sponsored by the Charles E. Young Research Library, American Indian Study Center, and Institute for Society and Genetics. For updated info on the event  visit: http://www.csw.ucla.edu/events/kim-tallbear

Kim TallBear’s website/blog: www.kimtallbear.com

Kim TallBear on Twitter: @KimTallBear

For more info about Kim TallBear’s book, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, visit: http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/native-american-dna

For more info about Oak Lake Writers’ Society, visit: http://www.oaklakewriters.org

From the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives: Processing A/V

The audiovisual holdings of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives make up a significant part of its contents. Graduate Student Researchers Kimberlee Granholm and Daniel Williford, who have been processing the A/V holdings, estimate that the collection contains 230 VHS recordings that are unavailable anywhere else, 60 to 70 VHS movies and other easily accessed materials, and 50 items in DVD, Matic, Beta, 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8 formats. Granholm and Williford have reviewed and processed between 150 and 200 items, and it has proven quite an exciting adventure. I met with the two of them to discuss what they have found the holdings and why these findings are so important to scholars, UCLA, the LGBT community, and anyone interested in the complete history of twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Processing the Mazer’s A/V holdings began when Granholm and Williford unearthed many boxes filled with VHS tapes, with varying degrees of labeling. Next, the graduate student researchers went through the Mazer’s extensive list of recordings, and highlighted any materials that as far as they could tell, were unavailable elsewhere. Since then, they have spent months reviewing video materials, checking for quality, and adding as much identifying information as possible to the labels. In doing this, they have processed a treasure trove of videotaped history, which includes community meetings and conferences from the 1970s to 1990s, self-produced lesbian history videos, memorial services, birthday parties, films and videos that appeared in festivals, musical performances, footage from a march on Washington from the late 1970s, a talent show from the Califia lesbian retreat, educational videos, and rare lesbian pornography.

Because the videos offer them unique opportunities to watch activist histories that they’ve read about come, in a sense, to life, Granholm and Williford both admitted that they have loved viewing the Archive’s A/V materials.

“I’ve been looking at footage produced by these regional lesbian activist organizations of their own meetings, events, and performances,” says Williford. “That’s been exciting to me, because I’m sort of used to reading critical theory from certain time periods, say the 1970s and 1980s. To see the footage of the grassroots community-based events— the other side of that feminist theory—has added that human dimension. It is exciting to see all the work that people put into living out this political goal of feminist theory.”

Granholm particularly appreciates footage of activist meetings because they clearly demonstrate the contradictions, complexities, and disagreements that make up lesbian history.

 “It comes up very often,” says Granholm. “This idea that an open discussion is not just intended to facilitate everybody’s similar attitudes and ideas. In the good majority of these videos, discussions always seem to be prefaced with a statement that this discussion should be a zone for us to safely disagree with each other and to facilitate our own opinions rather than just create a major backing.”

Williford has been impressed by the extent to which the people documented in the Mazer Archive have used their various creative talents in political advocacy. The subjects of the videos often use the arts to circulate widely the tenets of academic queer theory and thereby to accessible them to audiences that might not otherwise have become aware of them.

“In a way I was surprised at how much art—and, in particular, theater—have been elements of this practice of political theory and community organizing,” says Williford. “There’s a lot of performance art, and there are many theatrical productions, shows, and things like that, which allow people to bring their creative abilities to community events. It really makes certain ideas and political notions a little more available to people through art. That’s inspiring.”

Granholm and Williford both noted that the women who took the videos in the collection clearly felt that they were in the process of documenting important history.

“The other thing that has surprised me is just how carefully and consistently these organizations have documented and preserved their own activities, and their own people and figures who were influential and involved along the way,” says Williford. “I’ve been impressed at the extent to which these women working with these organizations were all so aware of documenting themselves along the way, preserving the history of activities even as they were doing them. Crucial to the project is their awareness at the time and that is coming through to me as we process all these materials, butespecially the video material.”

The Mazer Archives are known for preserving evidence of the lives of women that might otherwise go lost. Granholm was impressed by the histories revealed by the self-made documentaries in the collection. For example, Diane Germaine’s self-made documentary Lesbian Decade, The San Diego ‘70s, which includes excerpts from many lengthy interviews taken by the filmmaker, illuminates the otherwise undocumented stories of a multi-faceted community.

“It consisted of a couple of hour-long interviews with women talking about their own experiences, whether that was coming out, meeting other women, bar culture, and how that’s changed from then to now,” says Granholm. “A lot of these things were mind blowing to me because I just didn’t know most of this stuff. It was really incredible.”

The collection contains generous documentation of the work that lesbians did with gay men in order to fight AIDS. Popular accounts of the epidemic often overlook this angle of its history in their emphasis on the activism of gay males. It also includes meetings of OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), providing a welcome visual corrective to the majority of LGBT visual media, which often focuses on the young.

“Hearing about OLOC, hearing the speeches, and hearing older women argue about why they needed different attention than young people is extremely important. Especially when you think about the fact that this is a lesbian feminist group,” says Granholm. “Often times, older people are forgotten about in general. But when you have this sect in society in which young and old people have to look hard for small signs of themselves in pop culture already, it becomes even less likely that older lesbians will be considered. It is wonderful that there were so many attempts at making these videos, at actually recording this for history.”

In addition to preserving the materials of lesbian lives, The Mazer Archive (like many queer archives) has encouraged the expansion of definitions regarding what constitutes historically valuable archival materials. As a result, some of its holdings are startlingly intimate.

“The memorial services are so incredible,” says Granholm. “During one of them I cried because it was so touching, the ways in which these women are remembered.”

Williford points out that the lo-fi quality of many of the recordings, many taken on home camcorders, gives them an unusually candid quality that makes the spectator feel as though he is peering in at past events as they happened.

“There’s a certain aesthetic in the format and lo-fi quality of these video clips that I really like,” says Williford. “You feel like you’re just sort of peaking at some kind of documentation that is removed from the original, that maybe has a somewhat amateur quality, and the nature of the equipment just makes it feel a little more like the people are familiar. Through that technology, you feel that you can re-experience what they were documenting through real time.”

The Mazer Archives provide an opportunity to put under-seen footage, like talent shows and conferences, in conversation with mainstream representations of queerness that took place concurrently. Williford and Granholm are in the middle of processing a series of videotapes, recorded off of television using home VCRs, which include footage of lesbians in popular culture and on news programs.

“There are lots of TV clips, things that a general audience would probably have missed,” says Granholm. “They have a recording of Northern Exposure in which a character references the town being named after a lesbian. It’s just a small passing moment that a lot of people probably wouldn’t think twice about, but it was something that was referenced in popular culture, and the person recording wanted to note that ‘it referenced us!’"

“I think that the ephemeral television programming will be fun to sift through,” says Williford. “Because things like that might be archived somewhere, but not in connection to a lesbian archive. I think that through those videotaped, miscellaneous collections you end up getting this sort of timeline of the lived experience of going through the popular mainstream media discussion of some of these issues related to queer identity.”

The tapes are almost like collages of found footage, re-presenting a version of mainstream popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s in which LGBT characters (who were often the exception, rather than the rule) become constantly and repetitively present, even leading to the erasure of more common, heteronormative representations that were ever-present on the airwaves at the time. The footage offers valuable evidence not only of the period’s pop culture representations of queerness, but of certain manifestations of active lesbian spectatorship which became allowed by the invention of the VCR. 

Viewing the Mazer's abundance of audiovisual materials has emphasized all that could have been lost. It further illuminates the profundity of what the Mazer’s archivists have done over the years in order to keep such a huge loss from happening.

“I consider myself somebody who seems to be informed. I want to be accepting, and make sure that I’m viewing diverse things,” says Granholm. “But going through and digitizing this has shown me how little is actually available. So I am glad to have this collection, which completes that history within a larger institution, and represents the walk or paths taken by West coast feminist lesbians going from the 1970s into the future. It would be inaccurate, at the very base of things, not to include [the A/V materials]. More than just the political importance of these materials, it would be a lie not to have them as part of the historical archive. It’s also inspiring, I think, for somebody who is trying to be a better feminist, to see how much these women had to fight. This collection is more than just a historical component, but a cultural one. It’s heritage. To be able to share that with UCLA is really the most important thing. It can be inspiring to a larger group of women and men.”

“I believe in the work of the lesbian archive,” says Williford. “The motto of the Mazer is ‘Where lesbians live forever,’ and there’s something really powerful about that. When you are part of a community, an identity, and a subculture that is always under the threat of erasure and invisibility, to say ‘This is an archive in which lesbians live forever’ kind of ties together life and the preservation of life, which is actually a real concern in a community that is always under the threat of not just symbolic erasure, but also bodily violence and death.”

— Ben Raphael Sher

Ben Raphael Sher is a doctoral student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and a graduate student researcher at CSW.

The finding aids for the audiovisual materials will soon be available at the Online Archive of California(http://www.oac.cdlib.org). Digitized materials from the collection and the finding aid will be available for viewing on the UCLA Library’s Digital Collections website. This research is part of an ongoing CSW research project, “Making Invisible Histories Visible: Preserving the Legacy of Lesbian Feminist Activism and Writing in Los Angeles,” with Principal Investigators Kathleen McHugh, CSW DIrector and Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and Gary Strong, University Librarian at UCLA. Funded in part by an NEH grant, the project is a three-year project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make physically and electronically accessible two major clusters of June Mazer Lesbian Archive collections related to West Coast lesbian/feminist activism and writing since the 1930s.

For more information on this project, visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/research/projects/making-invisible-histories-visible. For more information on the activities of the Mazer, visit http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org

Roundtable Launch for S&F Special Issue

CSW is hosting a roundtable and celebration of the special issue of the online journal, The Scholar and Feminist (S&FOnline), devoted to Life (Un)Ltd: Feminism, Bioscience, and Race on Monday, October 14, 2013, from 3 to 6 pm in the YRL conference room.  

The range of research addressed as feminist science and technology studies in this special issue suggest the vibrant engagement in questions of bioscience’s effects on women and the LGBTSI communities that CSW is proud to have supported.  We are confident that this roundtable will prompt further scholarly collaborations and discussions across the humanistic, life science, and social scientific fields.

At the event, commentators Deboleena Roy, Laura Briggs, and Jackie Orr, will open up the roundtable with remarks on a preview version of the special issue.  Several contributors to the volume—Renee Tajima-Peña, Lindsay Smith, Diane Nelson, Rachel Lee, Lisa Onaga, Hannah Landecker, and Michelle Murphy—will then discuss their research and activism with regard to feminist STS (Science and Technology Studies) as well as cross-talk their work with the commentators and audience. Laptops will be streaming the journal so that audience can view it. 

Three areas of research are highlighted in the volume and at the roundtable. The first section, Eugenic Legacies and Infrastructures of Reproduction, takes us through the evolving terrain of feminist STS research on select biomedical procedures. Continuing along these lines, the scholars whose work comprises section II, Cross-species and Cross-kingdom Enmeshments, confirm that one cannot think the labor of reproduction and “generativity” without also thinking the non-human animal as well as the bacterial, insect, fungal, and horticultural microbiologies coassembled with the animal. Section III, Governmentality and Activism in Biotechnical Times, bring us back round to specific biotechnologies.

COMMENTATORS

Laura Briggs is Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Somebody’s Children: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children (Duke 2012) and Reproducing empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (UC Press, 2002).  Her research addresses international adoption, biology, eugenics, race and colonialism.

Jackie Orr is Associate Professor Sociology at Syracuse University and author of Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Duke, 2006).  She combines political theater, digital media, and social history to explore the labor of the experimental medical subject, pharmacology, and the psychopolitics of bioterrorism.

Deboleena Roy is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University.  In her doctoral work, she examined the effects of estrogen and melatonin on the gene expression and cell signaling mechanisms in gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons of the hypothalamus.  Her areas of interest include feminist science and technology studies, philosophy of science, critical disability studies, postcolonial studies, sexuality studies, neuroscience, molecular and synthetic biology, and reproductive health and justice movements.

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSANTS

Michelle Murphy is a Professor in the History Department and Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She is an organizer of the Toronto Technoscience Salon and coordinator of the Technoscience Research Unit. Her work focuses on environmental politics, labor, biopolitics, sexed and raced life, calculation, economic practices, reproduction and technology through feminist transnational, postcolonial, political economic, and queer approaches.

Hannah Landecker is a historian and sociologist of biology and biotechnology whose work on cell culture, microcinematography, and metabolism draws on and contributes to issues central to feminist science studies:  the commercialization of life and reproduction, biology as a site of social engineering, implications of epigenetics for the social and self-governance of pregnancy, and philosophical tensions between plasticity and determinism in biomedical explanations of human nature and disease.

Lisa Onaga is an assistant professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research examines the history of the life sciences in relation to agriculture, Japanese nationhood, and race. She is currently writing a book on the history of hybrid silkworms and the mass production of silk in modern Japan. Lisa was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics in 2011-2012.

Rachel Lee is Associate Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA. She teaches courses in critical theory, ethnic literature, and medical humanities.  She is the author of "Haptics, Mobile Handhelds, and other ‘Novel’ Devices: The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media,” “Notes from the (non)Field: Theorizing and Teaching ‘Women of Color,’” The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation; and the co-editor of Asian America.Net Ethnicity, Nationalism, Cyberspace. 

Diane Nelson is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women's Studies at Duke University. Nelson’s work deals with subjectivity and power, and draws on close to 25 years of work in Guatemala. She focuses on how complex social formations like nationalism, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality intersect with violence and the state to produce people’s senses of identity. She began working in Guatemala in 1985 in the midst of the civil war. Since then she has studied the causes and effects of that war and what genocide means on the ground to those who survived it.

Lindsay Smith is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on the development forensic genetics and its impact on identity, kinship, and human rights in post-conflict settings Latin America.

Renee Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose work focuses on Asian American and immigrant communities, race, gender and social justice. Her directing credits include the documentaries, Calavera Highway, Skate Manzanar, Labor Women, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha and Who Killed Vincent Chin? Her films have premiered at the Cannes, Sundance and Toronto film festivals, and she has received the Peabody Award, Dupont-Columbia Award, Alpert Award in the Arts, USA Broad Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

For more information about the event, visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/events/special-issue-launch-party

—Rachel Lee

CSW Associate Director

Associate Professor, Departments of English and Gender Studies

Cosponsors of the roundtable/launch party are Barnard Center for Research on Women, which has been publishing S&F Online since 2003, as a forum for scholars, activists, and artists whose work articulates the ever-evolving role of feminism in struggles for social justice, and  the Charles E. Young Young Research Library has long been devoted to innovative platforms for promoting research and instruction.

Alex Zobel will be live blogging the event: “Versed: culture + cultivation // theory + practice // contemplativa + active” (http://alexzobel.com/).