Rebecca M. Herzig, keynote speaker for Thinking Gender 2015

…surfaces and underpinnings, the spectacular and the boring, are inextricably intertwined.  The boundaries of ‘serious’ bioethical concerns, and of medical ‘necessity,’ are continuously remade, symbolically and materially, in relation to the trivial and the superfluous.  --Rebecca M. Herzig, Plucked

Rebecca M. Herzig’s (2015) most recent book, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, begins by examining the American public’s reaction to the reports of abuse of detainees held in the Guantánamo Bay internment facility.  The reports detailed, among other things, “forced shaving” of the detainees, done in order to humiliate them.  Herzig notes that the public’s reaction to the reporting of this particular type of abuse was to either ignore it, or to point to it as a way to illustrate that the conditions were, as one commentator put it, “nothing to be ashamed of” (Herzig, 2015, p. 2).  

Herzig uses some of the questions arising from the public’s reaction as a starting point for her book.  In it, she asks, how have dominant American beliefs about visible body hair changed over time?  What has driven these changes?

She focuses on hair, as the “liminal object par excellence,” in that it how we treat hair “tends to magnify other processes of political inclusion and exclusion, whether in terms of race, sexuality, nationhood, gender or ability: where you decide the line should be between self and other” (as reported on the News website for Bates College, December 2014). 

Reviewers have praised both Herzig’s style of writing, and the more substantive contributions of the book.  As a review by the Economist noted, "Humanity has used an impressive array of tools to remove hair.  This is, biologically speaking, pretty strange.  Most of earth's mammals possess luxuriant fur.  Only one seeks to remove it.  Rebecca Herzig's delightful history explains why: smooth skin is a cultural imperative."

Prior to Plucked, Herzig wrote Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America, published by Rutgers University Press in 2005.  In it, she explored the rise of an ethic of self-sacrifice in science, in order to “explain why, given the existence of other, less painful alternatives, so many scientists chose to align themselves with this ethos and considers ... some of the lasting ramifications of this decision" (p. 7).  Weaving together the Protestant doctrine of salvation, the physical suffering of the polar explorers, and the martyrdom of the early radiologists, Herzig created a picture of the many ways in which modern scientific inquiry has reflected and often reinforced cultural notions of gender and race.   

Herzig’s work has also looked specifically at how science has treated the subject of race.  In 2009, she co-edited, with Evelynn M. Hammonds, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (published by the MIT Press).  Chapters focus on important historical documents regarding race, including how the definition of race has changed over time, a 1950 UNESCO declaration that race is a social myth, and 2005 report of the discovery of a genetic basis for skin color. Regarding the book, Dr. Sandra Harding wrote, "Have the sciences finally provided the necessary evidence to conclude that we have arrived at 'the end of race' as a useful biological category? Hammonds's and Herzig's splendid introductions plus these original documents produce a profound and surprising meditation on the impossibility of resolving today's intellectual and political debates on this topic within familiar conceptual frameworks. This collection provides rich resources for rethinking basic assumptions in even progressive thinking about race.”

A historian of science whose research focuses on the relationship between tech, race, and gender in the U.S., Herzig currently serves as the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Bates College and Chair of the Women and Gender Studies program at Bates College.  She will be presenting the keynote speech on April 23 at 2:45 pm in the Grand Horizon Ballroom of Covell Commons at CSW’s annual Thinking Gender conference.  Her talk is titled, “Body Modifications: Violence, Labor, and the Subject of Feminism.”

--Skye Allmang

Skye Allmang is a graduate student researcher at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women

More info on this year's Thinking Gender: http://www.csw.ucla.edu/conferences-1

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Gender in Education and Information Studies

InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies announces

Special Issue on Gender in Education and Information Studies: 

Interrogating Knowledge Production, Social Structures and Equitable Access

This special issue is a direct outgrowth of a partnership between InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies and Thinking Gender 2015, the 25th Annual Graduate Student Research Conference sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. This year's conference foregrounds feminist approaches to knowledge production, addressing historical and contemporary marginalization, access to technology and resources, educational opportunity and structural oppression. InterActions situates this forthcoming special issue in conversation with activists, scholars and artists whose work engages critically with feminist epistemology and knowledge production. This issue seeks to complicate and deconstruct hegemonic ideas of what counts as knowledge, the effects of which challenge traditional approaches to pedagogy, information literacy and information access. InterActions is committed to an intersectional approach, recognizing that markers and categories of gender, biological difference and sexuality co-constitute political and embodied subjectivities alongside and through race, class and ability. Both Education and Information Studies contend with both the pragmatic and the theoretical and are intimately tied to technologies and techniques of social control. We must commit to developing and nurturing critical language and research agendas contending with gender, sexuality and identities. We hope to continue to challenge and expand existing conversations as well as break new ground through crucial, interdisciplinary work. Additionally, Education and Information Studies can offer entryways into all parts of the knowledge production lifecyle and each provide their unique points of critical interrogation. We welcome a range of submissions, including (but not limited to) research articles, literature reviews, book reviews, exhibition reviews, featured commentaries, position pieces, literary or artistic pieces. All submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review and the authors are expected to adhere to the deadlines to ensure the timely publication of the special issue. 

CALL FOR PAPERS: http://www.interactions.gseis.ucla.edu/call-for-papers/

DEADLINE for submissions: September 1, 2015

INFO: interactions@gseis.ucla.edu

Thinking Gender 2015

Thinking Gender 2015, CSW’s 25th Annual Graduate Student Research Conference, promises to strengthen scholarly networks and inspire lively conversation. To help make this landmark anniversary a memorable success, we have expanded the conference to a two-day schedule at UCLA’s Covel Commons and added a keynote address, poster exhibition, awards for papers and posters, student travel grants, workshops, and more.

This year, scholars from near and far will present exciting and innovative work on the tangled relationships between knowledge and the gendered body. Presentations, including 12 illustrated posters and 43 research papers in 12 fascinating panels, will cover a wide array of topics, including issues of biomedical body and knowledge production, sexuality in Asian media, feminist inquiry and practices, queer body and sexuality in performance, gendered militarism and social protests, and of gendered roles and professionalism. Also featured are discussions on exploring identity and culture of movement, contesting anthropocentrism, claiming public visibility and power, challenging stereotype of body in the arts, locating agency in politics of the body, and contesting marginality.

These presentations span the topics that are interdisciplinary, transnational, cross-regional, and both contemporary and historical. Representing 33 colleges and universities from around the world, our presenters come from disciplines in humanities and sciences at UCLA, from other UC campuses and other states, and from Australia, Poland, Canada, France, Germany, and China. We envision that the conference will interest a broad audience, from north and south campus of UCLA, as well as from local academic and lay communities. 

We will open the conference with a keynote address, “Body Modifications: Violence, Labor, and the Subject of Feminism,” by Rebecca M. Herzig, the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair of the Program in Women and Gender Studies at Bates College (http://www.bates.edu/gender/faculty/rebecca-m-herzig/), from 2 to 3:15 pm. The keynote address is cosponsored by the UCLA Colloquium in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. On this first day, we will also introduce Professor Herzig’s new book, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, will available for purchase. In Plucked, Professor Herzig describes the surprising histories of race, science, industry, and medicine behind hair-removal practices and norms. 

The poster exhibition will take place on the first day, following the keynote address. After the poster exhibition, we will award the student travel grant, best posters, and best papers. These awardees will receive certificates and financial awards. All awardees have an opportunity to publish in a special Spring 2015 issue of InterActions or Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.

The panel presentations are scheduled for the second day, Friday, April 24, from 9 am to 12:15 pm, and from 2:45 to 6 pm. Also on Friday will be a networking lunch and two workshops, “Fight Like a Woman” with Marcus Kowal and “Acupressure: Massaging Your Way to Optimal Health” with Dr. Felicia Yu. 

Fight Like a Woman will discuss the practicality and thinking behind Krav Maga and the mental game when in a situation where self-defense is necessary. Marcus Kowal (above), the lead instructor and owner of System Training Center, is a profesional kickboxer and MMA fighter and 2nd degree Krav Maga Black Belt. This workshop is cosponsored by Marcus Kowal and Systems Training Center (http://systemstrainingcenter.com).

In Massaging Your Way to Optimal Health, Dr. Felicia Yu (above)will show participants how to stimulate their own acupressure points to alleviate such symptoms as pain, headache, nausea, menstrual cramps, abdominal pain, and insomnia. Dr. Yu is an East-West Primary Care Fellow at the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine. 

Thinking Gender 2015 welcomes you to join us for two days of inspiring scholarship, energetic conversation, and lively networking. 

--Chien-Ling Liu

Chien-Ling Liu is the conference coordinator of Thinking Gender 2015. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at UCLA. Her dissertation is on the microbiological studies and public health work by the Pasteur Institutes in China between 1899 and 1950, particularly concerning prophylaxes of smallpox and rabies. She is interested in power dynamics of scientific knowledge production and practices in cross-cultural contexts, relating to the issues of modernity. When not writing her dissertation, she enjoys going to movies and playing badminton. 

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Thinking Gender is open to the public and all are welcome. Attendance at conference panels and the keynote address is free. A registration fee of $35 provides access to the conference workshops, networking lunch, and keynote cocktail reception; you’ll also get a Thinking Gender tote bag and CSW ceramic mug. Select PRIME when you visit the registration website: https://uclacsw.submittable.com

Location of Covel Commons on the campus of UCLA: http://maps.ucla.edu/campus/?locid=329 

More information on the program

Women Write the Mediterranean: A Transnational Symposium in Memory of Anna Maria Ortese

This transnational symposium addresses the relationship between women writers and the modern Mediterranean, considered as a diverse region of interconnected histories and identities, with a particular focus on the Italian novelist Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998). In its unprecedented tensions and oscillations between vivid realism and visionary transcendence, reportage and utopia, modernist allegory and postmodern fluidity, Ortese’s innovative work suggests many possible parallels with that of other important modern and contemporary Mediterranean/European women writers, from Fatema Mernissi, Hélène Cixous and Assia Djebar to lesser-known figures such as Leda Rafanelli, Etel Adnan, Maïssa Bey, and Nagwa Sha‘ban, among others. 

Although raised in Naples—a quintessential Mediterranean city that she portrayed in documentary style in her early writings—Ortese lived for a time in Libya, when that country was still an Italian colony under Fascism. As a self-taught female writer from the historically underdeveloped and colonized South of Italy, a former involuntary colonizer in North Africa, and a woman who lived most of her nomadic and solitary existence in dire poverty, Ortese epitomizes the experience of displacement, loss and exile common to many Mediterranean women writers. 

This symposium will explore the ways in which the experiences of Ortese and other creative women contributed to the emergence of a unique, unconventional approach to literature and ethics. The symposium stresses the importance of looking at women’s writing that imagines and defines the Mediterranean as a transnational, métissé, multi-confessional, cross-cultural space, offering an alternative to the divisive, oppositional model represented by national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or continental affiliations. The question of what the modern Mediterranean is, and how it may be defined, understood or imagined has been considered by many male thinkers, critics and writers, but the perspectives of female writers have rarely been studied comparatively or taken into account. “Women Write the Mediterranean” will reflect on the possibility of a transnational critical conversation and dialogue about modern women writers and their work on Mediterranean-related themes and problems.

PROGRAM

Thursday, March 5, 2015 USC
Doheny Library, Academic Commons, DML 233

3:00 pm.  Welcome
Peter Mancall, Vice Dean of the Humanities, USC Dornsife
Natania Meeker, Chair USC Dornsife French and Italian Department
                

3:15-4:30 pm

Chair: Bèatrice Mousli Bennett
Director, Francophone Research & Resource Center USC

Cristina Della Coletta
Dean of Arts and Humanities UC San Diego

Anna Maria Ortese and the Mediterranean Uncanny

Lucia Re
Department of Italian and Department of Department of Gender Studies, UCLA

Ulysses or Penelope? Italian Women Philosophers, Narrators and Poets of the
Mediterranean

4:30-5:00 pm  Coffee Break

5:00-6:30 pm

Hala Halim
Department Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and, NYU

The Mediterranean Cosmopolitics of Nagwa Sha‘ban’s Nawwat al-Karm

Andrea Baldi
Department of Italian, Rutgers University

Resisting Modernity: Anna Maria’s Ortese Negotiations with the South

Friday, March 6
UCLA – Royce Hall 236

9:00am Welcome
Tom Harrison, Chair UCLA Department of Italian
Alessandro Duranti, UCLA Dean of Social Sciences
David Schaberg, UCLA Dean of the Humanities

9:15-10:30 am

Chair: Gil Hochberg
Department of Comparative Literature UCLA

Barbara Spackman
Department of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, UC Berkeley

From Italy to Egypt: The Ethnomasquerade of Leda Rafanelli

Gian Maria Annovi
Dornsife Department of French and Italian, USC

Anna Maria Ortese and the “Mediterranean Effect”

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-12:30 pm

Olivia Harrison
Dornsife Department of French and Italian, USC

Etel Adnan’s Transcolonial Mediterranean

Lia Brozgal
Department of French, UCLA

«Aux oubliettes de l’histoire» : Maïssa Bey’s Microhistories

12:30-1:00 Q&A and Concluding Remarks

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Event organized by USC Department of French and Italian and UCLA Department of Italian; made possible with the support of: UCLA Dean of the Humanities; Dean of the Social Sciences; Department of Gender Studies; Center for the Studies of Women; Department of French and Francophone Studies; USC Dean of Dornsife College; Francophone Research and Resource Center; Center for Feminist Research; Department of Comparative Literature; Middle East Studies Program; USC Libraries.

For additional information, please contact the organizers:
Gian Maria Annovi gm.annovi@gmail.com
Lucia Re re@humnet.ucla.edu

Kath Weston

A single body cannot bridge that mythical divide between insider and outsider, researcher and research. I am neither, in any simple way, and yet I am both. 

– Kath Weston, Longslowburn 

Having published widely on issues related kinship, gender, and sexuality, as well as poverty in the U.S., Kath Weston, professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Virginia, has recently turned her attention to surveillance technologies and the body. In an upcoming talk in the Life (Un)Ltd lecture series organized by CSW Associate Director Rachel Lee, Weston will discuss one of the case studies from her forthcoming book, Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World: “In the United States, the National Animal Identification System is a state-sponsored Big Data scheme that proposes to render each animal destined for the dinner table capable of being tracked and traced, in whole or in part, throughout its material existence, in the name of protecting public health and facilitating international trade.  The NAIS represents a historical shift away from prevention and inspection of food production facilities, toward an investment in trace-back operations that attempt to secure the nation's food supply by securing the animal body.  Under the scheme, each pig, sheep, and cow receives a ‘unique individual identifier’ sutured to its body using a range of surveillance devices and mapped onto a premises registry. What is at stake in the struggles over animal citizenship, bio-intimacy, and techno-intimacy that have ensued in the wake of implementation of the NAIS?” 

Weston has interests in political economy; political ecology and environmental issues; historical anthropology; science studies; and kinship, gender, and sexuality. Weston was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, for “demonstrating exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” Her fieldwork and research pursuits have taken her to India, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. 

Her work has long challenged the preoccupations and predilections of the academic social sciences. In Longslowburn: Sexuality and Social Science (1998), she “argues that despite the recent growth in gay and lesbian studies departments, sexuality is not a new topic for social science. She also suggests that sexuality should not be a ghettoized area of study but rather should be considered in relation to work, migration, family, and all the other core topics that concern social scientists.” According to Stefan Helmreich, Weston’s book, Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age (2003) “is a provocative intervention into how critical cultural theory might engage the formulations of science and mathematics in order to think anew about how temporality contributes to the formation of gender, race, and sexuality, and other genres of social experience. Weston…argues that an accounting of time and its contingency is crucially missing from, or merely left implicit in, such work.” 

Her interest in the lived experiences of lesbians and gays animated two of her books, Render Me, Gender Me (1998) and Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (1997). Render Me, Gender Me “challenges comfortable assumptions about gender by weaving…[her] own thought-provoking commentary together with the voices of lesbians from a variety of race and class backgrounds.” The Library Journal hailed the books, noting that “Weston's witty, lyrical writing style coupled with the voices of the interviewees makes this enjoyable for the lay reader.” In a review of Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (1997) in Library Journal, Eric Bryant wrote “this book demands--and deserves--thorough and careful reading. With weighty prose, Weston, an anthropology professor, writes that gays and lesbians, long seen as exiles from kinship ties, are choosing to create their own families. Arguing that these "chosen" families cannot be understood apart from the "straight" families in which gays and lesbians grew up, she draws on interviews to describe gays' relationships with their straight families. Weston places her interpretation in perspective with historical and legal background information and extended quotations from interviewees.” 

In a recent book, Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor (2009), she rode the bus for five years to document what it’s like to be poor in America. A review in Publisher’s Weekly described the book, “In this accessible gem of a narrative, Weston makes a special contribution to the conversation (and glut of ethnographies) that seek to describe how the other half lives. Raised in the working-class outskirts of Chicago and trained as an anthropologist, the author is devoid of condescension or naïve astonishment as she zigzags across the country by bus—one of the last quasi-public spaces—swapping advice, snacks, favors, worldviews and nuggets of profound wisdom with her fellow travelers. Within these shared stories, Weston interweaves her own experiences in traveling on a limited budget with acute anthropological analysis. Attuned to the hardships of bus travel (no guaranteed seats after long waits to board, bad food at rest stops, hiked up prices for the poorest travelers), Weston is also refreshingly self-reflective on her own relative privilege (being white and a citizen, having a credit card). Although her writing occasionally reads like choppy journal entries, her simple observations are marked by a spare grace: Arrival is not all. Often the road is the thing. This book is a piece of 21st-century Americana in motion, and its characters and cities will resonate and linger with readers.” 

In her career as author, scholar, and activist, Weston has always been in motion, reimagining her research and her role in it. Please join us for a peek at what surely be another landmark book in the fields of anthropology, feminist studies, and science and technology studies when, on February 27, from 12 to 2 pm in Haines 352, Weston gives a talk titled “Old Macdonald Had a Database: Lessons from the National Animal Identification System.” 

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Life (Un)Ltd presents Old Macdonald Had a Database: Lessons from the National Animal Identification System, Kath Weston, University of Virginia, February 27, 2015, from 12 to 2 pm in Haines 352 on the UCLA campus. 

For more info on the talk, visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/events/life-un-ltd-kath-weston 

For more info on Life (Un)Ltd, visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/research/projects/life-un-ltd/life-un-ltd 

Political Ecologies of the Precarious, one of the essays in Weston’s upcoming book is available on academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/2314386/Political_Ecologies_of_the_Precarious

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014)

Inspired by Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth,” Kip Andersen changed his lifestyle to reflect a new consciousness of environmental concerns.  He later realized that despite these changes, there was another important environmental concern that needed to be addressed, although many environmentalists were not talking about it: animal agriculture, or factory farming.

In Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014), he set out, along with fellow filmmaker Keegan Kuhn, to obtain information about animal agriculture and its relationship with climate change.  Along the way, he spoke with leaders in the environmental movement and uncovered what he began to view as “an intentional refusal to discuss the issue of animal agriculture, while industry whistleblowers and watchdogs warn[ed] him of the risks to his freedom and even his life if he dare[d] to persist.”

According to the Huffington Post, “[Andersen] pulls no punches and makes no apologies: ‘The future of our planet is being destroyed by this industry.’ Hard to argue with the data.”  The film includes interviews with Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals), Dr. Will Tuttle (The World Peace Diet), and Dr. Richard Oppenlander (Food Choice and Sustainability).

There will be a screening panel and discussion at UCLA with the filmmakers Andersen and Kuhn on February 26^th at 5pm.  The event will be moderated by Associate Professor Janet O'Shea, from the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/1540813789537458/ 

New Directions in Black Feminism Studies: Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine, and works on comparative racialization in the South African and North American contexts, Black political thought, and African feminisms. Her book, Waste of a White Skin: Carnegie and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability, has just been published by UC Press. The publisher calls it “A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century, Waste of a White Skin focuses on the American Carnegie Corporation’s study of race in South Africa, the Poor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid.” Using black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition, Willoughby-Herard explores the effect of politics of white poverty on black people’s life, work, and political resistance. In particular, this groundbreaking book examines the philanthropic institution of the Carnegie Foundation, contributed to the constitution of apartheid as a process of knowledge production in South Africa. Her manuscript examines U.S. complicity in constructing notions of whiteness, arguing that the Carnegie Commission Study of Poor Whites helped create knowledge production process central to apartheid, in particular scientific racialism. 


In so doing, she examines the role of this supposedly benevolent U.S. philanthropic organization in the production of social science knowledge as a form of legitimation for the racial violence of apartheid. She thus makes the argument that whiteness is a global phenomenon, one that links white racial formations transnationally, by demonstrating the ways in which the United States not only produced whiteness within its own territorial boundaries, but is implicated in white Afrikaner racial formation as well. As Dr. Willoughby-Herard demonstrates, The Carnegie Commission Study legitimated a number of violent practices that attempted to discipline poor whites into bourgeois respectability. These practices were very much organized around gender and sexual normativity, and included genetic monitoring, sterilization, mental testing, and forced removals and detentions. In this way, this essay demonstrates that eugenicist tactics were brought into being through deployment not only against non-whites, but on what she calls “contingent” whites as well. In so doing, Dr. Willoughby-Herard argues that whiteness is not a monolithic racial formation, but a complex and internally differentiated one. This project is thus an important contribution to whiteness studies, which tends to situate whiteness as simply privilege. By tracing the violent process by which poor whites were forced to become white, this project reveals the exact process of production and the precise effect of the scientific racialism that would underwrite the system of apartheid.

Willoughby-Herard’s talk in the New Directions in Black Feminist Studies lecture series, “I Write What I Like”: The Politics of Black Identity and Gendered Racial Consciousness in Meer’s The Black Woman Worker,” which takes place from 4 to 6 pm in Haines 135 on February 26, examines Fatima Meer’s Black Woman Worker: A Study in Patriarchy and Woman Production Workers in South Africa (1990), which raised critical questions about how the concept of gendered black consciousness articulated with racial colonialism, segregation, and apartheid.  Like other books published in its time, Black Woman Worker resulted from a robust confluence of political activity, autonomous research, and careful attention to the politics of publishing.  While the radical black feminism of that era was becoming coherent as a set of consistent political philosophies across the Americas and on the African continent, according to Willoughby-Herard, it was anticipating, laying ground work for, and helping to establish the publishing audience that constitutes current interests in comparative black feminist studies, black feminist internationalism, African feminisms, and African gender studies. Our histories of the making of “the working class” and “left” have been shaped forever by the role played by research on black working women as servants, migrant laborers, domestics, and enslaved people.  Following Pumla Gqola and Zine Magubane, she will examine and offer an account of how the contested and complex political identity of “blackness” was articulated in this moment, why this set of nested categories was necessary for Meer and her collaborators, and the cultural work that it did to bind together African, Indian, and so-called “Coloured” women in a context of extraordinary state and vigilante violence.


New Directions in Black Feminist Studies is a lecture series featuring three scholars who represent the best of contemporary Black feminist scholarship. This series will contribute to the renewed energy around African American studies at UCLA, with the recent departmentalization of African American Studies and Angela Davis’s recent residency in the Department of Gender Studies. It is curated by Grace Kyungwon Hong, organized by the Center for the Study of Women and cosponsored by Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, Labor Studies Program, Institute for American Cultures, Department of English, Department of Gender Studies, Department of African American Studies, and International Institute. The speakers are Amber Jamilla Musser, an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis; Talitha LeFlouria, an Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University; and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at UC Irvine. All these scholars have new books that represent important new scholarship in the field. 

MORE INFO ABOUT THE UPCOMING TALK