Thinking Gender 2016

UCLA CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN announces

THINKING GENDER 2016

26th Annual Graduate Student Research Conference

Call for presentations: Spatial Awareness, Representation, and Gendered Spaces

Thinking Gender 2016 invites submissions for individual papers, pre-constituted panels, posters, and—for the first time!—films and interactive media on topics that focus on the awareness of self, representation, and the navigation and negotiation of social and cultural space. We welcome submissions—across all disciplines and historical periods—that engage with the politics  of  gender, race, sexuality, and space. We also intend to address international and transnational encounters, and colonization and decolonization practices. We invite scholarship engaging the following topics or others related to the conference theme of “Spatial Awareness, Representation & Gendered Spaces”:

•       Gender representation and state feminism

•       Physical culture and the body

•       Innovation through gender

•       Productive and reproductive labors

•       Security and gendered nationalism

•       Implicit bias and stereotype threat

•       Migration and transnational encounters

•       Women, gender, and health

•       Women and sustainable development

•       Identity formation in memory and memoir

•       Controversial and transgressive art

•       Socialization and sexuality

CSW accepts submissions from graduate students who are registered at US or international colleges or universities. Please note that we do not accept submissions from papers presented at previous Thinking Gender conferences. Previously published materials are also not eligible. If, however, the material is forthcoming, we will consider approving the submission. Filmmakers are encouraged to submit films even if they have submitted for other events. Undergraduate students are eligible for poster submissions.

All applicants are required to submit an abstract (250 words) and CV (2 pages max). Students proposing individual papers and posters must submit a proposal (5 double-spaced pages max) and a Works Cited (1 page max). Students submitting films and mixed media must submit a film synopsis (2 page max). All components are to be submitted to the website at https://uclacsw.submittable.com, according to the submission guidelines. For pre-constituted panels, a 250-word description of the panel topic is required, in addition to the materials required for individual paper submissions. For submission guidelines, visit: http://www.csw.ucla.edu/conferences/thinking-gender/thinking-gender-2016.

Send submissions to: https://uclacsw.submittable.com

Deadline for submissions:  Friday, November 20, 2015

Conference will be held April 7 and 8, 2016, at UCLA Covel Commons

Event is free and open to the public. There will be a $50 registration fee for each presenter. UCLA Center for the Study of Women

1500 Public Affairs Building, Box 957222 • Los Angeles, CA 90095-7222 http://www.csw.ucla.edu • thinkinggender@women.ucla.edu

Humanists@Work: Graduate Career Workshop and Networking Dinner

Humanists@Work is heading to Sacramento, California for our next statewide graduate student career professionalization workshop. We invite humanities PhDs, faculty, and staff to REGISTER for the workshop and join us for what will be another meaningful and productive gathering of humanities PhDs. We are offering a limited number of travel grants to 3 students from each UC campus (grants will cover your roundtrip travel and accommodation at The Citizen Hotel). Please note that those receiving a travel grant will be invited to the pre-workshop networking dinner. Deadline to apply for a travel grant is October 9th. Please apply online via UCHRI’s FastApps application system. For more information about the pre-workshop networking dinner, please visit our networking page.

SCHEDULE: HUMANISTS@WORK GRADUATE CAREER WORKSHOP & NETWORKING DINNER

NOVEMBER 8-9, 2015 | SACRAMENTO, CA

   8:00AM | BREAKFAST

Hot breakfast bar with–yes, you guessed it–plenty of caffeinated beverages

   9:00AM | WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS

Kelly Anne Brown, UCHRI’s Assistant Director

   9:15AM | THEORIZING OUR MOMENT: WHAT HUMANISTS@WORK LOOK LIKE

Part I of a two-part conversation moderated by the Humwork Graduate Student Advisory Committee and continuing the interactive, DIY activities began in San Diego last year, the Humwork grad committee will facilitate a conversation about issues such as: the possibilities for work outside/alongside academia, graduate student education and support, the general conditions of the humanities in higher education and society more generally, and the role of gatherings like Humwork to intervene in the many structural, cultural, and practical issues surrounding humanities work.

 9:45AM | STORIES FROM THE FIELD

UC Humanities PhDs share their stories as humanists@work in the world. Featuring:

J. Guevara, Economic Development Manager for the City of Santa Cruz (PhD Literature, UCSC, 2012)
Amy Jamgochian, Academic Program Director, Prison University Project (PhD Rhetoric, UCB, 2010)
Susie Lundy, Bay Area Program Director, Youth Speaks (PhD Cultural Studies, UCLA, 2008)
Marty Weis, UC Davis English PhD, 2015
Moderated by Simon Abramowitsch, UC Davis English PhD and Humanists@Work Graduate Advisory Committee Member

 11:00AM | COFFEE/NETWORKING BREAK

  11:30AM | RÉSUMÉ REDUX: USING THE WRITING PROCESS AS A TOOL FOR CAREER DISCOVERY

The quest to create a replicable résumé development framework for humanities PhD candidates exploring a variety of careers continues!

Since UCHRI’s February 2015 Humanists@Work workshop in San Diego, Jared Redick of The Résumé Studio, Kelly Anne Brown of UCHRI, and selected UC humanists have been hard at work refining the process of presenting academic experience within the boundaries of a non-academic résumé.

This iteration of the workshop builds on the work of past presentations at Berkeley and San Diego, focusing on how the writing process is being used as a tool for career discovery. Highlights include:

• A glimpse into how current PhD candidates and other graduate students have used the Job Description Analysis to translate their academic and dissertation experience into transferable skills useful within a reimagined résumé.
• Before and after samples from graduate students who have gone the distance and turned their backgrounds into marketable résumés, several resulting in new jobs this year.

Unsurprisingly, the work focuses on the student’s ability to convert academic activities into work experience that resonates beyond academia. Sounds easier than it is—which is why this series continues. UCLA PhD candidate Dana Linda joins the discussion to share her own experience, as well as insights she learned while going through the process.

Important:

• Please be sure you have watched the full 1.5 hour Berkeley video before you attend, otherwise you may not gain the full value of this presentation.
• Bring your current CV and/or résumé attempt (no matter how rough, printed or on your laptop) so it’s on hand for ideas you may capture along the way.

Jared Redick , The Résumé Studio and Dana Linda, UCLA Comparative Literature PhD Candidate

  12:45PM | LUNCH

In addition to a hot lunch, participants will have access to view Al Farrow’s Bay Area Figurative Drawings in the special collections gallery.

  1:45PM | BREAKOUT SESSIONS

SESSION A
SKETCHING YOUR CAREER’S UNIQUE CHRONOLOGY IN THE RÉSUMÉ CONTEXT

CROCKER ATRIUM

Jared Redick, The Résumé Studio

Working one-on-one with University of California PhD candidates and other graduate students this year, one of the surprising elements Jared Redick has discovered has been the complex task of distilling the hierarchy of one’s career within the limitations of the chronological résumé.

And chronological résumés are essential in the world beyond academia because functional résumés—while sometimes useful—are frequently regarded by recruiters and hiring managers as tools for masking periods of unemployment.

In this breakout session, Dana Linda joins Jared Redick for focused table work that utilizes the simplicity of 3×5 cards to wire frame your experience (institution names, job titles, dates, buckets) in a way that is readily understood by recruiters and hiring managers. This breakout is intended for people who are, or will soon be, deeply focused on the résumé development process.

Important:

• Bring a stack of your own 3×5 cards for table work. These are essential to the exercise we’ll be doing, and we will not have enough to give to everyone.
• Bring your current CV and/or résumé attempt, no matter how rough, printed or on your laptop.
• Please be sure you have watched the 1.5 hour Berkeley video before you attend, otherwise you may not gain the full value of this breakout session.

SESSION B
DECODING WORK: A VALUES-BASED APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING CAREERS FOR HUMANITIES PHDS

CEMO MEETING SPACE

Annie Maxfield, UCLA
In this session students will connect their unique strengths and value system to career trajectories by surveying how values are expressed through work, organizations and industries. We will identify concrete UC-Humanities PhD career paths, and discuss ways to “decode” jobs, imagine possibilities, and identify starting points.

  3:00PM | COFFEE/NETWORKING BREAK

  3:30PM | A MINDFUL INQUIRY INTO THE RIGHT KIND OF WORK

Lauri Mattenson, UCLA Writing Programs
Many of our assumptions about the job search are predetermined by the routines and rules of our educational institutions, and accordingly, we learn to package ourselves like products for sale to potential employers. If instead, we regard ourselves as in-process and engage in mindful practices with an attitude of receptive non-judgement, we can free ourselves from fixed notions of self and success.

In this participatory workshop, we will practice “generative mindfulness” exercises designed to inspire greater insight into what might bring us true professional pleasure and fulfillment.

Mindful meditation is known to facilitate decision-making and cognitive flexibility and enhance well-being, creativity, social performance, and health (Langer, 1989; 2005; 2009), so a mindful inquiry into the right kind of work may help us conceptualize and create a career deeply aligned with our skills and values.

  4:30PM | PART II: THEORIZING OUR MOMENT

  5:30PM | CONCLUDING REMARKS

REGISTER: http://humwork.uchri.org/sacramento-fall-2015/sacramento-career-workshop-registration/

Rachel C. Lee's The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

In her new book The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (2014, NYU Press), Rachel C. Lee, Professor of English and Gender Studies and Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, examines the interstices of embodiment, governmentality, and racial formation through the conceptual frameworks of biopolitics and biosociality. The central question Lee’s text takes up is: if race has been settled not as biological fact, but rather as a legal or social construction, why do Asian American artists, authors, and performers continue to scrutinize their body parts?  To this end, Lee examines novels, performance, poetry, and new media, such as Cheng-Chieh Yu’s dance theater, Margaret Cho’s stand-up comedy, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Lee’s innovative approach assigns each chapter to body parts that provide the catalyst for her readings and inform the somatic structure of the book’s form and content; effectively assembling the cadaver exquis promised in the title.

Lee analyzes the fragmentation of human bodies, divisible corporeality, and manipulable biologies as they appear in Asian American cultural and literary production to forge a symbiont relationship between Asian American Studies and Science and Technology Studies. She argues, “Asian Americanist critique and certain strains of bioethics have made ethical, political, and moral claims vis-à-vis these body parts; and they have done so through a distinctive rhetorical move that putatively returns the extracted body part to the violated racialized whole—a move that naturalizes a prior state of organic intactness and individuality to that racialized body” (7). Pushing the boundaries of bioscientific and humanistic approaches, Lee queries the preservation of organic, whole structures to consider the utility of fragmented, distributed parts and patterns of circulation for thinking embodiment. In the vagina and GI tract of Lee’s textual body, for example, Margaret Cho’s Cho Revolution is read alongside consumption, militarism, peristalsis, and reproductive politics in order to highlight the ways in which Asian Americans’ reflections on body parts demonstrate the body as both a site of governmentality and evidence of the organism’s capacity to express biopolitical agency. 

Challenging the racialized body, Lee’s text offers generative insights for critical race, femiqueer, and performance studies.  Lee’s nuanced attention to the divergent scales of embodiment in her stunning and original readings of Asian American cultural production indicate the exigency of rethinking the human organism in light of new biotechnological developments and biosocial arrangements.  

--Angela Robinson

Angela Robinson  is a graduate student in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA.

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The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies: http://nyupress.org/books/9781479809783/

Summer 2015 Newsletter!

This final issue of the 2014-2015 academic year presents a range of research supported by CSW. 
In “Border-Crossings between East and West Europe,” Renata Redford, a doctoral student in the Department of Italian who received the CSW Jean Stone Dissertation Fellowship in 2014, writes about how “borders, often understood as imaginary constructs, are inherently problematic and evolving sites from which to reframe thinking about belonging,” She also addresses current discourses regarding the feminization of migration and some writers whose work reveals a “private history of the East European female body in Italian.”

Carolyn Abrams and Ana G. Luna received a CSW Travel Grant to give a conference presentation in 2014. Their article, “The Reality of the Researcher: Addressing Assumptions and Biases,” provides an overview of their work on researcher bias and provides some guidelines for best practices in avoiding bias in doing research on women. Both recently received Master’s degrees from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Lisa Bloom, a CSW Research Scholar, presents some work from her current book project in “Judit Hersko’s Polar Art: Anthropogenic Climate Change in Antarctic Oceanscapes.” Bloom received a CSW Tillie Olsen Grant to support her research, which examines Hersko’s “Pages from the Book of the Unknown Explorer,” a project that addresses climate change and notions of heroic exploration by creating a fictional narrative of a woman polar explorer in 1930s.

In “Inflammation and Depression: Why Do Women have a Higher Risk for Depression than Men?,” Mona Moieni presents the results of a study using endotoxin. Moieni, who is a doctoral student the Department of Psychology and received the CSW Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, Award in 2015, reports the results: “First, we found that women showed greater increases in depressed mood in response to an inflammatory challenge. This may mean that women are more sensitive to the mood changes that may accompany an increase in inflammation.”

Alessandra Williams, a doctoral student in the Department of World Arts and Cultures, received a CSW Travel grant to support her research, which she presents in “Mixing Puppetry with Ethnography, part two: The ‘Fugitive’ Terms of Contemporary Indian Dance.” In the article, Williams writes about the work of Ananya Chatterjea, a choreographer who seeks to promote “a radical postmodern dance practice in which choreographers transcend cultural limitations by building solidarity with artists inquiring into the aesthetic forms of communities of color and the cultural activist research of their dancers.”

Finally, an article on the 2015 CSW Awards describes the recipients and their impressive work as scholars and activists. 

Hope you have a wonderful summer break! See you in the Fall!

– Rachel C. Lee

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