Center for the Study of Women

Film Screening: Queens of Syria
2017-10-19 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Northwest Campus Auditoriium, UCLA
Queens of Syria tells the story of sixty women from Syria, all forced into exile in Jordan, who came together in Autumn 2013 to create and perform their own version of the Trojan Women, Euripides’s tragedy about the plight of women in war. What followed was an extraordinary moment of cross-cultural contact across millennia, in which women born in 20th century Syria found a blazingly vivid mirror of their own experiences in the stories of a queen, princesses and ordinary women like them, uprooted, enslaved, and bereaved by the Trojan War.
View the trailer:

Co-sponsored by:

UCLA Center for the Study of Women
UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies
Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law
UCLA First Year Experience

Kathleen Sheldon, "African Women: Early History to the 21st Century"
2017-10-19 16:00 | Bunche 6275, UCLA Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Kathleen Sheldon will discuss her recently published book, African Women: Early History to the 21st Century, a comprehensive study of this expansive story from before the time of records to the present day. Her book provides a rich background on descent systems and the roles of women in matrilineal and patrilineal systems. She profiles elite women, as well as those in leadership roles, traders and market women, religious women, slave women, women in resistance movements, and women in politics and development. The rich case studies and biographies in this thorough survey establish a grand narrative about women’s roles in the history of Africa.
Kathleen Sheldon is an independent historian who is a Research Affiliate with the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Dr. Sheldon received her Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 1988 and her M.A. in African Area Studies in 1977. She is a historian who has primarily written about African women and Mozambique. Her most recent book is African Women: Early History to the 21st Century. She also wrote Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique and edited Courtyards, Markets, City Streets: Urban Women in Africa.
Other publications include the second revised edition of the Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa (2016; first edition, 2005) and a special two-part forum on Women and Gender in Africa for the African Studies Review, co-edited with Judith Van Allen, that appeared in December 2015 and April 2016. Dr. Sheldon was the editor for women’s entries for the Dictionary of African Biography (2011). She wrote the articles on Women and African History and Women and Colonialism for Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies, and is also a senior editor for the online resource, Oxford Research Encyclopedia in African History. Other publications include “From Frenzied Mobs to Savvy Businesswomen: Researching the History of Market Women in Africa,” in Changing Horizons of African History (2017); and “Creating an Archive of Working Women’s Oral Histories in Beira, Mozambique” in Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (2010). She is an editor on the H-Luso-Africa network, https://networks.h-net.org/h-luso-africa, which focuses on the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa. In addition to her work on African women she published “‘No more cookies or cake now, “C’est la guerre”’: An American Nurse in Turkey, 1919 to 1920,”Social Sciences and Missions 23, 1 (2010), based on a diary kept by her great-aunt, Sylvia Thankful Eddy.

Co-sponsored by:

UCLA African Studies Center
UCLA Department of History
UCLA Center for the Study of Women
UCLA Department of Gender Studies

CrossCheck Live: "Campus Speech: A Right to Speak? A Duty to Listen? An Obligation to Learn?"
2017-10-18 15:00 - 18:00 | Pauley Pavillion Club, UCLA
In recent years, both the left and the right have raised concerns about free speech, censorship, and academic freedom on college campuses. And media outlets—from the Atlantic to the New York Times to the Chronicle of Higher Education—have weighed in, offering a range of views on whether academic institutions are failing their core mission to facilitate the robust exchange of ideas while simultaneously providing a learning environment free of violence, intimidation, and harassment. The standard arguments are loud and well-rehearsed, but they obscure real tensions—between liberty and equality, between legality and propriety, between the right to speak and the right to learn, and between safe spaces and brave spaces. And our unwillingness or incapacity to address these genuine tensions seriously, without soundbites or cheap shots, have made difficult the wise governance of the University.
A reasoned debate from multiple perspectives is sorely needed. Thus the UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion offers the Fall’s CrossCheck Live:
CrossCheck Live
Campus Speech: A Right to Speak?
A Duty to Listen? An Obligation to Learn?
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Roundtable Discussion: 3 pm – 5 pm
Reception: 5 pm – 6 pm
Pauley Pavilion Club
301 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095
RSVP HERE
Please join us and our distinguished panelists for a stimulating discussion as we navigate the complexities of free speech and institutional governance, and ponder the best route forward for college campuses and beyond. Other panelists and commentators to be announced.
Moderators:

Jerry Kang, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; Professor of Law and Asian American Studies, and Korea Times Hankook Ilbo Endowed Chair, UCLA
Devon Carbado, Associate Vice Chancellor for BruinX – Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; Harry Pregerson Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law

Panelists:

Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean | Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law; Co-Author of the Forthcoming Book, Free Speech on Campus
Safiya Noble, Assistant Professor of Communication, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California
Gary Segura, Dean | Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
Eugene Volokh, Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Zev Yaroslavsky, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Initiative, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and Department of History; Former Member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors

For those walking to the border for dear life, and for those seeking a place of kinship in resistance: A performance and conversation with Merlinda Bobis
2017-10-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 193, UCLA
Through performance and conversation with Distinguished Professor Sherene Razack, award-winning poet, novelist and dramatist Merlinda Bobis reflects on Philippine indigenous values of kinship and the intertwined journey of writer-and-characters in her novels Locust Girl. A Lovesong (2016 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction) and Fish-Hair Woman (2014 Philippine National Book Award), and in her new poetry book Accidents of Composition (Spinifex 2017).
Merlinda responds to the growing climate of conflict in our compromised planet. She hopes that in the border, there could be accidents of kindness.

For those walking to the border for dear life,
and for those seeking a place of kinship in resistance
Please have no fear and
Take this offered hand
Your thirst, your thirst
Is my only affliction
—Locust Girl. A Lovesong
Sponsored by

Democratizing Research Access: Overcoming Exclusion from Well-Resourced University Research Libraries
2017-10-11 14:00 - 15:30 | Rolfe 2125
Democratizing Research Access: Overcoming Exclusion from Well-Resourced University Research Libraries
CSW Research Affiliate Brown Bag
Wednesday, October 11, 2-3:30 p.m., Rolfe 2125
RSVP Here: https://uclacsw.submittable.com/submit/93276/free-registration-democratizing-research-access

Stay afterwards for the CSW/Gender Studies Fall Reception in the Rolfe Courtyard at 4pm! Reception Details: https://csw.ucla.edu/event/fall-welcome-reception/
For a growing number of scholars, gaining access to adequate library resources–both books and digital– has become increasingly challenging. The problem of unequal research access is exacerbating larger problems of inequity across academia, by creating barriers for those working outside of large, well-resourced universities. This group includes independent scholars, faculty at under-resourced institutions, and others occupying positions of “career diversity,” a contingent likely to expand in the coming years. At this brown bag, Becky Nicolaides will lead a discussion that explores the nature of the problem and possible pathways toward solutions, based on her advocacy on this issue as an elected member of the American Historical Association – Research Division.
Becky Nicolaides is a historian who works as an independent scholar and consultant in Los Angeles. She specializes in U.S. urban and suburban history, and the history of Los Angeles. She serves as co-editor of the “Historical Studies of Urban America” series published by University of Chicago Press and is co-coordinator of the L.A History and Metro Studies group at the Huntington Library. She is a Research Affiliate at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and an Affiliated Research Scholar at the Huntington-USC Institute on California & the West. She is currently serving a three-year term in the AHA Research Division. http://tinyurl.com/NicolaidesUCLA

Disability Awareness Week
2017-10-09 - 2017-10-13
October 9-13 is Disability Awareness Week at UCLA! The week’s events include:
Center for Accessible Education Open House
Learn about accessibility resources available through CAE and CAPS
DATE: Monday, October 9
TIME: 11 AM – 1 PM
LOCATION: A255 Murphy Hall
UCLA Committee on Disability Open Meeting
Meet the committee and discuss your accessibility concerns
DATE: Tuesday, October 10
TIME: 2 PM – 4 PM
LOCATION: 5628 Math/Sciences
Adaptive Recreation Demos
Experience wheelchair basketball and hand cycles!
DATE: Tuesday, October 10
TIME: 4 PM – 7:30 PM
LOCATION: Wooden Center, Collins Court #1
Contact mgarafola@recreation.ucla.edu for accessibility needs
Film Screening: SWIM TEAM
DATE: Tuesday, October 10
TIME: 6 PM
LOCATION: Semel Institute Auditorium
RSVP: http://tinyurl.com/uclaaslaswimteam
Contact bwilkinson@college.ucla.edu for accessibility needs
Keynote talk by Jerry Kang, UCLA Vice-Chancellor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
DATE:Wednesday, October 11
TIME: 12 PM – 1 PM
LOCATION: Founders Room, James West Alumni Center
Royce and Powell Lights
Evenings, Monday, October 10 to Friday, October 13
All week long Royce and Powell will be lit up to raise awareness! Drop by at night to see the blue and white lights!

Weaving Generations Together: Opening Reception
2017-10-05 16:00 - 18:30 | Powell Library Main and East Rotundas, UCLA
Please join us at Powell Library for the opening reception to Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas.

This exhibition explores cultural transmission and learning through children’s play weaving and apprenticeship in the Maya Highland community of Zincantán, Chiapas, Mexico. The exhibition sho
ws over one hundred textiles from Zincantán drawn from a research collection spanning from 1943 to the present, including hand-woven and embroidered ponchos, shawls, and huipils in vibrant colors and metallic threads as well as looms and weavings made by children. Maya people wear traditional clothing today and the exhibition demonstrates both continuity and change through the expression of weaving and embroidery.
This exhibition is based on a book by Patricia Marks Greenfield.
More information on the exhibition’s run can also be found HERE.

Co-sponsored by:

Center for the Study of Women
UCLA Library
Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
American Indian Studies Center
Chicano Studies Research Center
Latin American Institute
Center for Mexican Studies
Fiat Lux
Office of Instructional Development

CSW Open House
2017-09-27 11:00 - 16:00 | Center for the Study of Women, 1500 Public Affairs
Welcome, new Bruins; and welcome back, continuing UCLA Students! Drop by CSW during True Bruin Welcome Week Departmental Open House Day! Come learn about our student award opportunities, student research projects, upcoming events, and other opportunities for students! Meet our staff, and find out more about what CSW offers to all members of our campus community.
We’re looking forward to meeting you!

Reproductive Health and the Environment in Los Angeles County: Best Practices for Los Angeles County
2017-09-20 08:00 - 14:00 | The California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda Sreet, Los Angeles, CA, 90012, United States
Free Symposium organized by the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center
Plenary Session
Environmental Policies of the New Administration that Impact Women’s Health and California’s Response

Symposium Topics
Addressing the Impact of Poor Air, Soil, and Water Quality on Preconception, Prenatal, and Children’s Health in Relation to:

Grassroots Advocacy
Applying Research into Action
Policy and Legislative Agendas

INCLUDES NETWORKING LUNCHEON
Continuing Education: 3 hours for CHES and RNs

Register online: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/KNQWXYV

Questions? Contact Karen Singh at KTSingh@mednet.ucla.edu
Si prefiere registrarse en español o necesita servicio de interpretación, por favor envíe un correo electrónico a Karen Singh: KTSingh@mednet.ucla.edu

Co-sponsored by:

David and Lucile Packard Foundation
Executive Advisory Board of the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center
UCLA Center for the Study of Women
County of Los Angeles Public Health Office of Women’s Health
Black Women for Wellness
Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles
Esperanza Community Housing
IDEPSCA
California Black Women’s Health Project
Visión y Compromiso
California Latinas for Reproductive Justice
California Pan-Ethnic Health Network
Maternal and Child Health Access
Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center
Dignity Health California Hospital Medical Center
Physicians for Social Responsibility San Francisco Bay Area Chapter
SAJE
UC San Francisco Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences
Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment

CSW Awards Luncheon & Keynote Address
2017-05-31 12:00 - 14:30 | Sequoia Room, Faculty Center, UCLA, Los Angeles, 90024
This event is now past. Photo highlights of the 2017 Awards Luncheon are available HERE.

Join the UCLA Center for the Study of Women for a special end of the year event to honor our student award recipients and the Center’s accomplishments over the past year!
FEATURING A KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Rise Up! Feminism in the Age of Trump
By Katherine Spillar
Executive Director, Feminist Majority Foundation
Executive Editor, Ms. Magazine

We’ve marched. We’ve rallied. We’ve gone on strike. And we must keep on fighting to protect and advance our rights at this critical political moment.
Katherine Spillar, who leads one of the feminist movement’s most influential organizations, will share lessons and strategies from the field to inform and inspire us as we move forward.

Sequoia Room, UCLA Faculty Center
Campus Map
Tickets are $20 and non-refundable
REGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED
Deadline to purchase tickets: Friday, May 19, 2017
Self-pay parking available in Structure 2

All CSW Events are Fragrance-Free! Learn more information HERE.
If you have questions or have RSVP’d but can no longer can attend, please contact CSW Manager Kristina Magpayo Nyden at kristina@women.ucla.edu.

Katherine Spillar is the Executive Director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and the Feminist Majority, national organizations working for women’s equality, empowerment, and non-violence. One of the founders, Spillar has been a driving force in executing the organizations’ diverse programs securing women’s rights both domestically and globally since its inception in 1987. She has played a leading role in national and state level campaigns to win women’s rights legislation, and leads the organization’s efforts to counter the effects of extremist anti-abortion groups that target women’s reproductive health clinics. She has been key in the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan to counter the Taliban’s abuse of women; for this work, the organization was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Spillar is the Executive Editor of Ms. magazine, which the Feminist Majority Foundation took over publishing in 2001. Under her oversight, Ms. has increased its investigative reporting, winning the prestigious “Maggie Award” for best feature article for its investigation into the network of extremists connected to Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller.
Spillar is a trained economist and researcher and a specialist in community organizing. She speaks to diverse audiences nationwide on a broad range of domestic and international feminist topics and appears frequently on television and radio. She has appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition, 60 Minutes, the Rachel Maddow Show, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terri Gross and Tell Me More with Michel Martin, the O’Reilly Factor, CNN, ABC Nightly News, CBS News, NBC, FOX, the Tavis Smiley Show, Politically Incorrect, and Hannity & Colmes.

Forms of Power and the Power of Forms: Annual Comparative Literature Grad Student Conference
2017-05-26 | Royce 306
This year’s UCLA Comparative Literature Graduate Conference will explore the many ways in which form colludes and contends with, is created by and creates, power. From epic poetry to the English sonnet to the novel, literary forms have conspired with power to produce political identities and practices of domination. Indeed, one might argue that certain forms were produced by and in the service of power in the first instance. Likewise, writers and artists have mobilized (literary) form as a site for remix and resistance. Representation—literary, visual, or aural—necessarily involves structures of reading, seeing, and hearing that hyperlink to powerful modes of knowing and their rebellious detractors.

Keynote speaker: Michelle M. Wright, Professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University

Afterland: Poetry of Mai Der Vang
2017-05-25 16:00 | Public Affairs 2270, UCLA
Mai Der Vang is the author of Afterland (Graywolf, 2017) which received the Walt Whitman Award winner from the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, New Republic, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Mai Der’s work has also been anthologized in Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora. As an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, she is co-editor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology. Mai Der has received residencies from Hedgebrook and is a Kundiman fellow. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley, along with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She lives in Fresno, California.
DATE: May 25
TIME: 4:00 PM
LOCATION: Public Affairs 2270
Co-sponsors: Southeast Asian Campus Learning Education and Retention, UCLA Department of English, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Center, Department of Asian American Studies, Department of Community Programs Office & Writing Success Program, Center for the Study of Women

Bloodless: A VR Documentary Film by Gina Kim
2017-05-24 15:45 - 19:00 | Darren Starr Screening Room, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, Los Angeles, 90095
“Bloodless” is a ten-minute VR film that deals with camp town comfort women for US army stationed in South Korea since the 1950s. The film traces the last living moments of a real-life sex worker who was brutally murdered by a US soldier at the Dongducheond Camptown in South Korea in 1992. Portraying the last hours of her life in the camp town, the VR film transposes a historical and political issue into a personal and concrete experience. This film was shot on location where the crime took place, bringing to light ongoing experiences at the 96 camp towns near or around the US military bases.
A Crayon Film production, Written and Directed by Gina Kim, Produced by Jiyoung Kang and Seonah Kim
Artist Talk: 5-7PM on Wednesday, May 24th, 2017 at Darren Star Screening Room
VR Viewing Experience (RSVP Only): 3:45-5PM on Wednesday, May 24th, 2017 at Melnitz Hall TV3
Please RSVP to Sharon Choi (shasung.choi@gmail.com) for VR viewing experience.
This project was sponsored by Dankook University Graduate School of Cinematic Content (BK 21 Plus), Venta VR, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UCLA The Center for Korean Studies, UCLA Institute of American Cultures, UCLA Asian American Studies Center

Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Exposure
2017-05-04 - 2017-05-05 | UCLA, 330 De Neve Dr., Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
May 4-5, 2017
UCLA
FREE and OPEN to the public!
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!
This symposium will convene a group of scholars, scientists and community based researchers, artists, documentarians, and policy makers to assess the gendered impacts of (primarily endocrine-disrupting) chemicals on human populations. By marshaling a variety of perspectives—laboratory, ethnographic, epidemiological, and narrative, this transdisciplinary collaboration will seek to explore how gender has made a difference in the public’s knowledge with regard to the cumulative effects of environmental toxins. Speakers will use methods from across scholarly disciplines to assess the way gendered patterns of exposure contribute to illnesses. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet researchers, community organizers, artists, and innovators who are changing the way we approach:

Reproductive justice, maternal health, and endocrine disruption
Urban oil drilling in Los Angeles
Income inequality, environmental health, and environmental justice
Exposure to indoor air pollution in homes and workplaces
Pesticides, flame retardants, and birth defects
Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance, and exposure illness
Toxic personal care and cleaning products
Training the next generation of environmental innovators and advocates

Travel Grants are available for non-UCLA graduate students and independent scholars to attend the Symposium! If you would like to apply, please visit our Travel Grants page.
All CSW Events are Fragrance-Free! CSW is dedicated to creating a safe and accessible space for everyone who participates in our events and programs. For information on our fragrance-free initiative and details on requesting accessibility accommodations, please visit our Event Accessibility page.
Sign-language interpretation will be available at Florence Williams’s keynote address on May 4 at 4pm in the Charles E. Young Research Library Main Conference Room.
Video of conference presentations will be made available on CSW’s YouTube channel following the event, and we will also be live-tweeting the proceedings for those unable to attend — follow the hashtag #CECSW to stay connected!
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS AVAILABLE HERE
We are thrilled to be welcoming Keynote Speaker Florence Williams!

Florence Williams is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine and a freelance writer for the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Slate, Mother Jones, High Country News, O-Oprah, W., Bicycling, and numerous other publications. She is also the writer and host of the new Audible Original series, Breasts Unbound.
A fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature and a visiting scholar at George Washington University, her work focuses on the environment, health, and science. In 2007-2008, she was a Scripps Fellow at the Center of Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado.
Her first book, BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History (W.W. Norton 2012), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science and technology and the 2013 Audie in general nonfiction. It was also named a notable book of 2012 by the New York Times.

We are excited to welcome our Panel Session Speakers:
Karim Ahmed (National Council for Science and the Environment)
Jesse Cohen (Canaries)
Martha Dina Arguello (Physicians for Social Responsibility)
David Crews (University of Texas at Austin)
Nourbese Flint (Black Women for Wellness)
Kim Fortun (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Andrea Gore (University of Texas at Austin)
Liza Grandia (UC Davis)
Tyrone Hayes (UC Berkeley)
mark! Lopez (East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice)
Shahir Masri (UC Irvine)
Teresa Montoya (New York University)
Peggy Munson (Artist, Writer, Activist)
Ana Soto (Tufts University School of Medicine)
For a compiled list of the Speaker Biographies and Abstracts, please visit the CE Speaker Bios and Abstracts page.
REGISTER TODAY!

Co-sponsored by:

UCLA Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership
UCLA Council on Research Trans-Disciplinary Seed Grant
UCLA Office of Interdisciplinary & Cross Campus Affairs
UCLA Social Sciences Dean’s Faculty Opportunity Fund
Environmental Health Sciences
Center for Occupational & Environmental Health
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE)
Institute for Society and Genetics
Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center
Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS)
Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program (LOSH)
Muriel C. McClendon, Social Sciences Equity Advisor (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Office)
Paul Barber, Life Sciences Equity Advisor (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Office)
School of Nursing
UCLA Division of Social Sciences
Charles E. Young Research Library
LGBT Campus Resource Center
Backed by Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

Get Involved:
JOIN OUR WORKING GROUP: Faculty and graduate students from across disciplines meet quarterly to discuss issues related to gender and exposure. Learn how to join here.
JOIN OUR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT GROUP: Undergraduate students can volunteer or receive research credit to conduct original research, participate in awareness campaigns, shape policy recommendations, and contribute to educational videos. Learn how to join here.
READ OUR BLOG: The Chemical Entanglements blog features reports from the field, interviews, film reviews, and more! Read our latest updates here.

WRITE FOR THE BLOG: We want your contributions to the Chemical Entanglements blog! Find out more here.
SHARE THE AIR: One simple way that you can reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals–and help safeguard the health of those around you–is by using fewer fragranced products in your everyday life. Learn more about CSW’s Share the Air initiative.

Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network (SEACRN): Promoting Dialogue Across Critical and Creative Practice
2017-04-28 - 2017-04-29 | Darren Starr Screening Room, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, Los Angeles, 90095
A two day symposium featuring screenings of short films and roundtable discussion.
Featured filmmakers:
Thi Nguyen Trinh (Hanoi Doclab, Vietnam), Anocha Suwichakornpong (Thailand), Nia Dinata (Kalyana Shira Films, Indonesia), Shireen Seno (Philippines)
Featured scholars:
Brian Bernards, Peter Bloom, Arnika Fuhrmann, Gaik Cheng Khoo, Mariam Lam, Philippa Lovatt, Cheng-Sim Lim, Bliss Cua Lim, Sudarat Musikawong, and Fatimah Tobing Rony

Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity
2017-04-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Rolfe 2125
This talk focuses on the ways that feminist scholars have negotiated the complicated, conflicted, and contradictory terrain of friendship. It offers fresh perspectives on feminists’ invested, reluctant, and selective uses of the nation; reflects on how the arts contribute to conversations about feminism, dissent, resistance, and solidarity; and unpacks the details of transnational dissident friendships.
Featuring the editors of Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity
Elora Halim Chowdhury
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Associate Professor and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies Department, College of Liberal Arts Affiliate faculty, Asian Studies Department; Asian American Studies Program
Affiliated Researcher, Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights
Liz Philipose
Independent Scholar
Liz Philipose is an educator whose research focuses on consciousness, the human condition in modernity, and potential catalysts for social transformation. Her interests have taken her into academic work and a tenured professorship in the fields of feminist philosophy, international politics, and cultural studies.

CSW Research Affiliate Brown Bag: "Polar Environmental Discourses: Film, Politics, and Oil in the Anthropocene," Lisa Bloom
2017-04-21 12:00 - 13:30 | Rolfe 2125
Polar Environmental Discourses: Film, Politics, and Oil in the Anthropocene
Bring your lunch and join CSW Research Affiliates for a brown bag research presentation!
RSVP ONLINE
Taken from a book project titled Polar Aesthetics in the Anthropocene: Imagining Climate, Lisa Bloom brings together issues in critical climate change scholarship to examine aspects of feminist and environmentalist polar art in the work of Brenda Longfellow. Focusing on oil drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, this paper invites us to think about how conventional narratives about oil production and consumption, science, gender, and race, as well as attitudes towards nature, technology, and the wilderness are being reimagined through interactive documentaries in the early 21st century.
Lisa Bloom is the author of Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), the first critical book on the Arctic and Antarctic in the US written from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. Her other books include an edited anthology titled With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press,1999) and Jewish Identities in U.S. Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity. (Routledge, London, 2006). She is currently a Research Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA. Her forthcoming book is titled: Imagining Climate: Art and Visual Culture of the Polar Regions in the Anthropocene.

"Contexts of Crisis: Danger, Opportunity, and the Unknown," History Graduate Students Association Conference
2017-04-14 | Young Research Library, UCLA
Keynote Speaker: Robin D.G. Kelley, Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, Department of History, UCLA

Disability as Spectacle
2017-04-13 - 2017-04-14 | Luskin Conference Center
Keynote Addresses:
ROSEMARIE GARLAND-THOMSON, Professor of English & Bioethics at Emory University

DJ KURS, Artistic Director for Deaf West Theatre

KAREN NAKAMURA, Robert and Colleen Haas Distinguished Chair in Disability Studies and
Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley

UCLA’s Disability Studies program announces a two-day conference on Disability as Spectacle (April 13-14, 2017). Disability’s representation in current popular culture, academic discourse, and political rhetoric raises important questions about how disability is depicted and which disabilities are excluded or rendered invisible in this new cultural landscape. How does our current moment’s heightened awareness of disability produce benefits and/or disadvantages in other social, political, or economic spheres? The conference theme encourages scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists to think critically about disability’s representations and invites them to share ideas about the future of disability rights and Disability Studies as this historically marginalized community continues to make advances in mainstream culture.
This conference aims to stimulate a discussion around how society constructs, reacts, and embraces or rejects visible and invisible disabilities in the public sphere. As representations change in popular and political culture, scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists will need to confront a changing milieu in which (some) disabilities are de-stigmatized while others are prevented from participation.
The film and television industry’s role in disability’s changing status makes Los Angeles an ideal location to reflect upon disability as spectacle.

Scope Lab Workshops
2017-04-10 17:30 - 2017-06-05 19:30 | 3261A Broad Art Center, UCLA, UCLA, Los Angeles
Scope Lab is a workshop series focused on exploring code as a creative medium with which to understand and represent diverse perspectives. These studies are framed by the questions: “Whose perspectives are represented?”, “Who has access to the tools to learn and express themselves?”, and “How do we design tools and projects that are more inclusive?”. Each workshop will consist of hands-on programming exercises, a lecture and discussion, and projects developed collaboratively. We will be using a software platform called p5.js, which is an open source JavaScript framework that makes creating visual media with code on the web accessible to artists, designers, educators, and beginners. For questions or to sign up, please write to scopelab@p5js.org.

WHO IS SCOPE LAB?
Scope lab workshops are free and open for all UCLA students. Workshops may be attended on a drop-in basis, but we do encourage students to come to the entire series. No prior coding knowledge is necessary, all levels of experience are welcomed and encouraged.
Scope Lab is led by Lauren McCarthy, Assistant Professor in the Design Media Arts Department and Miriam Posner, Director of the Digital Humanities Program, with Graduate Researchers Stalgia Grigg and Christina Yglesias. Collaborating groups and departments include UCLA Computer Science, VoidLab (a feminist student collective in the Design Media Arts Department), UCLA Arts Software Studio, and the NYU Ability Project.

The workshops will occur biweekly on Monday evenings, from 5:30-7:30pm at the Broad Art Center, room 3261A (New Mars).
April 10 | Uncertainty and Experimental Data Visualisation
Miriam Posner (Digital Humanities) and Lauren McCarthy (Design Media Arts)
April 24 | Experimental Language Design
Alessandro Warth (Computer Science)
May 8 | Feminist Artistic Strategies in Online Spaces
VoidLab
May 22 | Multiperspectival Experimental Data Visualisation
Miriam Posner (Digital Humanities) and Lauren McCarthy (Design Media Arts)
June 5 | Designing for Accessibility and Disability
Claire Kearney-Volpe (NYU Ability Project)

FURTHER READING
Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein, Feminist Data Visualization
Shaka McGlotten, Black Data
Johanna Drucker, 3DH Visualizations
Johanna Drucker, Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display
Mimi Onuoha, Missing Data Sets
Mushon Zer-Aviv, If Everything is a Network, Nothing is a Network
Melissa Gregg, Inside the Data Spectacle
Kim Gallon, Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities

Scope Lab is supported by a grant from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.

Black Milk: Colonial Foodways and Intimate Imperialism
2017-04-06 16:00 - 18:00 | Charles E Young Research Library Conference Room
All CSW events are Fragrance-Free. Learn more about our event accessibility policy.

Part of Dishing: Food, Feminism, and the Way We Eat. Video now available on YouTube!

A talk by Diana Garvin, PhD in Italian Studies, Cornell University
This talk will use original Italian and Ethiopian sources to examine breastfeeding in the colonial marketplace as a key plank in the social construction of race and racism in the colonies. Specifically, I will examine the Italian Fascist regime’s propagandistic newsreels and unpublished photographs of Ethiopian markets in Addis Ababa, Harrar, Quórum, and Asmara in relation with postcolonial oral histories and architectural studies of these spaces.
While breastfeeding represented a significant arena of political struggle over the care and nourishment of future generations in the colonies, contemporary historical studies rarely examine this practice as a primary component of imperial foodways. This stance builds on Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ assertion that food confuses physical borders between the self and racial others. My talk contributes an intersectional approach to the discipline by using breastfeeding in the marketplace to investigate the Fascist regime’s twinned seizure of food and women’s bodies, a mode of cultural erasure that bell hooks refers to as “eating the other.”
Interweaving the voices of vendors, customers, architects, and government officials in this image-based study of Ethiopian marketplaces not only helps to untangle the filmic decisions and techniques that directors used to construct race and racism through mass media, but also offers a more cohesive portrait of women’s daily lives in Italian East Africa under Fascism. Ultimately, I contend that the marketplace provided a powerful symbolic arena for forming, shaping, and perpetuating the racial thinking that defined Ethiopian and Italian people, markets, and foodways in terms of black and white.
Diana Garvin holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Cornell University. Her dissertation, “Feeding Fascism: Tabletop Politics in Italy and Italian East Africa, 1922-1945,” draws on Gender Studies, Colonial Studies, and Material Culture Studies and analyzes food as the physical evidence of power negotiations between individual women and the State in Italy and in former Italian East Africa (modern-day Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia). Garvin conducted her research at over 25 museums and archives, including the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, the Biblioteca Gastronomica, the Archivio Barilla, and the Archivio Centrale dello Stato. Garvin’s work has been supported by the AAUW American Fellowship (2015), the Julia Child Foundation Scholarship (2014) and the AFS Sue Samuelson Award for Foodways Scholarship (2013). Thanks to the support of the CLIR Mellon Fellowship, she spent the 2015-2016 academic year conducting research in Italy for her second project on colonial foodways and East African women’s domestic work in Italian homesteads.
Garvin’s research has been published in Critical Inquiry and the edited volumes, Doing Research To Improve Teaching And Learning, Representing Italy through Food, Communicating Italian Food, and Food and Material Culture: Proceedings of the 2013 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. In addition to her publications, Garvin directed the conference, “The Language of Food: Exploring Representations of the Culinary in Culture,” at Cornell in 2012. Prior to her graduate work at Cornell, Garvin taught at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Associazione Italo-Americana in Bologna, Italy, and at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, France. In 2006, she received her A.B. in Romance Studies (Italian, French, Spanish) from Harvard University.
Her favorite Italian proverb is “O mangi questa minestra o salti dalla finestra,” – “Eat this soup or jump out the window.”

Co-sponsored by:

UCLA Division of Social Sciences
UCLA Healthy Campus Initiative
UCLA Department of History
UCLA Food Studies Graduate Certificate Program
UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies
Iris Cantor—UCLA Women’s Health Center
UCLA Department of Italian

Kathryn Everly, "The Modern Woman Soldier and Gender Crisis during the Spanish Civil War"
2017-04-06 14:00 - 16:00 | Lydeen Library, 4302 Rolfe Hall, UCLA
Kathryn Everly is Professor of Spanish Literature and Culture at Syracuse University. She published Catalan Women Writers and Artists: Revisionist Views from a Feminist Space with Bucknell University Press in 2003 and History, Violence, and the Hyperreal: Representing Culture in the Contemporary Spanish Novel with Purdue University Press in 2010. She received the Florence Howe Award for feminist scholarship in a foreign language field awarded by the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages Association, as well as a research grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities. She has published several book chapters and articles in various journals including Letras peninsulares, Hispanic Journal, and Catalan Review.

Words About Women Matter: Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word Contest
2017-03-08 06:00 - 20:30 | Kerckhoff Hall Art Gallery, UCLA
25 selected contestants will each have up to 5 minutes to perform original poetry or spoken word, tell a personal story, do a comedy routine, or sing an original song that relates to the theme of “women of the world — learning, laughing, resisting, renewing.” Competition open to all UCLA Students, Staff, and Faculty.
This event is open to the UCLA Community, as well as family and friends. Suggested entrance fee is $10, which includes dinner and entertainment. The audience will select the winners.
Awards: Cash prizes! First place: $75. Second and Third places: $50. All contestants will also designate an international women’s organization to share in the door proceeds.
Deadline: to enter, submit the attached for by email to Chiao-Wen Lan (chiaowen@ucla.edu) by March 2 at 11:59 PM. Contestants selected to participate will be notified by March 6 at 6 PM. Only submission per person
Sponsored by: Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health, Center for the Study of Women, UCLA International Institute, Reproductive Health Interest Group, Art & Global Health Center, and the Word on Wednesday

Sharra Vostral, "Testing Tampons: Toxic Shock Syndrome, Feminist Advocates, and Absorbency Standards"
2017-02-23 16:00 - 18:00 | Kerckhoff Hall Grand Salon, UCLA, Los Angeles
Part of CSW’s Feminism + the Senses Lecture Series
RSVP ONLINE: HTTP://WWW.CSW.UCLA.EDU/VOSTRAL
During the 1980s in the aftermath of Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS), the Centers for Disease Control recommended that women use the least absorbent tampons possible, yet manufacturers did not label boxes with reliable information. This talk examines the establishment of the Tampon Task Force, the contested “syngina” synthetic vagina lab apparatus to test tampon absorbency, and the regulation of female-specific tampon technologies. The legacy of these efforts is the standardization of absorbency ratings as well as product labeling, and evidence of the importance of feminist health activists’ involvement within policy negotiations.
Sharra Vostral is an Associate Professor of History in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, where she is affiliated with both Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies. Her research centers upon the history of technology, specifically gender, and histories of medical devices and health. Her book, Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology examines the social and technological history of sanitary napkins and tampons, and the effects of technology upon women’s experiences of menstruation. Her current research explores the 1980 health crisis of Toxic Shock Syndrome and its relationship to tampon technologies.
She received her Ph.D. in History at Washington University in St. Louis. She completed her M.A. in American Studies at St. Louis University, and earned honors in Comparative Religion at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before coming to Purdue, she was an Associate Professor in Gender & Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Supported by the Estrin Family Lecture Series Fund

CO-SPONSORS:
The Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health
The Institute for Society and Genetics
UCLA Department of History
UCLA Center for Social Medicine and the Humanities

Thinking Gender 2017: "Imagining Reparations"
2017-02-09 11:00 - 2017-02-10 18:30 | UCLA Faculty Center, Los Angeles, CA
Thinking Gender, Imagining Reparations
27th Annual Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference
February 9-10, 2017
UCLA Faculty Center

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Featuring:
“For the Texas Bama Femme: A Black Fem(me)inist Reading of Beyonce’s ‘Sorry’”
12:00 PM, February 9
California Room
Plenary address by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley
Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Respondent: Shana Redmond, UCLA

“Re-writing the World”
10:45 AM, February 10
California Room
Plenary workshop with Nalo Hopkinson
Professor of Creative Writing, UC Riverside
Award-winning author of Brown Girl in the Ring

FULL CONFERENCE PROGRAM AVAILABLE HERE
This year’s conference theme, Imagining Reparations, engages contemporary social, scholarly, and literary movements that push to reimagine and retheorize what freedom, justice, health, and care can look like. Historically, reparations have taken financial form with governments recognizing victims of perceived injustice by awarding them money. Such practices have depended on and have defined the law and dominant ideas of justice within states and empires. By contrast, marginalized groups today are reframing reparations as capable of addressing historical and ongoing abuses, evident in law itself and manifest in biological, environmental, educational, technological, institutionalized, political, and diplomatic violence. The daring to imagine new forms of reparative justice emerges from raced, gendered, and sexualized subjectivities, which inform movements that devastate the binary between theory and practice in their struggle to be whole. A broad and intersectional investment in reparations challenges the assigning of rights and privileges in the past, and it is an important tool in recasting the structures that impact our daily lives.
Thinking Gender 2017, Imagining Reparations, takes a cue from movements that conceive of violence and reparative justice intersectionally with consequences that shape and are shaped by gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, etc. We invite presentations of work from across disciplines that embodies this intersectional ethos and, in particular, envision reparations through the lens of gender and sexuality. Conference sessions will include ample time for discussion of work, emphasizing dialogue discussion, writing as important modes of conference participation, and exploring their potential as feminist, decolonial tools for learning and action. Imagining Reparations aims to create cohesion among a broad range of disciplinary engagements, theoretical stances, and practical applications by providing space for thinking together about the role of the academy in theorizing tools for collective liberation from gendered and racialized violence.
Thank you to our Event Co-Sponsors:
Division of Social Sciences
Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Division of Humanities
Critical Race Studies Program
Department of African American Studies
Disability Studies Program
Institute of American Cultures
Latin American Institute Program on Caribbean Studies
Department of English
Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
Department of Comparative Literature
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies
LGBT Resource Center

Native Healing and Justice from California to Hawai'i: A Public Dialogue
2017-01-30 12:00 - 14:00 | 5391 Public Affairs, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Featured speakers:
Katherine Irwin, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Wayde Lee, Director, Kahua Ola Hou
Karen Umemoto, Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
with an introduction by Randall Akee (Assistant Professor, Department of Public Policy and American Indian Studies, UCLA) and a response by Jessica Schwartz (Assistant Professor, Department of Musicology, UCLA)
This event will feature a discussion of Katherine Irwin and Karen Umemoto’s new book, Jacked Up and Unjust: Pacific Islander Teens Confront Violent Legacies (University of California Press, 2016). Along with Wayde Lee, a Hawaiian practitioner of restorative justice practices, Irwin and Umemoto will explore schooling and poverty, gender socialization and trauma in K-12, and community responsibility and state policing in Hawai’i and elsewhere.

Insurgency at the Crossroads: A Book Talk by Aisha Finch
2017-01-26 16:00 - 18:00 | Anderson School Collins A201, UCLA, Los Angeles
Professor Aisha Finch, discuss her new prize-winning book, RETHINKING SLAVE REBELLION IN CUBA, with Lisa Brock, George Lipsitz and Ula Taylor—three incredibly dynamic speakers and brilliant historians who have spent much of their lives unearthing and making sense of social movements.
In Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844, Aisha Finch traces the emergence of a dynamic resistance movement of slaves and free people of color in nineteenth-century Cuba. Drawing from the largely unexplored testimonies in the Cuban National Archive, this book focuses attention on the hundreds of enslaved people who forged a radical, alternative vision of freedom in Cuba’s plantation countryside. Demonstrating that black slave women and non-elite slaves were critical to shaping and organizing this movement, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba offers new ways to think about slave mobilizations, black political struggles, and histories of rebellion.
Lisa Brock is the founding director of the Praxis Center at Kalamazoo College and scholar of Black internationalism and editor of and contributor to the groundbreaking book, Between Race and Empire: African-Americans and Cubans Before the Cuban Revolution.
George Lipsitz teaches Black Studies and Sociology at UC Santa Barbara and author of a dozen books on race, social movements, urban culture, and inequality, including A Rainbow at Midnight, Footsteps in the Dark, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, A Life in the Struggle, Time Passages, and How Racism Takes Place. He is the chairman of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance.
Ula Taylor teaches at UC Berkeley in African American Studies, has produced groundbreaking scholarship on the history of Black women, Black feminist praxis, and nationalism. Her books include the highly acclaimed The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey; (with J. Tarika Lewis and Mario Van Pebbles) Panther: A Pictorial History of the Black Panthers and the Story Behind the Film; and her forthcoming, Making a New Woman: Women and the Nation of Islam, 1930-1975.
Co-sponsored by: The Departments of African American Studies and Gender Studies

RAVE Teach-In: Resisting Violence Through Education
2016-11-30 17:00 - 19:00 | 100 Moore Hall, UCLA
Hate won. Now what? Come to the first-ever Teaching Rave organized by a group of UCLA faculty, who are committed to fighting the hate and violence of a Trump regime through a collaborative counter-movement between students, faculty, and staff on campus.
FEATURING A KEYNOTE PRESENTATION BY CHERRIE MORAGA!

Program:
Panel presentation: Professor Sarah Haley (Gender Studies) and Professor Cheryl Harris (Law School)
Keynote presentation: Cherrie Moraga, Artist in Residence, Stanford University
Open discussion with students facilitated by Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD

Wednesday, November 30, 2016
5pm-7pm
100 Moore Hall

CSW Research Affiliate Brown Bag: Gisèle Maynard-Tucker, "Women's Power, Sexuality, and Aging: A Multicultural View"
2016-11-30 11:30 - 13:00 | 1221 D Bunche Hall, UCLA
Bring your lunch and join CSW’s Research Affiliates for a brown bag research presentation!
Women’s Power, Sexuality, and Aging: A Multicultural View
by Gisèle Maynard-Tucker
In her research on rural Peru and urban Los Angeles, Gisèle Maynard-Tucker assesses the impact of the environment, culture, economics, and gender inequalities on the treatment of women as they age. Based on literary data, observations and other research, it seems that women acquire more respect in ethnic societies with age, while in Los Angeles aging becomes a curse because of the cult of youthfulness.
Gisèle Maynard-Tucker is a medical and applied anthropologist affiliated with the Center for the Study of Women (CSW) at UCLA since 1989. She holds a Ph. D. in anthropology from UCLA (1988) and has worked as an international consultant since the 1990s for development agencies such as WHO, USAID, World Bank, European Union, POPTECH, Development Associates, Academy for Educational Development and many others. She has conducted research and evaluation of health programs regarding family planning, reproductive health, maternal and child survival and HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa, India, South America, Asia, and the Caribbean. Her recent book examines women’s health in developing countries and is titled “Rural Women’s Sexuality, Reproductive Health and Illiteracy: A Critical Perspective on Development (Lexington Books, 2015).
Please RSVP online.

Delicious: A History of Monosodium Glutamate and the Fifth Taste Sensation, Umami
2016-11-29 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 314
Part of Dishing: Food, Feminism, and the Way We Eat. Video now available on YouTube!

A talk by Sarah Tracy, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics

RSVP online!
In this talk, Sarah Tracy will discuss the material and immaterial dimensions of pleasure, pain, guilt, and regret around eating processed and prepared foods. She does so through the case study of self-identified MSG sensitivity – as archived in official FDA reporting channels and in online community forums, e.g. blogs, consumer advocacy groups, Reddit. These questions are in reference to broader discussions of the gendered moral economies of food provision and preparation, and that casual privilege called eating/dining out. Who’s worrying about what to eat – and how “good” it is? Going down? Going through? Coming out? These and other abiding concerns are a kind of emotional labor that has, historically, been feminized in the U.S.
Sarah Tracy is an historian of the recent past, and of the United States in the world. Her work draws on feminist science and technology studies (STS), food studies, post-colonial theory, sensory history, and critical histories of capitalism.
Tracy’s dissertation is called, “Delicious: A History of Monosodium Glutamate and Umami, the Fifth Taste Sensation,” and it examines two interrelated objects: the global commodity and flavour enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG), and umami (roughly translated from the Japanese as “delicious”), the fifth basic taste that MSG is understood to confer. This project situates umami within translations of the life sciences between Japan and the United States, and shows how the metabolics of taste are inseparable from global capitalisms. It brings feminist STS into conversation with sensory history, cultural history, and post-colonial studies to foster cross-disciplinary insight into how foods mediate value, health, class, race, happiness, and violation.
Tracy maps how MSG explodes our categories of food, drug, and toxin. She trace the additive’s journey from Japan and across the globe and analyzes how it has been fetishized, racialized, and vilified. Tracy considers MSG as a focus point for connecting questions of authenticity and risk in foods; for connecting the state of knowledge in sensory science, neuroscience, and food design and marketing; and for thinking about how our food systems organize not only ways of being human (class, ethnicity, region), but the ways of being of creatures large and small (e.g. the laboratory mice in safety and cancer testing, the farmed bacteria who produce the glutamic acid we eat when we eat MSG).
Tracy’s research has been published in Global Food History, and is forthcoming in Radical History Review.
