Center for the Study of Women

UCLA Center for Reproductive Science, Health and Education Distinguished Speaker Series ft. Teresa K. Woodruff
2026-04-08 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CNSI Auditorium
Where: California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), UCLA Campus

When: Wednesday, April 8th at 4pm PT
Teresa K. Woodruff, Ph.D. is a leader in higher education and an internationally recognized biologist specializing in reproductive science. Woodruff is president emerita of Michigan StateUniversity (MSU) and MSU Research Foundation Distinguished Professor in the Department of Obstetrics,Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology as well as in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at MSU. In 2006, she coined the term “oncofertility” to describe the merging of two fields: oncology and fertility preservation. Working at the national level, Woodruff championed a new National Institutes of Health Policy mandating the inclusion of both male and female biological variables in fundamental research. As a leading research scientist, teacher and mentor, Woodruff was awarded the National Medal of Science byPresident Joe Biden in 2025 and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science
RSVP Here

Dreaming Together: California Student Survivors Reimagining Campus Responses to Sexual Violence
2026-04-10 10:00 - 12:00 | Royce Hall
Where: Royce 314 + Zoom
When: Friday, April 10th from 10:00 AM-12:00 PM PT
Survivors + Allies is a UCLA-student organization within the CSW|Barbra Streisand Center dedicated to advocating with and for survivors of sexual violence and sexual harassment (SVSH). Over the past year, we conducted a mixed-methods research study across California college campuses, including the University of California (UC), California State University (CSU), and community college systems, to better understand the conditions that enable or prevent student-survivor healing.
We invite you to join us for the official launch of our 2025-2026 research report. We are excited to present our findings and recommendations with you.

Beyond the Concrete: A Conversation About the Lost Art of Letter Writing with John Rodriguez
2026-04-14 16:00 - 17:00 | Virtual
When: April 14, 2026 at 4 pm PST
Where: Virtual
John Rodriguez is a UCLA alumnus whose sentence was commuted by the California Governor in 2017 after he discovered a life-changing passion for education while incarcerated. Today, he serves as the Education and Communications Manager at Root & Rebound, leveraging storytelling to bring visibility to overlooked narratives. John dreams of returning to prison someday—not as an inmate, but as a teacher with the power to help others find their way out through education.
The event is part of a Fiat Lux Seminar “Law, Justice, Literary Production, and Education Behind Bar” in the Department of English. This talk is co-sponsored by the CSW|Streisand Center.
All all welcome to attend via zoom.
Meeting ID: 927 8244 7447
Passcode: [REDACTED]

Thinking Gender 2026: Feminist and Queer Ecologies
2026-04-17 | James West Alumni Center, 325 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Thinking Gender 2026
36th Annual Graduate Student Research Conference
“Feminist and Queer Ecologies”
Friday, April 17, 2026
James West Alumni Center, UCLA Campus
Free registration here

Join us for a day of graduate student presentations highlighting innovative research at the intersections of gender, sexuality, environment, and justice. The conference will feature keynote speaker Cutcha Risling Baldy (Cal Poly Humboldt; NAS Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute), whose work centers Indigenous feminisms, land relations, and food sovereignty.
“Feminist and Queer Ecologies,” explores how environments and ecologies are shaped, understood, and contested through relations of sex, gender, and sexuality. The theme also considers how feminist and queer theorists, artists, and organizers have drawn on ecological processes and environmental knowledge to build new insights, movements, and practices.
Gendered and colonial ideas of wilderness, domesticity, and reproduction have historically shaped landscapes and environmental policy. At the same time, feminist and queer methodologies—from place-based storytelling to multimodal practice—offer critical tools for climate resilience, environmental justice, and community well-being. Around the world, social movements resisting environmental injustice—from Standing Rock to Flint, from the Everglades to rural India—have been led by women and gender-expansive people. Climate change and climate justice continue to affect communities differentially along lines of gender, sexuality, race, and class, revealing how struggles for ecological flourishing are inseparable from feminist and queer justice.
Feminist and queer ecologies demand multidisciplinary collaboration. This year’s theme invites environmental scientists, humanists, social scientists, artists, organizers, and practitioners to come together across methods, disciplines, temporalities, species, and geographies. It encourages experimentation with scientific inquiry, ethnography, storytelling, political theory, environmental history, modeling, and other forms of knowledge-making and truth-telling.

Conference Keynote:
“Indigenous Women Know How to Save the World: Framing a California Indigenous Ecofeminist Ethic.”

This talk builds a California Indigenous ecofeminist ethic grounded in place, fugitivity, resistance, and humor. It asks what it means to rethink how we talk about climate change and to recognize how land, water, and more than human relatives model resilience, refusal, and justice. By examining examples from California such as the damming, diversion, and even paving over of rivers, this talk argues that environmental devastation is not a future fear but an ongoing history that Indigenous peoples have survived and theorized for generations. Green colonialism, conservation land grabs, and the expectation that Indigenous communities must solve climate change while contributing the least to it exposes the absurdity and gaslighting in contemporary environmental discourse and policy. At the same time, Indigenous women who have long been leaders in ecological knowledge and restoration are kept busy navigating patriarchal structures rather than being supported as the scientific and cultural leaders they already are. Ultimately, this talk explores how the world around us is already feminist, already resistant, and already offering models for collective thriving beyond capitalism, patriarchy, and extraction. Indigenous peoples carry structures and methodologies that are sustainable, relational, and deeply grounded in place. We have lived them. And we are still building these futures now.
Cutcha Risling Baldy, Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt researches Indigenous feminisms, California Indians, Environmental Justice, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and decolonization. She is also the Co-Director of the NAS Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab & Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute.
In 2025 Dr. Risling Baldy along with Co-Director Dr. Kaitlin Reed were awarded the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award for their work with the lab. Her book: We Are Dancing For You: Native feminisms and the revitalization of women’s coming-of-age ceremonies received “Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies” at the 2019 Native American Indigenous Studies Association Conference. She received her Ph.D. in Native American Studies at UC Davis; her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Diego State University; and her B.A. in Psychology with a Specialization in Health and Development from Stanford University. She is also the volunteer Executive Director for the Native Women’s Collective, a nonprofit organization that focuses on the continued revitalization of Native American arts and culture. She is Hupa, Karuk, and Yurok and enrolled in the Hoopa Valley Tribe.
Thinking Gender Blog Posts

Fire Tender Film Screening
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
12:15–1:15 PM | CSW|Streisand Center
Join us for a screening of Fire Tender, directed by Roni Jo Draper (Yurok), followed by a discussion.
Fire Tender tells the story of Yurok tribal members returning to traditional fire practices as an essential form of land stewardship. The film centers on Margo Robbins—grandmother, cultural educator, healer, and Indigenous fire practitioner—who is leading efforts to restore Yurok fire sovereignty: the right to use fire for tribal land care, a practice outlawed under settler colonial policies.

Cosponsors
African American Studies Department
American Indian Studies Center
American Indian Studies Department
Anthropology Department
Asian American Studies Center
Asian American Studies Department
Bixby Center to Advance Sexual and Reproductive Health Equity
Center for Community Engagement
Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health
Chicana/o and Central American Studies Department
Chicano Studies Research Center
Critical Race Studies Program (Law)
Department of Geography
Disability Studies
English Department
Gender Studies Department
Graduate Division
Humanities Division
Information Studies Department
Institute of American Cultures
Institute of Society and Genetics
Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin
International Institute
Iris Cantor Women’s Health Center
Labor Center
Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies
LGBTQ Campus Resource Center
LGBTQ Studies Program
Luskin Center for Innovation
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies
School of Engineering
School of the Arts and Architecture
School of Theater, Film and Television
Social Welfare Department
Sociology Department
Water Resources Group
Friendly Reminder: Seating is first-come, first-served. Due to frequent no-shows, we overbook our events; a reservation does not guarantee a seat. Please arrive early. We appreciate your understanding.

Dean’s Lecture in Humanistic Inquiry: Kate Manne on Sensitivity and Survival
2026-04-30 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 314
The Inaugural Dean’s Lecture in Humanistic Inquiry
Thursday, April 30
4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Royce Hall Room 314
Free admission. Reception with light refreshments to follow lecture. Advance registration strongly recommended.
Presented by the UCLA College Division of Humanities
The Dean’s Lecture in Humanistic Inquiry is a biennial lecture dedicated to exploring cross-cutting topics and ideas in humanistic research and examining how humanistic inquiry connects to the most pressing questions of the day.
About our inaugural speaker
Kate Manne is a professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. She specializes in moral, social and feminist philosophy, and has written three books: DOWN GIRL: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2018), ENTITLED: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Crown, 2020) and UNSHRINKING: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown, 2024). In addition to her academic work, she regularly writes opinion pieces and essays for a wider audience, including in outlets such as The New York Times, The Cut, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation and Time. She writes a Substack newsletter, More to Hate, exploring misogyny, fatphobia and their intersection.
About Professor Manne’s lecture
Sensitivity and Survival
Accusations of oversensitivity are nowadays very common. Are they typically warranted? Is there in fact a scourge of snowflakes?
In this lecture, Kate Manne will distinguish three things that are commonly meant by “oversensitivity”: over-identification of instances, over-extension of the relevant concepts and over-reactions to the relevant harms or forms of injustice, such as sexism, misogyny and racism. Her talk will draw on two rich humanistic traditions: feminist epistemology and non-ideal theory.
While acknowledging that oversensitivity of all three kinds can and does occur, Manne will highlight and explore the comparatively under-emphasized converse dangers: the under-identification of instances, the under-extension of concepts, and under-reactions or the undermining of warranted reactions, respectively. In view of this, she concludes that what is called oversensitivity is often simply sensitivity: a normatively valuable and justified way of reacting to harms and injustices that often go under the radar in society as we know it.
Please visit this page to register.
Event cosponsors
Thank you to our cosponsors: UCLA Department of Philosophy, UCLA Department of Gender Studies, UCLA Center for the Study of Women | Streisand Center, and UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory
