Women's Daily Life in Exile Lecture
2025-11-17 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Where: UCLA Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
When: Monday, November 17, 2025 / 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM (Pacific Time)
After being deported from their homes, Armenian women experienced vastly different fates depending on where they were sent within the Arab-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Those on the eastern deportation route faced famine and disease but largely avoided mass killings, while those sent north were confined in desert tent camps and many were massacred in 1916. This lecture, led by Dr. Anna Aleksanyan and Dr. Taner Akçam of UCLA’s Promise Armenian Institute, will explore the varied experiences of these women and the gendered dimensions of the Armenian Genocide. This event is organized by The Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA.
Join the Zoom Webinar here.

Fiebre de carnaval: una conversación con Yuliana Ortiz Ruano
2025-11-18 16:00 - 17:00
The Spanish & Portuguese Department would like to invite you to a conversation with Ecuadorian novelist and poet Yuliana Ortiz Ruano. In this conversation, Ortiz Ruano will discuss her recently translated novel Carnival Fever (Fiebre de Carnaval), her practice as a writer, and the intersections of decolonial thought and Black and Caribbean intellectual traditions in Latin America.
When: November 18, 2025, 4:00 PM
Where: Lydeen Library, Rolfe Hall 4302
This event will be in Spanish. Light refreshments will be served.
Yuliana Ortiz Ruano is an Afro-Ecuadorian writer, poet, and teacher, as well as a DJ of Afro-Caribbean music. She has published several books of poetry and prose, including the multi award-winning Fiebre de carnaval (Carnaval Fever), which was chosen as one of the 50 best books of 2022 by El País. She is also the author of the poetry books Sovoz, Canciones del fin del mundo, y Cuaderno del imposible retorno a Pangea, and the book of short stories Litorales. She was selected by the International Writers in Residence program in Granada, Spain in 2023, and was chosen for the Translator Choice II award at the LATINALE Latin America Literature Festival in Berlin. Her first novel, Carnaval Fever, won the Joaquín Gallegos Lara Award (Ecuador), the Primo Romanzo Latinoamericano Award (Italy), and the PEN Translation Award (UK).

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Private I
2025-11-18 19:30 - 21:30
When: Tuesday, November 18, 2025, at 7:30 PM
Where: Hammer Museum
Pioneering conceptual artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, known for her six-decade exploration of technology, identity, and surveillance, joins Margot Norton, Chief Curator at BAMPFA, for an evening of video screenings and discussion. Leeson will reflect on her visionary works including the Roberta Breitmore series to her innovative interactive installations and her new book Private I, which examines the intersections of art, technology, and selfhood in today’s hyper-connected world.
No registration required. Seat is first come.

Faculty Writing Retreat - December 2025
2025-12-05 10:00 - 16:00
Join CSW|Streisand Center for a day-long retreat where you can concentrate on your own work alongside like-minded colleagues!

Friday, December 5th
10 am – 4 pm Hershey Hall Salon (Room 158)
Do you want to block out a day for writing and contemplation? The Faculty Writing Retreat is your solution. Join us for a day-long retreat where you can concentrate on your own work alongside like-minded colleagues—we will hold the world at bay for you. Breakfast and lunch will be provided in the beautiful setting of Hershey Hall Salon.
The writing retreat provides a peaceful place to write as well as meals; please bring your computer and any other materials you may need to work. If you have an extension cord, please bring it, as power outlets are limited. Also bring some extra clothes for layers, as the space sometimes tends to be cool.
We also offer a parallel virtual retreat with brief introductions and check-ins.
During lunch, there will be an optional conversation about the writing process.
If you register to attend in person and your plans change, please let us know immediately so that we may offer your spot to the long waitlist. No-shows will not be granted an in-person spot at future writing retreats.
If you are no longer able to attend in person, please e-mail csw@csw.ucla.edu to let us know.
Cosponsored by: CSW|Streisand Center, the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Creative Activities (ORCA), UCLA Humanities, UCLA Social Sciences, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
Save the date for future Faculty Writing Retreats:
Registration will be available the week following the most recent retreat.
Friday February 20
Friday March 6
Friday May 15

Surrealism & Antifascism: A Symposium
2025-12-06 14:00 - 18:00
Where: 3910 Los Feliz Boulevard
When: Dec 6th, 2pm-6pm PST
This unique gathering brings together artists, scholars, UCLA students and the public to explore the power of surrealist methods—past and present—as tools for resisting systems of domination and imagining new possibilities for being. From spiritual resistance to cultural subversion, surrealism has long offered a way to sidestep the normative, the colonial, and the fascistic in pursuit of radical freedom. Together, we will examine the contradictions and complexities within the Surrealist tradition and its entanglements with institutional power, gender, and race. This symposium is a call to those who believe that art, performance, spirituality, and speculation can resist the flattening forces of fascism and imagine other worlds.
Get tickets here! Tickets are free to UCLA students & PRS members with code UCLAstudent11 / $10 general admission

Cozy Book Swap + Books to Jails Drive
2025-12-08 - 2025-12-11
Join us for the CSW|Streisand Center Cozy Book Swap! Bring a wrapped book, add a hint note, and swap with others!
Additionally, donate a popular book to LA County Jails in partnership with LA County Library as a part of our Books to Jails Drive.

What kinds of books to donate to the Books to Jails Drive (per LA County Library Guidelines)

Fantasy novels
Adventure novels
Mystery novels
Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels
Spiritual books
Poetry
Self-help books
Books in Spanish

Donation guidelines

NO hardcovers – ONLY paperback books
NO textbooks or academic books
NO depictions or descriptions on how to commit crimes
MUST be in good condition / shape

Learn more about our mini library and the books to jails partnership.
When: Monday, December 8th – Thursday, December 11th, 10 am- 2 pm
Where: CSW|Streisand Center Office, 1500 Public Affairs (Located across from Jimmy’s Coffee House)

Cinema's First Nasty Women: Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy
2026-01-23 19:30 - 21:30 | Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Blvd.,, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
When: January 23, 2026 7:30 pm
Where: Billy Wilder Theater
Admission: Free; no registration required.
Cinema’s First Nasty Women returns to the Billy Wilder Theater! Its name a riff on the feminist cri de cœur that arose during the 2016 presidential election, Cinema’s First Nasty Women is an ongoing, curated project to rediscover and revel in the anarchic spirit of women comedians who brought a rebellious energy to the early silent screen. Organized by an international team of film archivists and scholars, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, this new travelling program of restored titles from the project comes with a special twist. Archival collections can inspire new research which in turn helps grow new audiences, but they can also inspire new films. Based in Australia, with The Physical TV Company, filmmaker and author Karen Pearlman has built a feminist film practice that puts cinema’s past and present in dialogue in brilliantly constructed, canon-busting short film essays. For “Cinema’s First Nasty Women: Breaking Plates and Smashing the Patriarchy,” Pearlman drew on the project’s images and energy for her latest short, Breaking Plates. The Archive is thrilled to have Pearlman as our guest at the Billy Wilder Theater with a selection of her work along with the Los Angeles premiere of Breaking Plates and the silent slapstick female performers that inspired it.
Programmed by Paul Malcolm with Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, Karen Pearlman and Richard James Allen. Notes written by Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm.
Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Total runtime: 103 min.

From Pitch to Publish in the Public Humanities
2026-02-02 - 2026-02-03 | Royce 314
Join award-winning writers and journalists Lauren Markham and Chris Feliciano Arnold for two days of panels and workshops.

From Pitch to Publish in the Public Humanities
When: February 2–3, 2026
Location: Royce 314
Free and open to the public.

Today, it is vital that scholars’ work is made widely available and accessible to the public. Is your research part of the public discourse? Do you have stories the public at large would benefit from knowing? Do you want to reach a broader audience, an audience beyond the peer-reviewed academic outlets? Do you want to learn how to pitch your specific story and research to non-academic publications? We have invited two writers and journalists, Lauren Markham and Chris Feliciano Arnold, to offer insights on the public humanities writing, pitching, and publication process in a series of panels, workshops, and individual feedback sessions.
Public Events
Monday, February 2, 10:30AM–12:00 PM (Royce 314)
Workshop: “Enliven Your Prose with Research Details: Public Workshop with Chris Feliciano Arnold and Lauren Markham.”
Discover how vivid storytelling and well-chosen details can transform scholarly work into engaging, resonant prose. This hands-on workshop explores how to integrate research into narrative writing—making complex ideas accessible without sacrificing depth or rigor. Through interactive exercises, close reading, and discussion, participants will learn strategies for bringing their data, fieldwork, and analysis to life on the page.
Monday, February 2, 4:00–5:00 PM (Royce 314)
Conversation: “Pitching and Working with Opinion Editors with Chris Feliciano Arnold and New York Times Opinion Staff Editor Isvett Verde.”
Explore strategies and best practices for effectively pitching and collaborating with newspaper editors on op-eds and opinion pieces. Gain insight into the editorial process, from crafting compelling and concise pitches that capture an editor’s attention to understanding the nuances of tone, timing, and topic relevance. This session will cover how to balance academic rigor with public accessibility, navigate editorial feedback, and establish long-term relationships with editors to amplify scholarly perspectives in the media.
Tuesday February 3, 4:00–6:00 PM (Royce 314)
Panel: “Writing for the Public in Times of Peril, a panel with Chris Feliciano Arnold, Lauren Markham, The Atlantic Senior Editor Honor Jones and VQR Editor Paul Reyes.”
This panel of authors and editors will address the crucial role of academics in bridging the gap between scholarly research and public discourse during times of crisis, uncertainty, and societal upheaval, including the ethical, intellectual, and practical challenges that scholars face when translating complex ideas into accessible language for broader audiences. Refreshments will be provided.
Panelist & Writer Bios

Chris Feliciano Arnold is the author of The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First-Century Amazon (Picador 2018). He directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Lauren Markham is an award-winning writer and journalist based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, the California Book Award shortlisted A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (2024) and the recently-released Immemorial.

Isvett Verde is a staff editor in the Opinion section of The New York Times, where she helps shape conversations on immigration, culture and identity. She is also an adjunct professor of Latinx Media studies at The City College of New York. She earned a B.A. in French from Florida International University, and an M.A. in Spanish-language Journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Her writing has been featured in the anthology titled, “Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness.”

Honor Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and previously at The New York Times Opinion section, where she edited cover stories and special issues for the Sunday Review. She is also the author of a novel, Sleep.

Paul Reyes is the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, where he develops a variety of content, including investigative reporting, essays, photography portfolios, poetry, criticism, and fiction. Before joining VQR, he was a senior editor with The Oxford American. His work as an editor has led to two National Magazine Awards (as well as several nominations), the Overseas Press Club Award, inclusion in the Pushcart Prize anthology along with regular appearances in the Best American anthologies. His book, Exiles in Eden, an investigative narrative of the 2008 housing crisis, was praised as “a wrenching chronicle of our new hard times” (Publishers Weekly) and “an engrossing memoir of American dreaming and financial devastation” (Mother Jones). His essays and reporting have appeared in VQR, The Oxford American, Harper’s, The New York Times, Literary Hub, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. His writing has earned him a Literature Fellowship in Nonfiction from the National Endowment for the Arts, a nomination for the Harry Chapin Media Award, and a nomination for the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing.

Cosponsored by:
Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center, Division of Social Sciences, Division of Humanities, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Creative Activities, School of Music, School of Arts and Architecture, and School of Theater, Film, and Television.

Fire Tender Film Screening
2026-02-10 12:15 - 13:15 | Center for the Study of Women, 1500 Public Affairs
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
12:15–1:15 PM
Center for the Study of Women|Streisand Center (Google Maps)
Join us for a screening of Fire Tender, directed by Roni Jo Draper (Yurok) and Marissa Lila, 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. Through her work, Robbins challenges more than a century of environmentally destructive anti-fire policies that have endangered Yurok lands and restricted access to the natural resources necessary for clean water, food, and traditional lifeways.
Seating is first come, first served. No registration required.
Attendees are welcome to bring their lunch for the 30-minute screening and discussion to follow.
This event is part of programming for Thinking Gender 2026: “Feminist & Queer Ecologies.” Register for the conference.
About the Filmmakers
Director: Roni Jo Draper, PhD (Yurok, she/they) is a professor in the Department of Teacher Education in the David O. McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University where she teaches courses in multicultural education, women’s studies, and literacy. Dr. Draper began her work as a scholar investigating disciplinary literacies and seeking to uncover the texts and literacies needed to participate and learn in disciplinary settings such as mathematics, science, and the arts. Her work has appeared in various journals for researchers and teachers including the Harvard Educational Review, the American Educational Research Journal, the Journal of Teacher Education, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and the Mathematics Teacher. Currently, her research interest has focused on the challenge to prepare teachers to create classrooms that allow our most minoritized children to thrive. She is a former high school mathematics teacher and is proud of her work serving students at risk of not completing high school. In her recent work, she has turned to Indigenous storytelling to share stories that center the lives of Indigenous peoples. She has produced the film Scenes from the Glittering World, about the lives of three Navajo young people attending a remote high school on the Navajo Nation. Draper is also the writer, producer, and director of the documentary Fire Tender, which centers on the lives of Yurok fire practitioners.
Co-director: Marissa Lila (she/they) is a Thai-American documentarian who grew up in Hong Kong and Thailand and is now based in Salt Lake City. As a multicultural filmmaker, she directs and produces projects with characters who cross boundaries set by dominant cultures or identities. Lila’s projects have been selected to play at international film festivals (DOC NYC, Camden, IFF, Big Sky Documentary FF, and MountainFilm). Two projects she produced, Transmormon and Oxygen to Fly, went viral with over 160 million total views. These projects were featured in The Huffington Post, New York Times, The Atlantic, People Magazine, and Dazed. Lila is co-founder of OHO Media, a creative content agency for which Lila creates documentaries and documentary-based branded content. Lila directed, produced, and wrote for the docu-reality television series The Generations Project, for which one of the episodes she produced won a Regional Emmy. Lila also spent six years creating educational content to increase equitable outcomes for students inclusive of race, ethnicity, language, cultural, sexual orientation, or ability.
Learn more about the film.

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.

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.

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.

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 on Population and Reproductive Health
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
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.

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