Center for the Study of Women

Native Healing and Justice from California to Hawai'i: A Public Dialogue
2017-01-30 12:00 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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.

Specters of the Past: M. NourbeSe Philip Reading "Zong! As Told to the Author by Sataey Adumu Boateng"
2016-11-15 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet and writer and lawyer who was born in Tobago and lives in Toronto. She has published novels, essays, and poetry, and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry and a Rebels for a Cause award from the Elizabeth Fry Society of Toronto. Zong! is NourbeSe Philip’s most recent book of poetry. This extended poetry cycle is based on a legal decision, at the end of the eighteenth century, related to the murder of Africans on board a slave ship.
In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

Aurora Levins Morales, "Justice is Our Medicine: Ecology, Disability and Health"
2016-11-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Cypress Room, Faculty Center
Aurora Levins Morales describes herself as “a writer, an artist, a historian, a teacher and a mentor. I’m also an activist, a healer, a revolutionary. I tell stories with medicinal powers. Herbalists who collect wild plants to make medicine call it wildcrafting. I wildcraft the details of the world, of history, of people’s lives, and concentrate them through art in order to shift consciousness, to change how we think about ourselves, each other and the world. ”
She is the author of numerous books and essays, including a chapter in the foundational volume This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and, most recently Kindling: New Writings on the Body and Cosecha and Other Stories (co-authored with her mother, Rosario Morales).
In response to chronic illness and disability, Morales designed the Vehicle for Change, an ecological, sustainable, non-toxic home, built inside a 32 foot aluminum gooseneck trailer. She says: “My traveling studio home is more than transportation and shelter. It also embodies possibility and innovation. It’s a manifestation of hope, a solid, three-dimensional expression of what I write about. As I move around the country and beyond, the fact of this vehicle, and the need for it, will underline and expand my words, to help me talk about what we’re facing as a planet, and how to face it.”
Join us for a talk by Aurora Levins Morales, with discussion led by Robin Kelley.
This talk is part of “In the Interests of Justice: Bringing Theory into Practice.” Each of the six speakers in this series is engaged in producing vital knowledge about the relationships between health, social inequity, race, gender, and power. Featured scholars will share their recent or ongoing work, and comment on the implications for changing and improving practice, in the fields of law, healthcare, or social services, in order to meet the needs of populations facing complex social, health, or disabling challenges. This series is a collaboration between Rapair, a Los-Angeles based health and disability justice organization, The UCLA American Indian Studies Center, the UCLA Program in Disability Studies, and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Funding and support are provided by NetCE.

Ruha Benjamin: "The Emperor's New Genes: Science, Race, Justice, and the Allure of Objectivity
2016-10-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
In this talk, Ruha Benjamin discusses advances in genomic science and explores questions of racial difference, scientific objectivity, medical trustworthiness, and social justice. Drawing upon developments in Mexico, South Africa, India, and the United States, she illustrates how political and scientific claims are connected in the day to day struggle of groups demanding rights and redress. Finally, she argues for a shift in focus away from individuals’ “trust” in biomedical research to the relative “trustworthiness” of institutions, as a starting point for developing science for the public good.
This talk is part of “In the Interests of Justice: Bringing Theory into Practice.” Each of the six speakers in this series is engaged in producing vital knowledge about the relationships between health, social inequity, race, gender, and power. Featured scholars will share their recent or ongoing work, and comment on the implications for changing and improving practice, in the fields of law, healthcare, or social services, in order to meet the needs of populations facing complex social, health, or disabling challenges. This series is a collaboration between Repair, a Los-Angeles based health and disability justice organization, The UCLA American Indian Studies Center, the UCLA Program in Disability Studies, and the The UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Funding and support are provided by NetCE.

Andrea C. Gore, "Environmental Endocrine Disruption of Reproduction, the Brain, and Behavior"
2016-10-27 12:00 - 13:00 | Community Health Sciences 43-105, UCLA, Los Angeles
The chemical revolution that began during World War II transformed our world. While our lives are undoubtedly improved in many ways, we now know that a subset of chemicals, called environmental endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), have detrimental effects on the health of humans and wildlife. EDCs include some pesticides, industrial chemicals, and components of plastics and food contact containers, and we come into contact with EDCs every day. Higher body burdens of EDCs in humans are associated with greater risk for endocrine and neurological disorders. Andrea Gore’s laboratory is using a rat model of low-dose EDC exposure, and ascertaining the consequences on neuroendocrine and reproductive functions and behaviors. They have discovered that prenatal EDCs “reprogram” genes and proteins in the developing neuroendocrine system, and that these molecular and cellular changes are associated with an impaired neurobehavioral phenotype. Importantly, the effects of EDCs are manifested very differently in males and females, a result that is consistent with sex differences in hormone actions in the nervous system. Current EDC research is beginning to identify vulnerable neuroendocrine targets, with the potential for future therapeutic interventions.

Dr. Andrea Gore is Professor and Vacek Chair in Pharmacology at UT-Austin. Her NIH- funded research projects are investigating how environmental endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) perturb the developing brain, and effects of estrogen on the aging brain as a model for menopause in women. Dr. Gore has published 4 books and 140 scientific papers. She is Chair of UT-Austin’s Faculty Council, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Endocrine Society’s flagship basic science journal, Endocrinology. Dr. Gore was lead author of the Society’s two Scientific Statements on EDCs, and organized and chaired the Gordon Research Conference on EDCs in 2012. In 2016, she was a recipient of the Endocrine Society’s Outstanding Public Service Award.
Andrea Gore and David Crews: Living in a Contaminated World

Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster
2016-10-26 12:30 - 15:00 | Ackerman Grand Ballroom, UCLA, Los Angeles
Part of Dishing: A Lecture Series on Food, Feminism, and the Way We Eat. Video now available on YouTube!

A talk by Rachel Vaughn, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies

Join us after the talk for the Fighting Hunger Fair — your chance to meet UCLA and community groups and researchers working to eliminate hunger and waste.
Rachel Vaughn holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Kansas. From 2011- 2012, she was a Fellow in Gender Studies at Oklahoma State University; and was then Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her research engages the intersections of food politics, food sovereignty, and feminist environmental theory. By way of her oral history research with scavengers, foragers, and dumpster divers of varying food security levels and socio-economic backgrounds, she explores how the space of the dumpster and the act of diving work as alternative forms of cultural knowledge about food. Her work asks how the labels ‘real,’ or by default ‘un-real’, ‘edible’ or ‘inedible’ effect people of varying food (in)securities within the current food systems we consume. Vaughn is the author of a book in progress Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food In/Security from the Margins of a Dumpster (under review with University of Nebraska Press).
RSVP HERE!
Co-sponsored by UCLA Division of Social Sciences, UCLA Healthy Campus Initiative, UCLA Department of History, and UCLA Food Studies Graduate Certificate Program

Black Feminist Vision: A Symposium on Possibility and Practice
2016-10-20 16:00 - 2016-10-21 17:30 | Kerckhoff Hall Grand Salon, UCLA, Los Angeles
A two-day symposium on Thursday, October 20 and Friday, October 21 presented by the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California. Featuring some of the most important established and rising stars working in the field of Black feminism, this symposium is centrally organized around questions of feminism and race.
Please register HERE for each day you plan to attend.
Day 1: Thursday, October 20, 2016, 4pm
Opening Keynote: Barbara Ransby
Barbara Ransby, Professor of African American Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Struggle: A Radical Democratic Vision and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. Keynote Introduction by Dayo F. Gore, Associate Professor of Critical Gender Studies & Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego.

Day 2: Friday, October 21, 2016, 10am-4pm
Conversations on Black Feminist Vision
Kimberly Juanita Brown, English, Mount Holyoke College
Simone Browne, Sociology/African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas-Austin
Marcia Chatelain, History, Georgetown University
Erica Edwards, English, UC Riverside
Tanisha Ford, Black American Studies and History, University of Delaware
Kara Keeling, Cinematic Studies/American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California
C. Riley Snorton, Africana Studies, Cornell University
Ula Taylor, African American Studies, UC Berkeley
Lisa Ze Winters, English/African American Studies, Wayne State University
Day 2: Friday, October 21, 2016, 4pm
Closing Keynote: Katherine McKittrick
Katherine McKittrick is Associate Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at Queens University and author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle. She is editor of Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis and co-editor (with Clyde Woods) of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Keynote Introduction by Arlene Keizer, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and African American Studies, UC Irvine.
REGISTER ONLINE!

Fear: UCLA French and Francophone Studies 2016 Graduate Conference
2016-10-20 08:00 - 2016-10-21 17:00 | 306 and 314 Royce Hall, UCLA
Discourses of fear dominate our contemporary moment. In this so-called “Age of Terrorism,” fear knows no borders, spreads quickly, and provokes the fearful to react in unpredictable ways. Politicians lash out and make shows of strength; citizens march en masse while immigrant families take flight; journalists proclaim “même pas peur!” while young people turn to newer forms of media to express their disillusionment and reshape pervasive stereotypes. At the same time, the causes—or perceived causes—of fear can be as varied as these reactions. Though opinion polls might define fear in terms of “terrorism,” “immigration,” or “globalization,” these kinds of categories often obfuscate and conflate more than they clarify.
In the face of repressive regimes from Indochina to Vichy France, from Haiti to Cameroon, dissidents could face severe, or even lethal, punishment. How does the fear of denunciation give rise to coded writings that criticize and subvert the status quo? In and beyond these contexts, how does fear cloud reason or induce clarity? Can it also have positive, not simply negative, effects? When is fear “natural” and when is it not? Who plays a role in shaping these perceptions? How and by whom is it incited and manipulated, diverted and channeled, coped with, suppressed and overcome? To what end? The 21st Annual Graduate Student Conference of the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, seeks to explore the reverberations of fear in French and Francophone literatures, languages, arts, cultures, and histories across time periods and disciplines. We understand fear to include empirical and conceptual engagements with the notions of terror, horror, panic, and phobia. We are interested in how these may be connected to creative endeavor, literary and artistic movements, political and economic gain, and aesthetic and cultural transformations. Our aim is to address concerns of importance to scholars in literature, history, film and media studies, art history, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and philosophy.
Keynote speaker: Tracy D. Sharpling-Whiting, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of Humanities (African American Diaspora Studies and French), Vanderbilt University
Sharpley-Whiting has published 14 scholarly books; her most recent, Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris Between the Two World Wars and The Autobiography of Ada “Bricktop” Smith, or Miss Baker Regrets (SUNY Press, February 2015), consists of two-parts, a nonfiction multi-life history followed by a noirmystery. The book was an American Library in Paris Book Award Long List selection and a Choice 2015 Outstanding Academic Title. She is currently at-work on a scholarly volume, A Quartet in Four French Movements: A Voodoo Queen, A French Romantic, a Poet, and an African Ethnologist, as well as a family history. She is on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (2014-2018) and is the editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.

The Poetics of Fragility: a Film Screening and Discussion with Lata Mani
2016-10-19 18:30 - 21:00 | Charles E Young Research Library Conference Room
A film screening and conversation.
Lata Mani is a feminist historian, cultural critic, contemplative writer and filmmaker. She has published on a broad range of issues, from feminism and colonialism, to illness, spiritual philosophy and contemporary politics. She is most recently the author of The Integral Nature of Things: Critical Reflections on the Present (2013).
Nicolás Grandi is a Buenos Aires based filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist and educator. He has taught film direction and the history of world cinema at the Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires, and in the Film Department at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore.
The Poetics of Fragility explores the texture, vitality and aesthetics of fragility. It interweaves stories of bodily frailty with optical vignettes of nature’s delicacy to reclaim fragility as intrinsic to existence, not something to be bemoaned or overcome.
Shot in the San Francisco Bay Area in September 2015, the film features internationally renowned scholar-activist Angela Davis, the acclaimed playwright and critic Cherrie Moraga, Nora Cortiñas, the inspiring founding member of Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora, actor-dancer Greg Manalo, feminist performance artists Thao P. Nguyen and Martha Rynberg, theater scholar Jisha Menon, healer Christopher Miles, creative writer Xochitl M. Perales and the young trombone talent, Jasim Perales.
The Poetics of Fragility is conceived as a “videocontemplation;” a form that Nicolás Grandi and Lata Mani have been developing to explore how the audiovisual medium with its sensuous possibilities can become a tool for social inquiry with a philosophical impulse. The visually arresting and formally plural film unfolds through stories that build on and amplify each other. Moments of emotional intensity alternate with speculative calm, dramatic narration with poetry and critical inquiry into prevailing understandings of fragility.

Christina Sharpe, "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being"
2016-10-13 16:00 - 18:00 | Humanities 193, UCLA
Christina Sharpe is Associate Professor of English at Tufts University and the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subject. Her research interests are in black visual culture, black diaspora studies, and feminist epistemologies, with a particular emphasis on black female subjectivity and black women artists.
This talk will draw from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the “orthography of the wake.” Activating multiple registers of “wake”—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of “the wake,” “the ship,” “the hold,” and “the weather,” Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and “wake work” as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

Women's Reproductive Health and the Environment
2016-06-21 08:00 - 14:00 | The California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda Sreet, Los Angeles, CA, 90012, United States
Advocacy Through Education
Women’s Reproductive Health and the Environment: Best Practices for Los Angeles County
A free symposium that will bring together health professionals, community activists, researchers, academicians, civic and business leaders, politicians, and government officials to learn about best practices related to research, policy, and community advocacy.
Plenary Session
Update on the Hidden Reproductive Health Hazards of Environmental Toxins
Symposium Topics

What’s New in Policy for 2016?
Grassroots Advocacy: Community-Based Preconception Program: Planning for a Healthy Home, Body, and Baby
Applying Research into Action: Using Data to Investigate Health Effects of Environmental Toxins

Chinyere Oparah
2016-05-25 13:30 - 15:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
Birth Matters: Research Justice and Black Life
African American women are 3 to 4 times as likely as white women to die of childbirth related causes, our infants are twice as likely not to survive their first year. “Birthing while black” is a site of struggle, which for too many leads to disabling, trauma or even death. Birth matters in conversations about black life and death, yet the reproductive autonomy of black women and trans/gender nonconforming pregnant and birthing individuals has only recently gained recognition with the #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName movements. Research justice is a strategic framework within which those directly affected by structural violence and discrimination use research tools in order to achieve self determination and lasting social change. Using a research justice approach, Oparah worked alongside members of Oakland-based collective Black Women Birthing Justice to document black women’s experiences of childbirth, and to publish an anthology of critical essays and activist and personal testimonies on black bodies and birth justice. In this talk, she explores the role of activist scholars in the movement to #LiberateBlackBirth.
Chinyere Oparah is an activist scholar, social justice educator and experienced community organizer, who is dedicated to producing critical scholarship in the service of progressive social movements. Oparah is an African diaspora specialist, whose interests span a number of different social concerns, including activism by women of color, violence against women, women and the prison-industrial complex, restorative justice, queer and transgender liberation, race and adoption, research justice and birth activism. Her work is informed by personal experiences of crossing racial, gendered and national boundaries as a biracial, transracial/ transnational adoptee, survivor of intimate violence and queer parent with ties to Britain, Nigeria and the U.S.
Oparah is Associate Provost and professor and department chair of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She played a leading role in the establishment of Mills’ Queer Studies Program and sits on the Advisory Committee for that program. She recently led the College’s Gender Expression and Identity initiative, leading to the production of an important report on improving the experiences of transgender and gender-fluid students at Mills.
Oparah was awarded the Rockefeller Fellowship in Sex, Race and Globalization in 2002, and held the prestigious Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Diversity at the University of Toronto from 2004-6. Educated at Cambridge University and Warwick University, she has graduate degrees in Sociology and Ethnic Studies. In addition, Oparah trained in community development. Prior to entering academia, she coordinated a black women’s center in the UK, and was executive director of a national development agency for non-profits serving communities of color.
Oparah is author of Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organizations and the Politics of Organization, the only comprehensive history of the black women’s movement on Britain. She is editor of Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex, a seminal work that mapped the connections between globalization, gender and mass incarceration. She is also co-editor of 3 books: Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism and Social Change, Color of Violence: the Incite! Anthology. and Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption.
She is working with the grassroots community organization Black Women Birthing Justice on a participatory action research project about black women’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, and editing an anthology on black women in the birth justice movement. In her spare time she practices mindfulness meditation and vinyasa yoga, sings along to gospel music, hangs out with toddlers and is learning horse-riding. Oparah has Nigerian (Igbo) and British origins, and immigrated to the US in 1995. She lives in East Oakland with her partner and daughter.
Each of the six speakers in this series, “In the Interests of Justice: Bringing Theory into Practice,” is engaged in producing vital knowledge about the relationships between health. social inequity. race. gender. and power. Featured scholars will share their recent or ongoing work. and comment on the implications for changing and improving practice. in the fields of law. healthcare. or social services. in order to meet the needs of populations facing complex social. health. or disabling challenges. This series is a collaboration between Repair, a Los-Angeles based health and disability justice organization and the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, the UCLA Program in Disability Studies. and the UCLA Department of Gender Studies. Funding and support are provided by NetCE.
Organized by: UCLA Department of Gender Studies
Cosponsored by: UCLA Center for the Study of Women, UCLA Program in Disability Studies, and UCLA American Indian Studies Center

Racialized State Violence in Global Perspective
2016-05-25 - 2016-05-26 | Royce 306 & 314 and Harry and Yvonne Lenart Auditorium of the Fowler Museum
RSVP! eventsrsvp.ucla.edu/RacializedViolence
Conference schedule now available! Download here or view online!
Questions? Email: rsv@csw.ucla.edu

The conference brings together scholars who work on racialized police violence in North America with others who work in Brazil, Central America, the UK, the Caribbean, and elsewhere to consider questions of pressing global importance including economic inequality, state power, racism and indigeneity, legacies of imperialism and colonialism, and gendered violence. Featuring intellectuals in the social sciences, humanities, and arts, the symposium not only analyzes racialized state violence but also engages possibilities for justice.

“Living With Certain Uncertainty: Violence, Exile, and Black Life”
KEYNOTE by EDWIDGE DANTICAT

May 25, 6 pm, Lenart Auditorium, Fowler Museum
The extraordinary novelist and public intellectual Edwidge Danticat (left) will deliver the conference’s keynote lecture on Wednesday evening May 25th, with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, associate professor, Department of History, UCLA, as respondent. Danticat is an award-winning author of short stories and novels that often engage with the history of her native Haiti. She also writes about the immigrant experience—what she calls “dyaspora”—and the reality of life in Haiti today. Her works include Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); Krik? Krak! (1996); Claire of the Sea Light (2013); Mama’s Nightingale (2015); and Untwine (2015). She wrote and narrated the film Girl Rising (Haiti) in 2013. In 2007, she received a National Book Award nomination for Brother, I’m Dying. She was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for Claire of the Sea Light in 2014.
PANELS and ROUNDTABLE: May 26, 9 am to 5:30. Royce 314
On Thursday, May 26th, we will hold two panels of speakers and a lunch scholar-activist roundtable on policing in Los Angeles.

SPEAKERS
Melina Abdullah, Professor and Chair, Pan-African Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, is a womanist scholar-activist – recognizing that the role that she plays in the academy is intrinsically linked to broader struggles for the liberation of oppressed people. Her research interests include activism and movement building and Critical Race Theory. Abdullah was appointed to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission in 2014 and is a member of the California State University Chancellor’s Taskforce for the Advancement of Ethnic Studies. She is currently writing a book manuscript that examines Hip Hop and political mobilization.
Mohan Ambikaipaker, Assistant Professor, Communications, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, is a social anthropologist and cultural studies scholar who studies the dynamics of multiracial societies. His research aims to examine the shifting configurations of racism and racial structures that go beyond bipolar frameworks of analysis. He is the co-author (with Robert Berkeley and Omar Khan) of What’s New about New Immigrants in 21st Century Britain? (Runnymede Trust/Joseph Rowntree, 2006).
Aisha Beliso-de Jesus, Associate Professor, African American Religions, Harvard Divinity School, is a cultural and social anthropologist. She has conducted ethnographic research with Santería practitioners in Cuba and the United States since 2003. Her book, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (Columbia University Press, 2015) details the transnational experience of Santería, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and actively reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Her current research, “Policing African Diaspora Religions,” draws on ethnographic research with police and religious practitioners in the United States exploring questions of race, religion, and policing.
Maurice Magaña, Lecturer, Chicano/a Studies, UCLA, researches youth activism and social movements in Mexico and the United States. He received his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Oregon in 2013 and was the Institute of American Cultures Visiting Researcher in Chicano Studies in 2013-14. His dissertation, Youth in Movement: the Cultural Politics of Autonomous Youth Activism in Southern Mexico, was named as one of the “50 Best Dissertations in Cultural Anthropology of 2013”.
Ana Muñiz, Criminology, Law, and Society, UC Irvine, does research on gang injunctions, social control, state violence and surveillance, militarization, and race. She is the author of Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries (Rutgers University Press, 2015) which examines how the LAPD, city prosecutors, and business owners struggled to control who should be considered “dangerous” and how they should be policed in Los Angeles.
Laurence Ralph, Associate Professor, African & African American Studies and Anthropology, Harvard University, researches how the historical circumstances of police abuse, mass incarceration, and the drug trade naturalize disease, disability, and premature death for urban residents, who are often seen as expendable. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Audra Simpson, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Columbia University, is energized by the problem of recognition, by its passage beyond (and below) the aegis of the state into the grounded field of political self-designation, self-description, and subjectivity. Her work is motivated by the struggle of Kahnawake Mohawks to find the proper way to afford political recognition to each other, their struggle to do this, and the challenges of formulating membership against a history of colonial impositions. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014) and co-editor with Andrea Smith of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014).
Christen Smith, Assistant Professor, Anthropology; African & African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin, does research in the areas of performance, race, gender, violence and the black body in the Americas with a particular emphasis on transnational black liberation struggles and racial formation. Her book, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016) explores the visual and performatic economies of the Black body in pain as an ironic transfer point for the production of Brazil’s racial state.
Shannon Speed is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of American Indian Studies and Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico, and her research and teaching interests include indigenous politics, legal anthropology, human rights, neoliberalism, gender and feminist theory, indigenous migration, and activist research. She has published five books and edited volumes, including Rights in Rebellion: Human Rights and Indigenous Struggle in Chiapas, Human Rights in the Maya Region: Global Politics, Moral Engagements, and Cultural Contentions, and Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas. She serves on the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and as co-chair of the Otros Saberes/Other Knowledges section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and on the editorial board of AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. In 2013, she was awarded the Chickasaw Nation’s Dynamic Woman of the Year, and in 2014 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the State Bar of Texas Indian Law Section.

Rinaldo Walcott, is Professor and Director of the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. As an interdisciplinary scholar Rinaldo has published on music, literature, film and theater and policy among other topics. All of Rinaldo’s research is founded in a philosophical orientation that is concerned with the ways in which coloniality shapes human relations across social and cultural time. Rinaldo is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003); he is also the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac, 2000); and the Co-editor with Roy Moodley of Counseling Across and Beyond Cultures: Exploring the Work of Clemment Vontress in Clinical Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2010). In all of Rinaldo’s research and publication he focuses on Black cultural politics; histories of colonialism in the Americas, multiculturalism, citizenship, and diaspora; gender and sexuality; and social, cultural and public policy

RESPONDENTS
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Associate Professor, Department of History, UCLA, does research on twentieth-century U.S. history with a concentration on race, migration, and police and prison systems in the American West and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her book, MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010) is the first book to tell the story of how and why the U.S. Border Patrol concentrates its resources upon policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration despite the many possible targets and strategies of U.S. migration control. Her current research explores the social world of incarceration in Los Angeles between 1876 and 1965.
Saree Makdisi, Professor, Department of English, UCLA, does research at the crossroads of several different fields, including British Romanticism, imperial culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism, and the cultures of urban modernity, particularly the revision and contestation of charged urban spaces, including London, Beirut and Jerusalem. His recent books include Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (WW Norton, 2008; revised and updated, with a new foreword by Alice Walker, 2010) and Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Sarah Haley, Assistant Professor, Gender Studies, UCLA, does research on African American history, critical prison studies, social movements and labor studies. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies from 2010-2011. She is author of the book No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
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Organized by Hannah Appel, Jessica Cattelino, Norma Mendoza-Denton, and Jemima Pierre
Cosponsored by Alessandro Duranti, Dean, UCLA Division of Social Sciences; David Schaberg, Dean, UCLA Division of Humanities; UCLA Center for the Study of Women; Institute on Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs; Robin D.G. Kelley, Distinguished Professor of History & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History; Eric Avila, Associate Dean, UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion; UCLA African Studies Center; UCLA American Indian Studies Center; Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA; UCLA Department of Gender Studies; Disability Studies at UCLA; UCLA International Institute; and UCLA Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies.
Photo credits: Black Lives Matter march, Minneapolis, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 31, 2015, Fibonacci Blue, https://www.flickr.com/photos/fibonacciblue/; Photo of E. Dandicat courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Black Feminism, The Carceral State, and Abolition
2016-05-19 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 314
A Book Talk by Sarah Haley with responses by Mariame Kaba and Dayo Gore
Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity illuminates black women’s experiences of imprisonment in the South to uncover how gendered regimes of incarceration were crucial to the making of Jim Crow modernity. No Mercy Here examines the brutalization of imprisoned women in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also situating them within the black radical tradition by illuminating practices of resistance, refusal, and sabotage that challenged ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy, offering alternative conceptions of social and political life and envisioning a world beyond prisons.
Sarah Haley is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies.
Mariame Kaba is a public scholar and organizer, and the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a long-term vision of ending youth incarceration.
Dayo F. Gore is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and the founder and co-director of the Black Studies Project (BSP@UCSD). She is the author of Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War.
Cosponsored by Center for the Study of Women

Ungrid-able Ecologies: Cultivating the Arts of Attention in a 10,000 Year-Old Happening
2016-05-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
In “Ungrid-able Ecologies,” Natasha Myers will explore what can a queer, feminist, decolonized ecology can reveal about the relationships that develop between species.
Ecology is not just an object of study. It is also a mode of attention to worldly relations. Where the sciences of ecology have traditionally been grounded in teleological, militarized and economizing logics, and bound to heteronormative reproductive imperatives, this talk insists that ecology could be otherwise. It describes my efforts to cultivate a queer, feminist, decolonized ecology within an ancient oak savannah in Toronto’s High Park, a site 10,000 years in-the-making. For millennia these lands were shaped by Aboriginal peoples who used fire to keep the woodlands open for hunting and farming. Today, it is a site of massive ecological restoration efforts in the midst of a bustling city. The aim is to bring back the oak savannah through the use of controlled burns, and the planting of native grasses and wildflowers. But today the oldest oaks are falling and the next generation is just 15 years old.
Kinesthetic images by Ayelen Liberona with Natasha Myers
What modes of attention can help us learn how to pay attention to this remarkable naturalcultural happening which is both in-the-making and coming undone? Working at the cusp of anthropology, art, and ecology, this project interrogates the self-evidence of approaches to conservation ecology and environmental monitoring by throwing open the very question of what it means to pay attention. It proposes an “ungrid-able ecology” to disrupt conventional ecology’s normative, moralizing, and economizing discourses. This ecological practice reconfigures the naturalist’s notebook by innovating techniques for tuning in to the “affective ecologies” and the “involutionary momentum” that propel plants, insects, animals, and people to get involved in one another’s lives (see Hustak and Myers 2012). Through an ongoing collaboration with filmmaker and dancer Ayelen Liberona, this research-creation project experiments with sensory practices that can document the growth, decay, combustion and decomposition that are essential to the life of this remarkable land. In the process, we explore new forms of collaboration to cultivate plant/people relations that are fit for earthly survival.

Natasha Myers is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, the convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, a member of Sensorium, and on the editorial board of Catalyst. She works alongside Michelle Murphy as co-organizer of Toronto’s Technoscience Salon, and is co-founder of the Write2Know Project with Max Liboiron. Her ethnographic research examines forms of life in the contemporary arts, sciences and ecologies. Her book, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. In her new work, she is experimenting with ways to document the affective ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and among plants and their remarkably multi-species affinities.
Support provided by Estrin Family Lecture Series Fund
Cosponsored by the Institute for Society and Genetics
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/natasha-myers-tickets-23195678900

Racializing Normative Markets: Whiteness, Masculinity, and the "Efficiency" of Networks
2016-05-12 12:00 - 13:30 | Haines 352
A talk by Karen Ho, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.
While critical scholarship has made important contributions to the understandings of markets and difference, many of these approaches have focused on how dominant markets have actively depended upon, as well as excluded groups based on, hierarchies of raced, gendered, classed, sexualized, and national differences. That we better understand how capitalism depended on enslavement, how US real estate markets segregated and excluded African Americans, and how productive labor cannot be jettisoned from reproductive labor are due to this crucial research. However, we need to go further. Even as dominant, capitalist markets are depicted as exclusionary and exploitative of differences, they themselves are often held stable, and not directly analyzed as composed of particular bodies, assumptions, actions, and values. This presentation, inspired by critical race theory, cultural histories of risk and the construction of the risk-bearing individual, as well as ethnographic accounts of financial markets, examines both the underbelly of what makes financial markets possible as well as the whiteness and classed masculinity of financial markets themselves. I will explore how the very underpinnings of what makes markets and market exchange possible are arrangements of exchangeability, commensurability, and liquidity made possible, in part, through the instruments and assumptions of racial fraternity and exclusion.
Karen Ho is the author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press, 2009). Her research areas include cultural studies of finance capital; finance, globalization, and capitalism; ethnography; feminist studies; political economy; and comparative race and ethnicity.
Organized by UCLA Anthropology – Culture, Power, and Social Change. Cosponsored by the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women
Culture, Power, and Social Change is open to students, faculty, and invited guests only. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, email Hannah Appel at happel@ucla.edu.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
2016-04-27 16:30 - 17:00 | Humanities Room 135
Jeanne Theoharis is the biographer of Civil Rights organizer, Rosa Parks. She will be speaking about her landmark, paradigm-shifting biography, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, which won the NAACP Image Award for outstanding biography and the Leticia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Theoharis contributes invaluable insight into Parks’s significance to the gendered history of social movements, and Civil Rights specifically, revealing how misconceptions regarding Parks’s politics and legacy shape understandings of the movement writ large. In contesting Parks’s image as a quiet seamstress known only for a single political act, and instead excavating her long and radical political career, Theoharis illuminates the role of ideas about gender in shaping ideas about radicalism, social movement participation, and popular representation.
Cosponsored by Robin Kelley, Gary B. Nash Chair in History, and Center for the Study of Women

How Societies and States Count
2016-04-21 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 306
Censuses in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom
A Discussion with the authors of Antecedents of Censuses From Medieval to Nation States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 1) and Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States: How Societies and States Count (Volume 2), Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Featuring Rebecca Jean Emigh, UCLA, Sociology; Dylan Riley, UC Berkeley, Sociology; and Patricia Ahmed, South Dakota State, Sociology.
These two volumes are a comprehensive survey of censuses (and before censuses, census-like information gathering) starting in the early medieval period to the present in England/UK, the US, and Italy. They develop a new theory of information gathering to explain the social and state forces that shape how and when information gathering is undertaken. Central to this process of information gathering is classification, that is, how people are put into socially relevant groups, such as men and women, and how social and demographic characteristics are attached to these groups. For most of history, until very recently, much more information was collected about men than about women, as early censuses were generally collected to assess resources and distribute political benefits, which were more often attached to men, not to women. However, as the purpose of censuses shifted towards collecting population information, which then became construed socially as knowledge, information collection about men and women became more symmetrical. The books trace this shift from resource collection to knowledge collection over time and region, and thus, contribute to understanding how our knowledge of women and men shifted over time and place.
Organized by: UCLA Department of Sociology
Cosponsored by: UCLA CAPPP, UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies, and UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Climate Change: a Department-Wide Conversation About the Shared Impact of Gender Inequity and Discrimination
2016-04-14 12:30 - 14:00
Women in History, a group which seeks to foster discussion about the unique challenges faced by women in academia, invites you to its Spring 2016 Roundtable on April 14th from 12:30-2pm in the History Department Conference Room (Bunche 6265).
A co-ed panel of faculty guests, including Soraya de Chadarevian, Toby Higbie, Eric Avila, and Ghislaine Lydon will address the theme of the event:”Climate Change,” a department-wide conversation about the shared impact of gender inequity and discrimination and strategies for changing the culture of the UCLA History Department and the academy at large. This event, geared toward both men and women in UCLA History, aims to explore the ways in which inequities affect everyone, and it hopes to encourage all colleagues, regardless of gender, to work together to affect change.

Masen Davis
2016-04-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Royce 314
The Movement of Our Time: Transgender Equality at the Crossroads
A talk by the 2015-2016 Regents’ Lecturer
Mason Davis, Executive Director, Transgender Law Center
Masen Davis has more than two decades of leadership and activism in the LGBT movement. Under his direction, TLC’s impact litigation secured groundbreaking federal protections in 2012 against employment discrimination for transgender and gender non-conforming people under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From securing $1M in public funds for transgender employment programs, to sweeping changes to California law under the 2011 Gender Nondiscrimination Act, to unprecedented healthcare access initiatives for transgender people within the state – Masen’s leadership has had a tremendous and positive impact on countless constituents. Masen works tirelessly as a preeminent voice in local, state, and national forums, and is increasingly identified as an international leader in the trans equality movement.
He received his B.A. from Northwestern University, M.S.W. from UCLA, and completed the Program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Cosponsored by: Center for the Study of Women and Williams Institute

Urgent Issues Forum/Foro Urgente: The Assassination of Berta Cáceres and the Future of Indigenous and Afrodescendant Environmental and Land Rights in Honduras
2016-04-08 09:00 - 14:00 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
On March 2, 2016, award-winning Lenca environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated in her home in Honduras. She had received multiple threats from military and paramilitary groups linked to the mining and dams interests that she opposed. Gustavo Castro, a Mexican activist who was in Berta’s home and was injured in the attack, is now being held illegally in Honduras and there are international concerns that he is being framed for the attack. This urgent forum explores the issues of resource extraction and state violence and their impact on the future of indigenous and environmental rights activism in Honduras.
Participants include:

Olivia Cáceres (Lenca)
Activist and daughter of Berta Cáceres
Rony Castillo (Garifuna)
PhD student UT Austin, Advisor on Education Issues OFRANEH, President of the Garifuna Education Council and Co-founder of the Garifuna Intercultural University
Suyapa Portillo
Pitzer College
Chris Loperena
University of San Francisco
Joseph Berra
UCLA Law School

Hosted by the UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Co-sponsored by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, UCLA Center of Study for Women, UCLA Chicano Research Studies Center, UCLA Institute of American Cultures, and Grassroots International.

Françoise Girard
2016-04-07 16:00 - 18:00 | UCLA Law School, Room 1457
Sex in the time of Zika: Reproductive Rights and Women’s Health in a World in Turmoil
A public lecture in honor of International Women’s Day
Françoise Girard is a longtime advocate and expert on women’s health, human rights, sexuality, and HIV and AIDS. Prior to becoming President of the IWHC, she served as Director of the Public Health Program at Open Society Foundations, where she was also a Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe and Haiti. From 1999 to 2003, she was Senior Program Officer for International Policy at IWHC, and thereafter a consultant for IWHC, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and DAWN, a network of women’s rights ac-tivists from the global South. She has played a key role in advocacy on reproductive health and women’s rights with UN agencies and at UN Conferences, and was the Chair of the Leadership Programme Com-mittee of the 2010 International AIDS Conference. Françoise Girard serves on the Civil Society External Advisory Panel of the UN Popula-tion Fund, and on the Advisory Committee of the Health and Human Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.
RSVP: Sanderson@international.ucla.edu
Cosponsored by: International Institute, Center for World Health, Luskin School of Public Affairs, Iris Cantor/UCLA Women’s Health Center, International and Comparative Law Program/School of Law, and UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Thinking Gender 2016
2016-04-07 11:30 - 2016-04-08 18:00 | Grand Horizon Ballroom, Covel Commons, UCLA
VIDEOS NOW ONLINE!
Thinking Gender is a public conference highlighting graduate student research on women, sexuality and gender across all disciplines and historical periods. This year’s theme is “Spatial Awareness, Representation, and Gendered Spaces.”
PRELIMINARY PROGRAM! Download now! Or view on online!
REGISTRATION INFORMATION
General Registration (FREE) includes access to the keynote speech, paper and film panels, and poster session: https://uclacsw.submittable.com/submit/54090
Prime Registration ($20) provides access to conference workshops, networking lunch, and keynote cocktail reception. You will also receive a souvenir mug. [Prime Registration is now closed. If you are still interested in Prime Registration, check in at the “General/Prime Registration” tables at the Conference. Availability is first-come, first-serve.]
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Our keynote speaker is Aili Mari Tripp. Her address is titled “Unexpected Consequences: Women and Power in Postconflict Africa” and is based on her recently published book, which looks at gender-related consequences of the decline of major conflict in 17 countries in Africa over the past 20 years. It explains why postconflict countries in Africa have significantly higher rates of women’s political representation compared with countries that have not undergone major conflict. It also looks at why these countries tend to have been more open to passing legislation and making constitutional changes relating to women’s rights. It shows how and why the postconflict countries have adopted a distinct trajectory compared with non-postconflict countries, recognizing that from the point of view of activists, this trajectory is still too slow and fraught. The talk is based on comparative research across Africa as well as fieldwork in Uganda, Liberia, and Angola.
Aili Mari Tripp is a professor of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Center for Women’s Empowerment at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. She is conducting research on women and legal reform in North Africa. Her past research has focused on women and politics in Africa, women’s movements in Africa, transnational feminism, African politics (with particular reference to Uganda and Tanzania), and on the informal economy in Africa. For more information: https://ailitripp.wordpress.com
PROGRAM

Click here for the full program — including panelists and paper titles!
Thursday, April 7, 2016
11:30 am to 1 pm
Registration
1 to 1:30 pm
POSTER PRESENTATIONS
1:30 to 3 pm
WELCOME by Jessica Cattelino, CSW Associate Director
SCREENINGS
For the first time, Thinking Gender will feature film, video, and mixed-media shorts followed by a moderated discussion.
3 to 3:30 pm
POSTER PRESENTATIONS, continued
3:45 to 4:45 pm
KEYNOTE: UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES: WOMEN AND POWER IN POSTCONFLICT AFRICA
featuring Aili Mari Tripp, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Copies of Professor Tripp’s new book, Women and Power in Postconflict Africa, will be available for sale.
5 to 7 pm RECEPTION
5:30 pm AWARDS PRESENTATION by Rachel C. Lee, CSW Director
Friday, April 8, 2016
8 to 8:45 am
Registration
9 am to 6 pm
SESSIONS will take place from 9 am to 12:15 pm and from 2:45 to 6 pm
12:20 to 1:20 pm
Networking lunch
1:30 to 2:30 pm
WORKSHOPS
Intersection of Gender, Justice, and the Environment, featuring Martha Dina Argüello, Executive Director, Physicians for Social Responsibility – Los Angeles
At this workshop, participants will learn techniques to reduce their contact with harmful toxins and about issues of reproductive justice and environmental racism.
Mindfulness…Self Care and Beyond, featuring Giselle Jones, MSW, CMF (trained at UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior)
This workshop will explore the applications of mindfulness from stress reduction to increasing sensuality and relational awareness.
COSPONSORED BY: Graduate Division, Division of Social Sciences, International Institute, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Office, Center for European and Russian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, Department of Political Science, Department of History, African Studies Center, Department of Musicology, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of Asian American Studies, and Department of African American Studies.
THINKING GENDER COORDINATOR
Amanda Domingues is a second-year MA student in the Department of African Studies. Her current academic focus is on twentieth-century social and political movements of women in East Africa. More specifically she is examining the effectiveness of constitutional gender quotas as a means to increase both descriptive and substantive representation for women. She is also interested in measuring women’s ability to direct public goods and policies towards women’s issues (both at the national and local level). In her free time Amanda enjoys German-style board games, eating delicious food, and spending time outdoors.
LOCATION AND PARKING INFORMATION
Parking spots for conference attendees are held in Structure 7, located just southeast of the conference location. Passes are $12.00 each (CASH AND EXACT CHANGE ONLY) and are valid for all-day use. Attendants will be selling passes at the lot from 1:30-3:30pm on Thursday and 7:30-9:30am on Friday. We highly advise that you arrive during these time slots (also conveniently during registration times); if you arrive outside of these time slots, you need to find a pay-by-space in the visitor parking area (see below) or go to the parking kiosk in Structure 4 (adjacent to Structure 7 and closes at 12pm on Friday). Please allow a few minutes to walk west to Covel Commons after parking.
For guests with disabilities:

Please proceed to the Sunset Village (SV) Lot. Attendants will be selling passes at the lot between 11am and 2pm on Thursday and between 7:30 and 9:30am on Friday. If you arrive outside of this time, please enter the Sunset Village visitor parking area and purchase a daily (discounted rate) pass from the pay-by-space kiosk. The fee is $5 for those with any state-issued handicapped plate or placard.
Unreserved “Pay-by-Space” Visitor Parking Areas
If you arrive outside of the reserved parking times, you can find parking at a self-service station. The closest and recommended lots are Sunset Village (SV, right beside the conference location) and Recreation Center (RC, just north of Covel). All-day passes are $12.00 each (cards or exact change accepted) and hourly passes range in amount. Please be aware that spaces are limited and allow yourself time to walk to the event if you do not park at the SV lot.
See http://www.transportation.ucla.edu/portal/pdf/paystationmap.pdf for all locations.
For additional info or questions, please contact UCLA Transportation: 310-825-3169
For info about Thinking Gender, you can email: thinking gender@csw.ucla.edu
Call for Submissions
Submission Guidelines
Panel Cover Sheet
Description of this year’s themes

Lee Ann S. Wang
2016-04-05 12:00 - 14:00 | Rolfe 2125
Asian American Feminisms and the Re-writing of the Legal Voice: Immigration Law, Criminal Enforcement, and “Cooperation”
A talk by the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley
This talk will discuss the U Visa, a new form of legal protection designed to rescue undocumented immigrants from gender and sexual violence – but only if they willingly agree to cooperate with the police state. She argues that the visa’s requirement for “cooperation” binds any future for Asian immigrant women to the criminality of blackness and the whiteness of universal innocence. Visas such as these have been overlooked within contemporary immigration and policing debates that largely focus on moments when the law fails as evidence of racial violence. Instead, this talk takes the law’s proclaimed successful protection over legal innocence as the very site from which the violent constitution of legal personhood unfolds. Drawing from ethnographic interpretations of legal advocates who assist Asian immigrant women with visa applications, she interrogates the law’s evidentiary relationship between lived experience, humanness, and “voice” that make legible the legal subject of the crime victim. The 2001 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) created the U Visa alongside a host of other immigrant provisions that were not originally included in the first iteration of VAWA in the early 1990s when it passes as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. I argue that the U Visa’s requirement for legal cooperation is a form of coercion that cannot be fully understood outside its elemental arrangement within criminalization and security regimes. This talk is part of her manuscript, “Of Law’s Protection and Punishment: Gender Violence, Asian Immigrant Woman, and the Enforced Safety of the Security State,” a legal ethnography of Asian American citizenship and the making of legal personhood at the intersections of immigration law, criminal enforcement, and American humanitarianism.
RSVP: http://leeannwang-aasc.eventbrite.com
Organized by: Asian American Studies Center
Cosponsored by: Department of Gender Studies; Department of Asian American Studies; Center for the Study of Women; School of Law; and UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship

‘If You Should Lose Me’ The Archive, the Critic, the Record Shop and the Blues Woman
2016-03-10 15:30 - 17:30 | Charles E. Young Research Library, Presentation Room
This talk examines the problem of iconic blues women who’ve been “lost” to history, Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, as well as the critics who’ve loved and chased after them. By placing the politics of queer archival studies and black performance theory in conversation with canonical blues historiographies, the talk will explore the aesthetics and cultural resonances of Wiley and Thomas’s rare recordings. It aims as well to trace a black feminist counter-history of record collecting and listening publics in order to tell a different story of blues lives that mattered.
Daphne A. Brooks is a professor in the departments of African American Studies and Theatre Studies at Yale. She earned her Ph.D. in English at UCLA. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). She has authored numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture such as “Sister, Can You Line It Out?: Zora Neale Hurston & the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood” in Amerikastudien/American Studies, “‘Puzzling the Intervals’: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play” in Callaloo and “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Surrogation & Black Female Soul Singing in the Age of Catastrophe” in Meridians. Brooks is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010) and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011), each of which has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing. She is the editor of The Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007) and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series, eds. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer (New York: Pro-Quest Information & Learning, 2006).

Organized by: UCLA Department of Musicology and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women
This event is part of CSW’s Feminism + The Senses Speaker Series and CSW’s Gender Research and Equity Committee initiative, with support from the Office of Interdisciplinary & Cross Campus Affairs.
This event is also the Department of Musicology’s 14th Annual Robert Stevenson Lecture.
Cosponsored by: Charles E. Young Research Library; Robin Kelley, Gary B. Nash Chair in History; the Department of Theater; and the Department of African American Studies.
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/daphne-brooks-tickets-21037556899

Own Your Voice: Assertive Communication and Negotiation
2016-03-07 13:00 - 17:30 | CNSI Auditorium
Advancing Women in Science and Engineering presents Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up and award-winning women’s development coach, for a two-part interactive workshop on Monday, March 7th from 1 to 5:30pm at the CNSI Auditorium. “Own Your Voice” helps participants cultivate a leadership identity, navigate fear and uncertainty, and practice strategies for assertive communication and negotiation.

These two sessions are open to both male and female graduate students, postdocs and faculty members in all disciplines across campus. Each attendee has the option of choosing one or both workshops to fit with his or her busy schedule. There will also be a networking coffee hour between sessions with a LinkedIn photo booth and drop-in career counseling, complements of the UCLA’s Career Center, Grad Division, gradSWE, and Graduate Programs in Biosciences.
Please help advertise this event by distributing the attached flier to the CSW listserve. By promoting soft skill development workshops, we aim to break down existing gender barriers across UCLA and beyond.
RSVP: ownyourvoiceucla.eventbrite.com

Sponsored by UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, Center for the Study of Women, Graduate Programs in the Biosciences, Graduate Division Society of Women Engineers, and Biotech Connection Los Angeles.
