September 4:    Organizational Meeting (lunch provided – please RSVP to Lyndi)

September 11:  Craig Anne Heflinger – Community Research and Action

                        “Examining Disparities in Health Care”

In this presentation, I will address questions such as: What are “disparities” and how do these link with issues of social justice? How do disparities get examined and documented in order to promote system change and improved health care? I will also consider issues regarding policy, research and advocacy.

September 18:  Lyndi Hewitt – Sociology

                        “Feminist Activism and the World Social Forum: Is it Worth the Effort?”

Feminist scholars and activists have written extensively on men’s domination of the World Social Forum, women’s disappointments in working to change it, and more recently their success in influencing the forum.  Discussed far less often is the Forum’s role within women’s and feminist movements.  Instead of asking whether or not the Forum is “feminist-friendly,” or documenting women’s efforts to change it, I take up a different but related set of questions.  I consider whether the social forum is in fact a productive space for feminist activism.  Do activists come away from the forum with tangible results?  Putting aside for a moment the goal of infusing global justice movements and the Forum with a feminist perspective, what are the benefits to feminists’ continued participation in the forum?  In short, is it worth the effort?  This paper represents an attempt to draw out insights relevant to these questions, while simultaneously articulating and practicing a self-reflective, feminist methodology.  Ultimately, I argue that there are reasons to be both skeptical of and optimistic about the Forum’s utility for advancing the agendas of feminists working transnationally.  Additionally, I raise ethical concerns and offer suggestions for scholars whose goals include conducting research on, with, and for social justice activists working within the World Social Forum.

September 25:  Bonnie Dow – Communication Studies

                        “Second-Wave Feminism Makes the News: The 1970 Ladies Home Journal Sit-In”

In March of 1970 more than 100 members of the women's liberation movement staged a sit-in at the New York headquarters of the LADIES HOME JOURNAL, in an effort to dramatize the magazine's demeaning treatment of American women. The event attracted significant media attention, leading to the first national network news coverage of a feminist protest. Analysis of the news coverage of the LHJ action reveals the beginnings of what would become a pronounced pattern in media framing of the second wave of feminism: the marginalization of radical feminist critique of sexual/gender politics in favor of an emphasis on the liberal/equal opportunity implications of feminist protest.

October 2:        Jill Robinson – Community Research and Action

                        “Perceptions of Human Trafficking:  Blaming the Victim and Feminism”

Human trafficking is a pernicious and salient international problem.  The discussant traveled to Moldova (a former Soviet republic) in the summer of 2004 to interview residents in and around the capital city, Chisinau, to gain a better sense of their perceptions of people who are trafficked.  Although academic research is growing in the field of human trafficking, little attention has been paid to public perceptions of the issue.  One approach to the analysis of informant interviews was how an understanding of macrolevel issues affects one’s perceptions of human trafficking.  Results indicated that informants who identified the role of structural level issues were less likely to blame the victim of human trafficking.  The discussant will also describe her experience presenting at an anti-trafficking conference in Washington, DC during which there was resounding criticism against feminist scholars and practitioners who approach trafficking as a gender issue.

October 9:        Laura Taylor – Graduate Department of Religion

                        “La Frontera: Boundaries, Identities and Differences in Theological Thought”

This essay raises questions regarding the construction of identity and the (dis)place(ment) of difference in mainstream theological scholarship.  Drawing on feminist theory and theology, postcolonial studies, and the writings of Mexican American women living on La Frontera (the borderlands between the United States and Mexico), I illustrate the ways in which recent Western-European theologies have reified a monolithic understanding of Christian identity, ignoring or intentionally violating the postmodern imperative that univocal and essentialist claims to identity are ultimately unjust to the complexity of human subjectivity. Comparing these discourses with the current immigration debates dividing the United States, I argue that monocultural, monolinguistic, and monolithic conceptions of identity—whether referring to the nation state or one’s religion—suppresses the ambiguous or interstitial spaces in which the interrelated identity categories of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, history, and language are continually at play. Recognizing that all identity categories are necessarily heterogeneous and unstable, I explore what the spaces in-between might mean for theological understandings of identity and difference. 

October 16:       Ellen Armour – Graduate Department of Religion

                        “Planetary Sightings? Negotiating Sexual Differences in Globalization's Shadow”

I consider the contemporary controversy over homosexuality as symptomatic of certain dynamics of colonialism and globalization. I focus on the specific case of the Anglican church, where the recent consecration of an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire has brought to a head the possibility of a schism in the global church. Bringing resources from queer theory and postcolonial theory allows us to see problems and possibilities in this situation.

October 23:       Fall Break

October 30:       Susan Saegert – Community Research and Action (Visiting Professor)

                        “Go There: An American Pragmatist Confronts the Post Modern City”

This talk will present the rationale and preliminary plan for a book on the application of pragmatist concepts to postmodern urban scholarship. First the argument will be made that pragmatism offers particularly useful ways out of dilemmas faced by post modern scholars who are concerned with changing urban life with the goals of a more equal distribution of material, social and personal resources, and more inclusive, democratic  communities.  Though particular pragmatists differ, the body of pragmatist thought from the beginning has rejected many of the dualisms that have been undercut by post modern scholarship such as mind/body, individual/society, the knower and the known.  James, Dewey and Peirce laid out a program for empirical but not positivist ways of knowing the world with explicit expectations that this knowledge would be rooted in human interests, oriented toward action, limited, provisional, inherently subject and constantly open to revision. I will draw on the work of current feminist and black pragmatists to introduce ideas of positionality, power differences, and the continuing need for ways of knowing that offer the possibility of ameliorative change.  Pragmatism presents itself as a method of knowing and this book will take up that path by developing a pragmatist account of the potential of action research.  To this end, the book addresses the following: A pragmatist understanding of selves as embodied, changing knowers of a material, historically constituted, and changing world; Uncertainty as an irreducible aspect of knowledge and action; the mutability of desires and concepts of what is good and just and the limitations of variability; the significance of direct experience for valid, actionable knowledge and satisfactory, effective, and just action; understanding the nature of democratic inclusive communities; how research can contribute to valid, actionable knowledge, satisfactory, effective and just action and  more democratic and inclusive communities.

November 6:     Brooke Ackerly – Political Science

                        “Justifying Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference”

What justifies a theory of universal human rights in a world of difference? How can post-modern, post-colonial, critical race, feminist, and critical theoretical perspectives be brought to bear on a universal theory? In what sense could such a theory be understood to be “universal”? Is it possible to theorize about universal human rights in a way that respects diversity, engages with dissent, and deconstructs while at the same time attempts to exercise epistemological authority sufficient for condemning and more importantly acting against human rights violations? Yes.

November 13:   Laura Carpenter – Sociology

                        “The Politics of Male and Female “Circumcision”: Why Is Only One a Social Problem in the U.S.?”

Many individuals and social groups have expressed concern with two forms of childhood genital surgery – male circumcision (MC) and female genital cutting (FGC) – yet, in the U.S., only FGC is widely considered to be problematic.  What factors contribute to these different outcomes? Scholars have shown that “private troubles” come to be recognized as “problems” warranting public concern and policy solutions in part through the actions and interactions of grassroots activists, state actors, and other stakeholders, like medical associations.  News media professionals also play a critical – but poorly understood – role, through their decisions about which issues to cover and in what ways. To explicate these processes, I compare the controversies over MC and FGC in the U.S., drawing on activist and medical association materials, newspaper accounts, legislative records, and scientific research.  More specifically, I ask: (1) Who are the stakeholders in the debates, with whom are they allied, and how effective are their efforts to frame the issues in particular ways?  (2) How are state actors involved (if at all) and what is their relationship to other stakeholders?  (3) How do the news media present the issues, stakeholders, and frames?  (4) What factors in the broader social/historical context have influenced the construction of these “problems”?  My analysis centers on factors related to gender, sexuality, feminism, and globalization.

November 27:   Barbara McClure – Graduate Department of Religion

“Women, Professional Work and Globalization: Pastoral Theology in the Midst of Disruption”

Globalization is a multivalent dynamic, notable for its variable consequences.  The benefits to the haves and the costs for the have-nots have been well documented. Caught in the middle are those immigrants who migrate to fill professional positions.  Beneficiaries of what the United States has to offer, these dislocated knowledge workers nonetheless pay an often heavy psychic and spiritual cost.  This essay explores this dimension of globalization: transnational migration of professional labor and its effects on immigrant women working in North America. Using a case study of a Vietnamese immigrant woman working in the financial services industry, the essay seeks to illuminate the often hidden disruptions—both cultural and personal—that can be part of the experience of this new, mobile class of professional settlers.  The goal is to deepen our understanding of this aspect of globalization and to better equip pastoral caregivers to minister to those new North Americans who may find themselves in distress.

December 4:     Brandi Brimmer – History

“All Her Rights and Privileges: African-American Women and the Politics of Civil War Widows’ Pensions”

In 1866, the Military Pension Bureau recognized the sacrifice of formerly enslaved African-American Union soldiers by creating policies that extended financial support to their families.  Retroactively recognizing slave marriages, viewed by the federal government as merely honoring its obligation to male soldiers and their dependent families, opened up a new arena for newly freed African-American women to claim and define new rights for themselves.  Expressing their own concepts of marriage, family, and morality in their petitions, these women challenged the Bureau’s definition of widowhood and the meaning of marriage itself in pension law.  This study is about newly freed African-American Civil War widows and their negotiations with the United States Military Pension Bureau during the late nineteenth century. Although southern black women were far removed from the seats of national and even state government, their experiences alter our view of women’s—especially poor women’s—relationship to the federal government.  These women built a direct relationship to the federal government through the issue of social provision.  That dynamic is interesting because social provision is usually treated as a contemporary issue in both academic scholarship and popular discourse.  Yet, the petitions of newly freed African-American Civil War widows indicate that women’s involvement with the federal government over state-sponsored aid has a long history.  Like women in the twentieth and twenty first centuries, poor women in the post-Civil War era were articulating their own vision of women’s relationship to the state—a relationship in which economic resources were a key component of citizenship.  African-American widow’s negotiations with Bureau officials make evident the extent to which marriage and sexual morality intersected with their struggle to maintain their rights to federal aid.  By drawing attention to debates over federal aid at the local level, this research illuminates how formerly enslaved African-American women, with the help of local professionals, and Bureau representatives entered the public debate over federal aid during the late nineteenth century.