GCWS has featured the Feminisms Unbound series for more than five years. This series is extremely popular with students, faculty, and the greater Boston feminist academic and activist communities. Feminisms Unbound, organized by GCWS affiliated faculty, features debates which focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. The goal of Feminisms Unbound is to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments. Feminisms Unbound is curated by a team of three faculty members who represent a number of institutions and disciplines.
The Neoliberal University and Academic Feminism
September 17, 2020 at 6:30-8:30PM
More Info, Register Here.
This panel takes its inspiration from our insistent critique of the academic corporation in which we find ourselves working today. Increasingly, our new colleagues are temporary and underpaid hires, who are nevertheless often expected to give service beyond teaching. Our senior administrators, compensated at the same levels as the corporate structure, are hired as much for their fundraising abilities as for their academic inclinations or interests. Juggling multiple jobs, our students are enmeshed in an aggregation of precarity that is not only financial: their protests of the institution’s raced, gendered, sexed and classed inequities, for instance, are repurposed into website photographs designed to advertise the institution’s openness to critique. Particularly as women, as queer, as trans, and as first-generation, the discomfort with an institution that is hostile to them is transformed into a burden to reform the institution. Does our activism and theorizing alleviate or intensify these inequities? How is the genealogy of such processes, which we often hear ourselves take for granted as deeply unethical, connected to the humanist values we espouse and teach?Speakers include:
Speakers include:
- Eng-Beng Lim, Associate Professor of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dartmouth College
- Iyko Day, Associate Professor of English and Critical Social Thought, Mount Holyoke College
- Jigna Desai, Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies, University of Minnesota
Moderated by Faith Smith, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English, Brandeis University
