News from the Centre

The first major event of this term for the Institute is the public lecture by Colm Toibin on February 11, co-sponsored with the Department of English. I have just finished reading Toibin’s most recent novel Brooklyn. The central character is a young woman, Eilis, who emigrates from Ireland, leaving her family, to live and work in Brooklyn. The book is about (among other things) the way in which gender often determines our possibilities for work, for family life, for sexuality. But it is not didactic, and this seems to me to make it even more valuable. As we read about Eilis, we see the constraints that gender imposes as they enmesh with other aspects of a life – what it is like to feel homesick, how difficult it can be to understand other people in a new place. We see gender as part of a life, in short, and not as an abstract idea.

We are delighted to be hosting Toibin’s lecture, as well as the symposium on the History of Sexuality (organized by members of the Historical Perspectives research axis) planned for March 4-5 with senior scholars Joan Cadden and Valerie Traub, and emerging scholars Sebastien Matzner and Ara Osterweil. Upcoming events also include talks in the seminar series by our visiting scholars Naima Benlarabi, Heidi Epstein, and Caroline Bassett as well as a seminar on teaching challenges by Heidi Epstein. For updated information on all of these, see our web-site www.mcgill.ca/igsf

We look forward to seeing you – and please keep bringing us your ideas, and alerting your graduate students and new colleagues to the research axes and their activities.

2. Events from Last Term

(a) “Feminist Visual Methodologies for Social Action” workshop, September 25, 2009, Thomson House, McGill University
(b) Making Contact: A Symposium on Affect, Sexuality and Power, October 29, 2009, Faculty Club, McGill

(a) Séminaire sur les méthodologies visuelles féministes et action sociale ou How Feminism Might Change Methods

Par Myriam Gervais, IGSF

L’Institut Genre, sexualité et féminisme en collaboration avec Myriam Gervais et Claudia Mitchell, membres de son axe de recherche Équité et Justice, ont organisé le 25 septembre dernier un séminaire d’une journée dans le but de se pencher sur les méthodologies visuelles participatives dans le cadre de la recherche féministe. À titre de co-organisatrice, Myriam Gervais a inscrit les préoccupations de ce séminaire sur la contribution féministe aux méthodologies participatives dans le contexte du programme de recherche qu’elle dirige sur les questions de genre et de pauvreté rurale au Rwanda.

Un des buts poursuivis par ce programme est de mettre en lumière la manière dont les méthodologies visuelles participatives peuvent générer des données et des éléments d’interprétation essentiels à la compréhension des inégalités de genre et informer, de ce fait, les politiques et stratégies de réduction de la pauvreté en Afrique.

Taking in the photovoice exhibit How We See This Place: An Intergenerational Dialogue about Conservation around Tiwai Island, Sierra Leone (Jennifer Thomson, McGill University) at the “Feminist Visual Methodologies for Social Action” workshop

Participants engaged in discussion at the “Feminist Visual Methodologies for Social Action” workshop

The product of one table’s brainstorming at the participatory session of the workshop

Brinton Lykes, Associate Director, Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Boston College facilitates a morning workshop on the study and use of visual methodologies in participatory feminist research

As Guest Speaker, Brinton Lykes (Boston University) invited the participants to compile a list of violations of the rights of girls and women, as a way of reflecting on rights. Lykes described her research projects in Chile, Guatemala and the post-Katrina U.S., where she has built partnerships to re-think disasters, and how she situates her projects within the histories of particular places. She argued that participants involved in the research should be allowed to be part of analysis and that we must recognize and value diverse ways of knowing.

A panel discussion followed, with researchers who demonstrated the significance of feminist visual methodologies in their own work. The presentation of the three panelists offered a vibrant portrait of visual researcher’s challenges and highlights as well the importance of the contribution made by the intuitive work of the research participants. Based on a comprehensive treatment of visual data, their respective work made a compelling case for the validity and accountability of qualitative inquiry for feminist research approaches. Hourig Attarian (Concordia), Ran Tao (McGill), Sarah Flicker (York) all offered panel presentations, and Susann Allnut (McGill) acted as discussant. 

Les méthodologies visuelles utilisées dans les approches participatives féministes en cherchant à comprendre et à permettre aux jeunes filles et aux femmes de s’exprimer sur leurs besoins et intérêts stratégiques, leurs valeurs et leurs solutions s’inscrivent d’emblée dans une démarche politique. As an illustration of the potential for visual participatory methodologies to lead to social action, a documentary film was the closing event of this one-day workshop. Where the Water Meets the Sky, supported by international non-profit organization, the Campaign for Female Education (CAMFED), documents a participatory filmmaking project that provides women in a remote region of northern Zambia with the tools to share their own stories and perspectives. Their film, I’ve Found My Way, has been shown to over 3,000 people across the region.

(b) Making Contact: A Symposium on Affect, Sexuality and Power, October 29, 2009, Faculty Club, McGill

The McGill Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and Media@McGill, a research hub in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, jointly sponsored a symposium on affect, sexuality and power. Audience members at the Faculty Club were deeply engaged in discussions following presentations by: Wendy H.K. Chun, Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, Lisa Henderson, Associate Professor of Communication, U-Mass Amherst and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University.

Oct 29, 2009: Wendy H.K. Chun, Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, delivers a talk as part of Making Contact: A Symposium on Affect, Sexuality and Power

Oct 29, 2009: Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University asks a question at Making Contact: A Symposium on Affect, Sexuality and Power

3.Visiting Scholars

The IGSF welcomes two new visiting scholars this term: Heidi Epstein and Caroline Bassett.

Heidi Epstein

Dr. Epstein is currently Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan where she teaches courses on Gender and God-Talk, Religion and Embodiment, Women and Western Religions, History of Christianity, Religion and Global Justice Movements, and Religion and Pop Music.

Her research interests stem from her interdisciplinary academic formation in musicology, feminist theory, and religious studies. Her book Melting the Venusberg: A Feminist Theology of Music (Continuum, 2004) exposes the veiled, gynophobic subtexts and sexist protocols for women making music that Christian rhetorics of musical transcendence throughout history have obfuscated. Enlisting interpretive lenses from the field of New Musicology, Melting the Venusberg proposes more holistic reconceptualisations of the musical sacred through attention to 1) the visceral bleed-through between human musicality and sexuality, and 2) case studies of women’s actual music-making practices from the Middle Ages to the present day—the latter a heretofore suppressed musico-theological resource.

While at the Institute, Dr. Epstein will explore other neglected “circulations of social energies” (Greenblatt) in contemporary musical settings of the Song of Solomon. In The Polyphonic Shulamite, she is putting the latest biblical scholars’ queer and feminist readings of the Song ‘in conversation’ with an even wider range of insights from New Musicologists. Her musicological and contextual readings of these works elucidate how they provide composers, performers and auditors with counter-cultural “sources of the self” (Taylor). This implicates the biblical figure of the Shulamite in new, paradoxically secular roles as a key sculptor of alternative identities in the 20th and 21st centuries. These musical treatments also render the text an allegory of the conflicts and contradictions plaguing postmodern romantic love as it is culturally constructed and mediated today.

Caroline Bassett

Caroline Bassett is based at Sussex University where she is the Reader in Digital Media and Director of the Centre for Material Digital Culture. She is an ex-journalist, now a scholar of new media and cultural theory, researching the intersections of culture, technology and society. Questions of sex, gender, and feminism have been a recurring theme in her writing.

Her early work as an academic was forged through a critical engagement with European cyber-feminism (e.g. Old Boys Network and Mute) and she produced work on gender performativity and virtuality. Later she wrote The Arc and the Machine, a monograph on narrative and digital media. This explored the digital space of appearance, considering forms of gendered publicity and privacy enabled or foreclosed in digital spaces. She has recently considered bio-political/digital intersections through work on the techno-feminist Shulamith Firestone.

The project she plans to work on at McGill concerns histories of hostility to computing and is partly archival and partly based on critical sociology and feminist theory. Specifically, she is exploring gendered antipathy/hostility towards the technological in relation to two sites: the 1950s leisure society debates and the later ‘Two Cultures’ discussion. More broadly she is drawing on the resources of feminism/feminist methodologies to open up technological hostility as a neglected aspect of the history of computing and culture. She hopes that excavating this history will also provoke consideration of how techno-feminism tends to prioritize particular ways of writing its own history - and in doing so is forgetful of others.

4. Report on the Women’s Studies Program

Julia Krane
Chair, Women’s Studies Program  

The Women's Studies programs at McGill University offer interdisciplinary approaches to critical issues centered on women, gender and/or feminism. Our programs, drawing core and complementary courses from 17 departments, provide students with opportunities to explore the meanings and intersections of such categories as gender, 'race', class, sexual orientation, age, ability, citizenship, and national identity for example, and to examine how such categories might inform and reproduce power relationships.   

Each academic year, Women’s Studies offers thought-provoking “topics” courses based on cutting edge theoretical debates of relevance to this dynamic and diverse field of study. During the fall of 2009, Women’s Studies has been fortunate to offer WMST 301 “Queer cultures: Gender systems and sexual meanings in a modern, global world” (Professor Engebretsen, Faculty Lecturer IGSF), WMST 302 “Anti-racism and activism in Canada” (Professor Lee, Doctoral Candidate, School of Social Work), and WMST 401 “Women and the State in India: Colonial and postcolonial perspectives” (Professor Narain, Faculty of Law and IGSF). During the winter of 2010, we are excited about WMST 302 “Transnational global feminisms” (Professor Abisaab, Department of History, Institute of Islamic Studies) and WMST 402 “Feminist theories of identity” (Professor Engebretsen, Faculty Lecturer IGSF).   

The Women’s Studies programs are overseen by an advisory committee comprised of undergraduate student representatives in Women’s Studies, graduate student representatives in the Graduate Option in Gender and Women’s Studies, and professors from the Faculties of Arts, Education, Engineering, Law, Medicine, and Religious Studies. We welcome the participation and input from faculty and students alike for generating insights and ideas to advance our programs. Please visit our website (http://www.mcgill.ca/igsf/programs/) or contact me (http://www.mcgill.ca/crcf/people/members/jkrane/) or any other member of the advisory committee.   

5. A Word from Elisabeth Engebretsen, Faculty Lecturer, Women’s Studies Program

Since arriving in Canada and at McGill in August, I have greatly enjoyed getting to know my colleagues, students, and the wider McGill community. It has also been an absolute pleasure to discuss issues related to feminism, gender and sexuality, from a Canadian perspective, with my students, and to find out about students’ interests, and gender and sexuality related activism at McGill and in Montreal. This winter I am teaching two courses for the IGSF, Feminist Theories of Identity (WMST 402), which will count both as a Women’s Studies course and as a complementary course towards a Minor Concentration in Sexual Diversity Studies, and Feminist Theory and Feminist Theory and Research (WMST 303), as well as a course on Modern Chinese Society and Change for the Anthropology department (ANTH 329).

I would like to share two exciting events that I am organizing this winter. First, I am organizing a panel at a student conference at Dawson College in March, with student presenters from the Queer Cultures class I taught this fall (WMST 301); they will present papers based on their excellent final essays. I was greatly and routinely impressed by the high quality of the work students submitted to me for this course, and this conference is an excellent opportunity for others than the lecturer to hear about it.

Second, starting in mid-January, we will show documentary films on a monthly basis, in the IGSF 2nd floor seminar room. Screening cutting-edge and award winning documentaries on sexuality and old age, queer China, and women bullfighters in Spain, respectively, we aim to provoke debate, promote community, and provide film fodder related to the work and agenda of the IGSF. Attendance is free; we provide popcorn. Please check the Institute web site for details and updates.  

6. Upcoming Events www.mcgill.ca/igsf/events

February 11, 2010, 3PM
Public Lecture: Colm Tóibín
Oscar Wilde in Prison
Prize-winning Irish writer and journalist
Leacock Building, Room 232
With the Department of English. Made possible by a grant from the Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee

* * *
  

March 4, 2010
Symposium on the History of Sexuality
Participants include:
Joan Cadden, Department of History, University of California Davis
Sebastian Matzner, Department of Classics, King’s College, London
Ara Osterweil, Department of English, McGill University
Valerie Traub, Departments of English and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan
Leacock Building, Room 232
With the Departments of History and English. Organized by members of the IGSF research axis, “Historical Perspectives”.

* * *

March 25, 2010 (date to be confirmed)
Seminar
Rethinking Power in World Politics: the empowering potential of media monitoring and gender-based advocacy networks. Reflections on the Global Media Monitoring Project
Claudia Padovani, Department of Historical and Political Studies, University of Padova, (Italy) and Media@McGill visiting research fellow
Arts building, Room W215
With the Department of Art History and Communication Studies

* * *

April 12, 2010
Seminar
Caroline L. Tait, Departments of Native Studies, and Women and Gender Studies, University of Saskatchewan With the Department of Anthropology

* * *

March 18, 2010, 3:30 PM
Seminar on teaching, open to students and junior faculty
The ‘Millennials’ Mystique: Notes from the Pedagogical Trenches
Visiting Scholar Dr. Heidi Epstein shares tips, stats, and mantras that helped her make the transition from teaching sessionally at McGill University—with its particularly diverse student demographics—to a full-time position in the relatively homogeneous setting of the University of Saskatchewan. Her reflections will include: 1) a profile of the so-called “Millennial” student; 2) useful guidelines and ideals from the pedagogical models of bell hooks, Ken Bain, and Parker Palmer; all of which allow responsiveness to students’ and administrators’ expectations, without the compromise of one’s unique pedagogical gifts and values
IGSF Seminar Room, 2nd floor 3487 Peel

* * *

Please check our web site regularly for details on upcoming seminars in this series including ones by:
Naima Benlarabi
Ibn Tofail University, Morocco and IGSF Muriel Gold Senior Visiting Scholar
Caroline Bassett
Department of Media and Film, University of Sussex and IGSF Visiting Scholar
Heidi Epstein
Department of Religion and Culture, University of Saskatchewan and IGSF Visiting Scholar
Robyn Ferrell
School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

Fall 2009 Newsletter

Message from the Director
A Word from Brian Lewis, Chair, Sexual Diversity Studies
New IGSF Appointments
(a) Vrinda Narain
(b) Elisabeth Engebretsen
News from the IGSF Research Axes
(a) Update from the Representation, Performance, Culture Research Axis
(b) Update from the Equity and Justice Research Axis
IGSF Visiting Scholar
Upcoming Events

1. Message from the Director of the IGSF

As many of you now know, our proposal to create the McGill Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies/ Institut Genre, sexualité et féminisme (IGSF) was approved by the Board of Governors last spring. The IGSF is now a fully functioning Institute, with many events planned for this academic year (see our Events Page for regular updates) and with responsibility for three teaching programs: Women's Studies, Sexual Diversity Studies and the Graduate Option in Gender and Women's Studies. Last week we held a reception to welcome in the new academic year, and I was glad to see the diversity of disciplines represented: faculty and students came from Law, Engineering, and Music as well as from a wide range of departments in Arts. The interest in interdisciplinary exchange was evident in the conversations around the room, which reflected the diversity of our research axes. Our new Institute is founded on this commitment to interdisciplinarity, and it is a collective venture. Please encourage your graduate students and new colleagues to join the research axes, and bring us your ideas for events and activities that we might support.

Marguerite Deslauriers
Director, IGSF

2. A Word from the Chair of Sexual Diversity Studies (SDS)

We are pleased that the SDS program, which began under the umbrella of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Faculty of Arts, has now moved to the IGSF. We asked the Chair of the program, Brian Lewis, for a brief account of SDS.

The Sexual Diversity Studies program ("SDS" or "Sex Div" for short) is just entering its fifth year at McGill. It grew out of an initiative by McGill's Queer Equity Subcommittee and is part of a burgeoning movement across North American campuses. We, its midwives, set out to bring together into a coherent program much of the exciting new work and teaching in the study of sexuality across many disciplines. And, in cajoling colleagues into adding new courses, we have roughly tripled the number of appropriate course offerings since we began.

Thirteen departments or programs across five faculties now provide courses, ranging from “Sex and the Single Building” in the School of Architecture, to “Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East” in the Department of History, to “Gender and Sexuality in Hinduism” in the Faculty of Religious Studies, to “Music and Queer Identity” in the Schulich School of Music. The program is vigorously eclectic, drawing on feminist studies, queer studies, LGBT studies and a rich variety of other theoretical and empirical perspectives. Our required introductory course, SDST-250, routinely reaches its cap of 150, and more than 50 students are currently enrolled in the Sex Div Minor. So the program is flourishing and, in due course, after more persuasion of yet more colleagues to add more courses, we hope to be able to expand into a Major.

We invite anyone who is interested in participating—or in offering a new course—to visit our website (www.mcgill.ca/sdst) or to contact me (brian.lewis@mcgill.ca) or any other member of the advisory committee.

Brian Lewis
Associate Professor, Department of History
Chair, SDS Advisory Committee

3. New IGSF Appointments

Vrinda Narain, Assistant Professor in the IGSF and Law

We are very pleased to announce the first tenure-track appointment to the IGSF. Vrinda Narain has been jointly appointed to the Faculty of Law and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. She is also a Research Associate in the Department of Afroasiatic Studies at the University of the Free State, South Africa. As a lawyer, she has practiced in the areas of family law, laws relating to women, constitutional law, corporate law and administrative law. She is the author of two books: Reclaiming the Nation: Muslim Women and the Law in India (University of Toronto Press, 2008) and Gender and Community: Muslim Women's Rights in India (University of Toronto Press, 2001). In Women’s Studies, Dr. Narain currently is teaching WMST Special Topics 1: Women and the State in India: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives.

Elisabeth Engebretsen, Faculty Lecturer in the IGSF

We would like to welcome Elisabeth L. Engebretsen the new Faculty Lecturer appointed to the Institute. A cultural anthropologist, she specializes in gender, sexuality, cultural citizenship, and new forms of kinship in the People’s Republic of China. Her work includes journal articles on methodological and theoretical reflections on queer ethnography, transnational sexuality studies and queer activism in China (2008), intimate aspirations and marital strategies in the lives of Beijing lesbians (2009), and a book chapter on anthropological research in urban China (forthcoming). Her current book project is provisionally titled, Different Women: The Intimate Politics of Sexuality, Kinship, and Nation in Postsocialist Beijing. She is teaching the WMST 200: Introduction to Women’s Studies, and WMST 301 Special Topics: Queer Cultures:

Gender Systems and Sexual Meanings in a Modern, Global World. Elisabeth is a member of the McGill Equity Subcommittee on Queer People.

4. News from the IGSF Research Axes

(a) Update from the Representation, Performance, Culture Research Axis

Members of the Institute’s Representation, Performance, Culture, are in the process of submitting an application for an ‘équipe en émergence’ grant from FQRSC . The team has formed over the last year and is led by Carrie Rentschler (Art History and Communication Studies). The team includes researchers from Communication Studies, English, German and Music with shared interests in the sexing and gendering of publics and counter-publics. The team emerged out of a workshop series on research-in-progress that began in the fall of 2008 and will continue this academic year 2009-10. If you are interested in participating in the workshops, please contact Natalie Amar who will fill you in on when and where they meet. Some members of this team are also organizing a symposium to be held on October 29-30, 2009 on the theme, “Making Contact: A Symposium on Affect, Sexuality and Power.”

Additional research teams are in the process of formation. We see this as an important step in raising the visibility of research in gender, sexuality and feminist studies. These teams will also function to create more collaborative research opportunities for faculty at McGill and in conjunction with colleagues at other universities in Quebec.

(b) Update from the Equity and Justice Research Axis

PERSPECTIVES DES FILLES ET DES FEMMES DU MILIEU RURAL
SUR LES STRATÉGIES DE RÉDUCTION DE LA PAUVRETÉ

THROUGH THE EYES OF RURAL GIRLS’ AND WOMEN’S
FOR ENGENDERING POVERTY REDUCTION STRATEGIES

Financé par le Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada, femSTEP est un projet de recherche qui vise à documenter les points de vue et les solutions proposées par les jeunes filles et les femmes du milieu rural au Rwanda en matière de lutte contre la pauvreté. Pour ce faire, le projet favorise une approche multidisciplinaire qui s’appuie sur une méthodologie visuelle participative pour analyser les enjeux de la pauvreté rurale sous l’angle des inégalités de genre vécues et expérimentées par les jeunes filles et les femmes au Rwanda. S’étalant sur trois ans, ce projet est mené par Myriam Gervais (IGSF), Claudia Mitchell (Faculté d’éducation) et Eliane Ubalijoro (ISID), en collaboration avec Euthalie Nyirabega (Université Nationale du Rwanda) et de Naydene DeLange (Université KwaZulu-Natal).

This group of researchers is organizing an event, “Feminist Visual Methodologies for Social Action / « Méthodologies visuelles féministes et action sociale » The panel discussion and film will take place on Friday, September 25, 2009.

Pour information: myriam.gervais@mcgill.ca

5. IGSF Visiting Scholar

We are pleased to welcome Naima Benlarabi, the Muriel Gold Senior Visiting Scholar, to the IGSF. Benlarabi’s work focuses on the impact of immigration on Moroccan women:

In the last four decades, the Maghreb, a developing region including Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, has experienced high levels of migration leading to large diaspora populations around the world. While research in the field of Maghrebian migration is thriving, research on the impact of immigration on women still is scarce, although most of those emigrating from developing countries in search of work are women. The aim of my research is to study the immigration of Maghrebian women in a North American context. After considering an overview of this immigration, its push and pull factors, its impacts on women, their families and environment, the study will attempt to draw a comparison of women’s immigration to North-America with that to Europe. Because migration recently has become a pervasive phenomenon in Morocco, my study will focus mostly on Moroccan women.

Prof. Naima Benlarabi
Ibn Tofail University, Morocco
Contact: nbenlarabi0506@yahoo.com

6. Upcoming Events

We look forward to a variety of IGSF events this fall. All events are free and open to the public, however we ask you to register with the IGSF Please go to our Events Page for a detailed list of our main events and our seminar series. A poster of our Upcoming Events is also available on our Events Page

___________________

Spring 2009

1. Message from the Director
2. Upcoming Events
3. Report on “Listening Bodies: Improvisation and Interdisciplinary Collaboration”
4. Women’s Studies Program
5. Visiting Scholar, Isabel Arredondo
6. Staffing News

1. Message from the Director

Marguerite Deslauriers

I hope this newsletter gives you a sense of the diversity of activities at the Centre as we develop into the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Perhaps most exciting in terms of our structure, the proposal for the new Institute has now been approved by the Academic Planning Committee (APC) of the university as well as McGill’s Senate. Should the proposal meet with the approval of the Board of Governors (at their meeting next week) the Institute will be created. We are happy not only to report this progress, but also to acknowledge the usefulness of the process – as the proposal makes its way through the various bodies representing different parts of the university, we learn more about the interests and perceptions of a variety of disciplines and people, and different ways in which the Institute might promote feminist studies, gender studies and sexual diversity studies.

APC recommended that we structure the research activities of the Institute around the research axes, without a distinct Research Centre, and we agreed that this will simplify and unify the structure. Meanwhile, the five axes are building momentum, and with the creation of the Institute in the spring will have even stronger institutional support.

The winter semester kicked off with seminars from our Visiting Scholars and others, and several work-in-progress presentations by members of the Representation, Performance, Culture Research Axis. As well, we held a very successful trilogy of workshops as part of the Health, Gender, and Sexuality series initiated by the Health and Wellness research axis. In February, we held a symposium on Improvisation and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (see details below) using Skype technology to connect our group with “live” scholars around the globe. Throughout the term, we have had the opportunity to meet with scholars from gender studies departments at universities as far away as Turkey and Israel. We welcome these international exchanges and look forward to the future Institute’s enhanced cooperation with academic centres and community groups, near and far. Finally, we are cooperating with Media@McGill and the History Department, respectively, on two public lectures, that of Sara Ahmed and Joan Scott. You can check for up-dates on these and other events on our web-site. Likewise, we hope you will feel free to drop by the Centre, or contact us by e-mail (or phone at 514.398.3911), and we look forward to seeing you at our events.

2. Upcoming Events

Friday, March 20, 6 pm

Public lecture organized by the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women in collaboration with Media@McGill

For more info please click on the image
"Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness"
Sara Ahmed
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London

McGill Faculty Club, 3450 McTavish Street

Open to the Public

_____

Thursday, March 26, 4 - 6pm

Public lecture made possible by a grant from the Beatty Memorial Lectures Committee and in cooperation with the History Department

Joan W. Scott

School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J

McGill University, Leacock Room 232
Open to the Public

Reserve these dates:

September 25, 2009

Symposium: “Feminist visual methodologies for social action”

A one-day workshop to explore how participatory visual methodologies have the potential to ‘put young girls and women in the picture,’ focusing on their direct involvement to map out the complexity of issues as they affect them. Starting off with a participatory session with Brinton Lykes of Boston University, and including a panel of visual participatory work at McGill, this workshop will close with a public screening of David Ebert’s new documentary "Where the Water Meets the Sky". This documentary focuses on working with girls in Zambia to produce their own visual images as a way to speak out about their lives.

October 29–30, 2009

Symposium: Feminists Rethinking Representation

The McGill Centre for Research and Teaching and Media@McGill, a research hub in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, are planning to jointly sponsor a symposium on feminism and the politics of representation. Invited speakers at the symposium will be asked to address two key areas of innovation in feminist theory and research around questions of representation:

1) The de-centralization of the identitarian subject---as authors, speakers and/or hearers---in recent feminist theorizing; and

2) New ways of thinking about issues of form and the dissemination, exchange and circulation of non-representational materialities, such as movement, affect and feeling, which are not strictly speaking "representational."

The latter refers to the increasing interest among humanities and science and technology scholars on the materialities of communication, work that is associated with German media theorists like Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Friedrich Kittler. Researchers interested in the materialities of communication shift the emphasis in scholarly investigation from the identification of meaning-making to that of the cultural work that form and infrastructure do in media and communication practices.

Participants will include:

Wendy H.K. Chun, Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University Suzanne Cusick, Associate Professor of Music, New York University Lisa Henderson. Associate Professor, Department of Communication, UMass Amherst Elizabeth Povinelli, Co-Director, Anthropology & Gender Studies, Center for the Study of Law & Culture, Columbia University

Please check our website in the coming months for further details on these, and other events.

3. Report on “Listening Bodies: Improvisation and Interdisciplinary Collaboration”

By: Ellen Waterman (ICASP researcher and IGSF visiting scholar)

Through the auspices of the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women , and the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research project (ICASP, based at the University of Guelph), researchers from both institutions came together for a two day set of meetings in Montreal, February 13 and 14, 2009. The ‘link’ was Ellen Waterman, an ICASP researcher who is one of the IGSF’s visiting scholars for 2008/09. Ellen organized the event with the considerable aid of staff from ICASP and IGSF.

ICASP is a SSHRC-MCRI project that aims to explore the social and cultural potential of improvisation. The project’s core hypothesis is that musical improvisation is a crucial model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action. The project is formed around seven research areas, and it was the Improvisation, Gender and the Body team who participated in this collaboration with the IGSF. The IGSF promotes interdisciplinary research in Women's Studies, and feminist research more generally, and is in the process of widening its scope as it becomes an Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies organized around a number of research axes. Indeed, the challenge of collaborating across disciplines, philosophies, artistic media, and subject positions is of central concern to both the IGSF and ICASP. It only seemed logical to centre our meetings on “listening” as a methodology for promoting understanding and inclusiveness rather than territorialism and authority.

Ellen Waterman (ICASP & IGSF Visiting Scholar), Cynthia Leive (McGill) , Lisa Barg (McGill), Sorouja Moll (Concordia) and David Brackett (McGill)

The first day featured a public symposium “Listening Bodies: Improvisation and Interdisciplinary Collaboration” in which 19 scholars, artists, and students made presentations. Held at McGill’s Schulich School of Music, the day attracted about 70 additional participants for an array of papers, panels, workshops, and open discussion. By making use of Skype internet video technology we were also able to include ‘remote’ presentations from Mills College, The University of Kansas, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Deep Listening Session, with Pauline Oliveros on the front screen via Skype

Highlights included: a listening workshop by renowned educator, composer and improviser Pauline Oliveros; an experimental improvisational ‘jam’ session over the internet between students from McGill Music and Mills College; panels and presentations on listening, embodiment, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration; and an open discussion hosted by Sherrie Tucker.

Following the public symposium, the eight members from ICASP’s Improvisation, Gender and the Body (IGB) research area held an intensive set of formal and informal meetings. Judging by responses both from symposium participants and the IGB, both sets of meetings were a huge success, and the combination of a public event and a focused small-group meeting worked very well. Pauline Oliveros, who had intended to be present in person but whose flight was cancelled due to bad weather, attended the entire two days via “Skype”. She wrote: “Congratulations on a wonderful conference! Thanks again for taking such good care of my virtual body.”

I want to thank ICASP and the IGSF for whole-heartedly supporting this event. In particular I want to express my appreciation for the expertise, boundless energy, and wonderful efficiency of the IGSF staff whose good work made the public symposium such a success.

Respectfully submitted, Ellen Waterman

4. Women’s Studies Program

Call for Applications

Margaret Gillett Graduate Research Awards

These awards are granted by the IGSF in honour of Dr. Margaret Gillett, Macdonald Professor of Education at McGill University (retired). Dr. Gillett initiated the Women's Studies program at McGill
Eligibility: Graduate students, in any McGill department, who are conducting research in Women's Studies leading to a degree are eligible to apply. Applicants may be, but are not required to be, enrolled in the Graduate Option in Gender and Women’s Studies
Deadline: Monday April 6, 2009

For further information: http://www.mcgill.ca/igsf/awards/grads/

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Call for Nominations

Shree Mulay Graduate Award in Gender and Women's Studies

Awarded by the IGSF to a graduate student who is enrolling in the Graduate Option in Gender and Women's Studies and exemplifies excellence in scholarship in gender and/or women's studies.

Value: One award of $5,000
Nomination Deadline: April 6, 2009

For further information: http://www.mcgill.ca/igsf/awards/grads/

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Follow up on workshop held in the fall: “Trans in the University Classroom: Issues of Pedagogical Strategy and Practice”.

Sabrina Hom, the faculty lecturer in Women’s Studies, is producing a document to follow up on the workshop held in the fall. This text will provide some recommendations for instructors seeking to make their classrooms safer spaces for trans students and for discussion of trans issues, as well as ideas for integrating trans studies into their course outlines.

5. Visiting Scholar, Isabel Arredondo

Dr. Arredondo is a visiting scholar from Plattsburgh State University, where she teaches Latin American literature and culture. Her field of interest is minority discourse, especially gender and ethnicity. She wrote her dissertation on the representation of the Mayas in the 1940's Guatemalan literature. This was later published as a book, De brujos y naguales: La Guatemala imaginaria de Miguel Angel Asturias.

As one of the IGSF’s visiting scholars for the term (she joins Ellen Waterman and Lisa Geunther) Isabel Arredondo is currently working on two projects. The first is a study of the representations of mothers in films made by Mexican women filmmakers during the late 1980s and early 1990s. She is especially interested in the ways in which these filmmakers question the shame society puts on mothers and their proposal of more positive ways to understand motherhood. Arredondo’s second project focuses on Juliet Barrett Rublee, who was one of the first, if not the first, person to make a film on location in Mexico in 1929.

Isabel can be reached by e-mail at: arredoi@plattsburgh.edu

6. Staffing News

Please see the farewell note below from Christine Archer, the former Administrative and Student Affairs Coordinator. The position currently is being filled by Caili Woodyard.

Dear Students, Friends and Colleagues, I have accepted a position outside of McGill and shortly will be leaving my position here at the MCRTW. Although I have enjoyed working at the Centre and with Women’s Studies Advisory Committee (WSAC) and its members, this new position offers me both professional challenges and financial compensation that are right for me at this point in my life. I will certainly miss all of my colleagues as well as the students and faculty that I have become so familiar with in this past year. Thank you for the opportunities and support you have provided me during my time at the MCRTW. Sincerely, Christine Archer

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Next: Teaching Programs

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McGill Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF) [Unit detail]
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Montreal, Quebec H3A 1W7
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Page last updated:
Feb. 2, 2010 at 10:54 AM

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