This two-day conference will explore the changing meanings of feminism and its intellectual, social, and political goals in a global context, examining how these meanings can be contained within the rubric of common social agendas. Can women within the post-industrial West effectively relate to, and remain engaged with, issues that arise from diverse locations and affect differently situated women in different ways? Is the subject of feminism women? How can the feminist "we" be de-centered or re-centered? And what emerging social movements within the United States and beyond are working to foster the collective interests of women across national, class, religious, and racial borders? The conference will feature a keynote address by Radhika Balakrishnan, Professor of Economics and International Studies at Marymount Manhattan College, and over a dozen other scholars, activists, and writers.

For more information about the conference, and a list of the many other panelists, please visit the Columbia Institute for Research on Women and Gender website or call 212.854.3277.

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There is currently widespread scientific endorsement of the idea that early hormones channel our fundamental interests in masculine or feminine directions. Even before the research leaves the pages of scientific journals, this idea is directly linked to career choices and chances, education, the division of labor in families, and the "drive" to be a leader versus a nurturer. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, for example, believes it explains the sex disparity among top scientists, suggesting that a "male-type" pattern of fundamental interest in inanimate objects makes one a "systemizer," while fundamental interest in people (the "female-type" pattern) makes one an "empathizer." For historically minded skeptics, it's hard to reconcile women's advancement over the past few decades with the idea that innate sex differences are the key force behind sex distribution in education, occupations, and the division of labor in families. But there are even stronger reasons to question this theory, based on a scientific evaluation of the studies themselves. In particular, how well do the sorts of interests that are studied in relation to prenatal hormone exposures actually connect to the kinds of differences they are meant to explain in occupations, education, and family life? Based on a systematic review of more than 300 studies linking early hormone exposures to sex-typed patterns of sexuality, cognition, and interests, Professor Young will explore what is actually known about the influence of hormones on so-called "masculine" or "feminine" interests.

Rebecca Young, Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Barnard, is a sociomedical scientist whose research includes social epidemiology studies of HIV/ AIDS, and evaluation of biological work on sex, gender and sexuality. Prior to joining the faculty at Barnard College, she was a Principal Investigator and Deputy Director of the Social Theory Core at the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research of the National Development and Research Institutes, Inc., and has been a Health Disparities Scholar sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. She teaches courses in critical science studies, sexuality, gender theory, and HIV/AIDS. Professor Young is currently preparing a manuscript titled "Sex, Hormones and Hardwiring: Re-thinking the Theory of Brain Organization."

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Women for Afghan Women (WAW), founded in April 2001, is a grassroots civil society organization with offices in New York City and Kabul, dedicated to securing the rights of Afghan women. WAW works both in New York and internationally to promote the agency of Afghan women through the creation of safe forums where Afghan women can network, develop programs to meet their specific needs, and participate in human rights advocacy in the international sphere. WAW's Community Outreach Program in Queens, NY provides essential services for Afghan women and girls. Within Afghanistan, WAW advocates for women's rights in government ministries and has worked to provide women and girls with access to literacy and vocational training classes and income-generating projects. WAW also operates a Family Guidance Center in Kabul to assist women whose rights are being violated and help them to find practical, attainable solutions to their problems through counseling for both women and men.

WAW Board Member Fahima Vorgetts and and Executive Director Manizha Naderi will discuss their work providing services to women in both Afghanistan and the New York City area. Mary Lu Christie '67, a member of Women for Afghan Women, will introduce the speakers and frame this discussion on the status of women's human rights within Afghanistan and in Afghan communities here in New York City.

Fahima Vorgetts has been intimately involved in Afghanistan's women's movement since the mid-1960s. She served as director of the Women's Literacy Program in Afghanistan before leaving the country in 1979, and was a key supporter of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, providing funding for underground schools for girls and humanitarian relief during the Taliban's rule. After the fall of the Taliban, she co-founded the Humanitarian Organization for Orphans and Widows of Afghanistan. Vorgetts is the recipient of numerous awards for her efforts on behalf of the women of Afghanistan.

Manizha Naderi, Executive Director of Women for Afghan Women, was born in Kabul and raised in New York. She joined WAW in 2002 as the director of the organization's Community Outreach Program in Queens. In 2006, she moved permanently to Kabul to direct WAW's work in Afghanistan. There, she founded WAW's Family Guidance Center.

Mary Lu Christie '67 is a member of Women for Afghan Women. She has traveled to Afghanistan several times, working for Catholic Relief Services to set up preschools in villages north of Kabul, and as a volunteer with WAW.

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In the summer of 2004, filmmakers Wazhmah Osman and Kelly Dolak set out to make an independent film that explored whether Afghan women's lives had actually improved as a result of the US military campaign. The documentary that came out of this question, Postcards from Tora Bora, became far more than an exploration of women's rights in Afghanistan. The film also follows Wazhmah Osman's journey as she returns to her childhood home, from which her family fled at the height of the Cold War. Armed only with rapidly fading memories, she recruits some unlikely and reluctant guides to put together the pieces of her past. As Osman desperately searches for any tangible evidence of her former life, the journey leads her to many unexpected places. On the road, Osman frequently finds herself at a strange intersection where cultures clash, identities are mistaken, and the past violently collides with the present. Postcards from Tora Bora has been screened at many international film festivals including the Tribeca Film Festival, the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, the Global Peace Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, and the Second Take / Splice In Film Festival, and has received numerous awards.

Wazhmah Osman is a New York City based documentary filmmaker. She has a Masters degree in Middle Eastern Studies from New York University and currently is a PhD candidate in Culture and Communication at NYU. She is also completing the Culture and Media Program in Anthropology. Before going back to school she worked for six years at Millennium Film Workshops and Cooper Union School of the Arts as a film technician, film instructor, and curator.

Kelly Dolak is a filmmaker currently teaching digital filmmaking at Ramapo College. Her short films have been screened at film festivals both nationally and internationally. Her short, Purse, was showcased on PBS's "Reel New York" and screened at more than 10 film festivals. She began her producing career working for the Emmy-award winning show "Behind the Screen" for five years at AMC and now is an independent documentary film producer.

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How is race configured in the practices of genetic anthropology? What, more specifically, are the continuities and discontinuities between the practices of genetic anthropologists today and those of race scientists of old? Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj will analyze the evidentiary logic of research into male-Jewish origins within the broader context of genetic anthropological research into population genealogies, specifically considering the relationships among history, nature and culture established in this work. If, as many philosophers and cultural critics have argued, conceptions of nature have long grounded our modern senses of self, what exactly have the characters of "nature" as it relates to history (or descent) and of "culture" produced within this field of research?

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard, joined the department in Fall 2002. Previously, she held fellowships at Harvard University's Academy for International and Area Studies, the University of Pennsylvania Mellon Program, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Her work examines the relationship between scientific knowledge and the making of social imaginations and political orders. She is a former Fulbright Fellow and a recipient of awards from the SSRC-McArthur Grant in International Peace and Security, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Prior to her arrival at Barnard she served on the faculty of the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, now in its second printing. In 2002 this book won the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani Annual Book Award for the best book published on the Middle East that year.

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Please note: there is no registration for this event. Seating is first come first served.
Click here for directions.

Since well before the publication of the feminist classic, Women, Race, and Class in 1981, this year's Helen Pond McIntyre '48 lecturer Angela Y. Davis has been concerned about the interconnections among issues, as well as about connections among peoples around the world. In "Abolition Democracy and Global Politics," Davis will present a new and wide-ranging vision for making connections among both issues and peoples. She develops the term "Abolition Democracy" from W.E.B. DuBois's influential text, Black Reconstruction in America, connecting the abolition of slavery, of the death penalty and of prisons themselves to the possibility of substantive democracy in the United States and globally. As Davis stated in a recent interview, "DuBois ... argues that a host of democratic institutions are needed to fully achieve abolition—thus abolition democracy.... In thinking specifically about the abolition of prisons, [for example], using the approach of abolition democracy, we would propose the creation of an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the problems that set people on the track to prison, thereby helping to render the prison obsolete." In her lecture, Davis will link this concept of abolition democracy to questions of global politics. What does it mean that the prison-industrial-complex, often led by U.S. corporations, is expanding globally? What are the connections between the rapid expansion of prison industries and the military-industrial-complex? What global forces contribute to the exploitation of peoples in different parts of the world? How can feminists and other advocates for democracy connect their movements around the world? On October 30, we will learn what visions of another possible world—one of freedom, justice and democracy—are offered by these movements and by Davis's long experience as both an activist and a scholar.

Professor Davis's teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She has also taught at UCLA, Vassar, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. She has spent the last fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is Professor of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary Ph.D program, and Professor of Feminist Studies. Angela Davis is the author of eight books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List." She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. Her most recent books are Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is now completing a book on prisons and American history.

Co-sponsored by The Cooper Union, The Center for the Humanities at CUNY, The College and Community Fellowship Program at CUNY, and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU.

Directions: The Great Hall at Cooper Union is located at 7 East 7th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. The closest subways are the R or W at 8th Street, or the 6 at Astor Place.

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Join the American Museum of Natural History for a riveting evening featuring memories and images of Margaret Mead '23, the best-known, and most controversial, anthropologist in 20th century America. Speakers will include Nancy Lutkehaus, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California, who participated in BCRW's 2001 tribute to Mead and authored the just-released Margaret Mead: American Icon; Mead's daughter and granddaughter, Mary Catherine Bateson and Sevanne Kassarjian; and others. The event will be introduced by Laurel Kendall, Curator of the Division of Anthropology at AMNH. A book signing will follow. For a complete list of guests and for more information about the event, please visit the AMNH website.

Cost: $15 ($13.50 for Museum members, students, and seniors)

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Drawing on fresh analytical approaches to diaspora studies, Kobena Mercer, the British theorist and historian, proposes a model that identifies cross-culturality as one of the basic conditions of modernity. Discussing the nineteenth-century landscapes of Robert Scott Duncanson, this inquiry into 'race,' representation and visuality foregrounds unexplored aspects of the hermeneutics of the Black Atlantic.

Kobena Mercer teaches and writes of the black diaspora. He is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. He was a Reader in Art history and Diaspora Studies at Middlesex University, London, and has taught at New York University and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has received fellowships from Cornell University and the New School for Social Research. He is the series editor of Annotating Art's Histories, co-published by MIT and inIVA, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernism (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007), and Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (2008).

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Conference kick-off
True North
Isaac Julien
Film screening and discussion:
Thursday, 11/20, 7:00 PM
202 Altschul Hall

The conference opens Thursday, November 20 with a presentation by award-winning filmmaker Isaac Julien of his short film True North, based on the story of Matthew Henson, the first African-American to explore the Arctic with Robert Peary in 1909. The film screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Isaac Julien, Lisa Bloom, and Monica Miller.

Special guest DJ Spooky will present his trailer of "Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica" preceding the event.

Workshop
With Roslyn Silver '27 Science Fellowship Lecture by Gabrielle Walker
Friday, 11/21
9:30 AM - 5:00 PM
Registration in Barnard Hall Lobby

Stunning shifts in the ice of Polar environments underscore the growing need to understand the relations between the environment and human activity and policy. As the ice melts in both regions, the Arctic and Antarctic have once again become objects of international competition as well as sites of research and concern. Drawing on the natural sciences, the social sciences, history, literature, and the arts, this interdisciplinary workshop focuses on the intersection of science, policy, race, and gender in the way the Arctic and Antarctic are studied, represented, inhabited, and imagined.

Panelists include: Subhankar Banerjee, photographer and Arctic educator-activist; Lisa Bloom, Visiting Professor at the University of California San Diego and author of Gender on Ice; An-My Le, Assistant Professor of Photography at Bard College and artist; Chris Cuomo, Professor of Women's Studies and Philosophy at the University of Georgia; Wendy Eisner '75, Associate Professor of Geography, Environmental Studies, and Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati; Elena Glasberg, faculty member in the Writing Program at Princeton University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Barnard College; Sherrill Grace, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and author of Canada and the Idea of North; Elizabeth Hutchinson, Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College; Isaac Julien, filmmaker and video artist; Laura Kay, Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Chair of the Women's Studies Department at Barnard College; Monica Miller, Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College; Connie Samaras, Professor of Studio Art at the University of California; and Gabrielle Walker, award-winning science writer and consultant to the UK Government's Office of Science.

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