News and Events

Monday, April 16, 2 - 4 pm, Women's Studies Conference Room (Basement), 837 22nd St., NW

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a community-based farmworker organization leading the struggle for fair wages and working conditions in the US agriculture industry.  Join representatives from the CIW and the Student/Farmworker Alliance for an interactive presentation on the Campaign for Fair Food.  Hear what day to day life is like for farmworkers and their families and communities, as well as why they began to organize for change.   Learn as they share the analysis, history and strategy of the campaign, focusing largely on the role of allies, including women's groups, student groups and others.  Finally, hear about the current moment - what changes are beginning to happen in the fields, and how we as students, young people, community members and consumers can support farmworkers in the struggle for justice.

On Wednesday, April 4, 2 – 3:30, Duques 250

Nalini Natarajan will speak on
“Tamil Women in the Transvaal” 

Nalini Natarajan, is Professor of English at University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, author most recently of The Resonating Island: The Caribbean in Postcolonial Dialogue (Terranova), and the forthcoming Atlantic Gandhi (Sage).

This is open and free to the public.

What Would Harriet Do? Unfinished Liberation or the Dangers of Innocence

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

2012 Yulee Endowed Lecture
Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 6:30 p.m.
Marvin Center, Room 309
800 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052

Free and Open to the Public

The world is in crisis and -- as everybody knows -- the effects of structural adjustment and organized abandonment fall most heavily on the shoulders of those most burdened by the cares of everyday life in the first place. In this talk I will discuss some of the crisis-driven opportunities in changing the scale and scope of the prison-industrial complex, and argue that the struggle against the all-purpose use of criminalization to solve social, political, economic, and cultural problems cannot be won with an appeal either to “innocence” or to naming “the real criminals.” That said, how we account for how we got to where we are determines in part what alternative futures we might make. Using the story of Harriet Tubman as a model and case, I will conclude with an argument about what I call the “infrastructure of feeling” and what it means to work in the Black Radical Tradition.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Geography in the Earth and Environmental Studies Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her prize-winning book is Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, published in 2007. She is a founding member of California Prison Moratorium Project; Critical Resistance; the Central California Environmental Justice Network; and many other organizations.

Women’s Studies and the University Writing Program invite you to:
Meet the Women Workers Who Sew GWU Apparel!
Monday, March 5, 6 – 8 pm, Philips Hall 414A

Working together for more than a decade, workers in the Dominican Republic and students successfully organized to create Alta Gracia, a living-wage union-made apparel factory where workers earn over three and a half times the local minimum wage, enabling workers to support themselves and their families with housing, transportation, health care, nutritious food and education. Workers voices are valued through an independent union and they are treated with dignity and respect in their workplace.

 Alta Gracia invites you to hear the story of two courageous women that led the campaign to start Alta Gracia, Maritza Vargas and Ana Marinez, union leaders whose families and community are being transformed by living wages and international solidarity behind hoodies and t-shirts in our schools and community. Join us for a discussion of how to bring living-wage and union-made apparel to George Washington University!

Author and Journalist Nicole Pope discusses her book: Honor Killings in the Twenty-First Century
When: Wednesday, February 15, 5:45-7pm
Where: Funger Hall Room 220

Nicole Pope will host a conversation about her new book about honor killings and violence against women.  The book examines honor-based violence, its roots and its evolution, as well as the ongoing struggle to eradicate it in Turkey, Pakistan and other countries, including Western European nations.  Thousands of women are murdered every year by close relatives for allegedly violating an unwritten social code or rebelling against the patriarchal order. “Honor” killings and other harmful practices such as forced marriage, child marriage, and bride exchange have been recorded for centuries. Under growing pressure from human rights activists, these old traditions have also evolved and adapted to modern circumstances.  Pope will talk about the process of interviewing women and researching crimes that are often hidden and obscured as simply local customs. 

As one reviewer said of Pope’s work, “In this powerfully written book, Nicole Pope takes a comparative look at so-called honor killings, searching out the patterns and triggers that cause families and relatives to kill women suspected of sexual misconduct or even just defiance or disobedience. Pope compares honor killings in Pakistan and Turkey with violence against women elsewhere in the world, opening the road to new ways of understanding what has often been seen as a Middle Eastern or Muslim problem. Her heart-wrenching interviews with victims’ families and with women who survived illuminate the social and cultural forces that lead families to murder, but also give some glimpse of how this scourge might be eliminated.”  Jenny White, associate professor of anthropology, Boston University and author of Islamist Mobilization in Turkey.

Nicole Pope is a Swiss journalist and writer based in Istanbul, Turkey. She worked as Turkey correspondent for the French daily Le Monde for 15 years and has published articles in numerous international publications. She is the co-author of Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey (2010, revised edition) and has been conducting research on violence again women for the past decade.

GW Graduate Feminists: Feminist Food for Thought

Our monthly Women's Studies gatherings, formerly "First Thursdays," are back -- but this semester, on Wednesdays! To avoid any confusion about days, from now on we will be calling them "Feminist Food for Thought."  Our first one of the semester will be Wednesday, February 22 at 5:00pm in the basement of the Women's Studies building. This month we will hear updates from undergrad student Ali Lozano, grad student Rachel Hall, and Professor Todd Ramlow.

Whether you are an alum, a professor, a staff member, or a student, we hope that you will join us to chat, drink coffee, and see what other folks in Women’s Studies are up to.  As usual, fair trade coffee and snacks will be provided.