Find below the current conference schedule. Posting will change as details are solidified. Stay tuned!  

Conference Dates: March 30-31, 2006

Conference location: MIT Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

MIT Campus: campus map

Conference is *Free* and registration is required

To find out more about conference registration, contact gcws@mit.edu

Thursday, March 30

5:00 - 6:00 PM • Registration: Room 32-123, Stata Center

6:00 - 8:00 PM • Opening Remarks & Keynote Address:: Room 32-123, Stata Center

OPENING REMARKS: Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, GCWS co-chair and Associate Professor of English at Boston College

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: "Narrating Survival, Representing Gender: Interrogating the politics and praxis of feminist-infused participatory action research", a Keynote Address by   M. Brinton Lykes , Associate Dean of the Lynch School of Education, and Associate Director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Boston College      

M. Brinton Lykes, is Professor of Community-Cultural Psychology, Associate Dean at the Lynch School of Education, and Associate Director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College. From 1999-2001, she held a Professorate in Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa). She has worked for many years among women and child survivors of war and of state-sponsored economic and political violence in rural Guatemala, South Africa, and N. Ireland and with local immigrant women and children in the Boston area. Her research explores the interstices of indigenous cultural beliefs and practices and those of Western psychology, towards collaborating in the design and development of community-based programs that respond to the effects of war in contexts war and in post-war contexts of transition and transformation.

8:00 - 10:00 PM • Networking Reception: R&D Dining Room, 4th Floor, Stata Center

Friday, March 31

8:30 - 9:00 AM • Registration and Continental Breakfast: 32-123, Stata Center

9:00 - 11:30 AM • Welcome and Keynote Panel: 32-123, Stata Center

WELCOME: Wendy Luttrell, GCWS co-chair and Associate Professor, Human Development and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

KEYNOTE PANEL:Panelists Include:

Carol Cohn, Director, Boston Consortium on Gender and Human Rights , Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University  

Nandini Manjrekar , Professor, Women's Studies Research Centre, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, India\

Jyoti Puri , Associate Professor, Sociology and Women's Studies, Simmons College        

Panel Moderator: Chris Bobel, Assistant Professor, Women's Studies Department, University of Massachusetts Boston

11:30 - 12:30 PM • Lunch: Forbes Cafe, Stata Center

12:30 - 2:00 PM • Concurrent Workshops and Panel Presentations:

Room 32-124: FEMALE IDENTITY, MOTHERHOOD, AND HEALTH

• "(Dis)heartening Women's Health: Emerging Articulations of Women's Heart Disease" - Anne Pollock, MIT [PhD Candidate, Department of Science, Technology and Society]
• "Breastfeeding Advocacy in the Midst of Natural Disaster: social implications of the U.S. Government's response to women after Hurricane Katrina" - Miranda Waggoner, Brandeis University [PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology]
• "Shrapnel in My Womb: Black Female Vegans and the [In]visible War" - Amie Breeze Harper, Harvard Extension School [MA Program, Technologies in Education Program]
• "Contemporary Notions of Hegemonic Femininity and Masculinity in Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua: The Legacy of Sandinismo, The Effects of Neoliberalism, "Responsible" Motherhood, and Persistent Heteronormative Gender Ideology" - Meghan Field, Simmons College [MA Program, Gender/Cultural Studies]

Room 32-144: REFRAMING REPRESENTATION: VISUAL CULTURE DURING AN ERA OF WAR AND CONFLICT

• "Rethinking Obituary and Photography: Livability and Grievability in Judith Butler's Precarious Life " - Jung Ja Choi, Harvard University [MA Program, Department of East Asian Studies]
• "Third Culture Kids: Negotiating a New Concept of Home/Nationality in the Age of Globalization in Shunji Iwaii's Swallowtail Butterfly " - Wei-cheng Lee, National Taiwan Normal University [MA Program, English/American Literature]
• "Seen...Not Heard: The 'Look' of Violence, Race, and Masculinity Surrounding American Southern Lynching and the Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal " - Patrice Delevante, Simmons College [MA Program, Gender/Cultural Studies Program]
• "War and Women: A story in four parts" - Aparna Sindhoor, Boston University [PhD Candidate, Dance-Theater]

Room 32-155: WAR AND WOMEN COMBATANTS

• "Who Wears the "Mexican Mask"?: (Non)Gender Politics in the EZLN" - Lauren Summers, Boston College [MA Program, English Department]
• "Fighting to Survive: Agency in Female Former Child Soldiers Living in Rwanda" - Heather Baldwin, Boston College [PhD Candidate, Cultural Psychology Program]
• "Female Combatants and the Redefinition of Gender within Norse Society " - Kevin Michael Anderson, Harvard Divinity School [MA Program]

2:15 - 3:45 PM • Concurrent Workshops and Panel Presentations:

Room 32-124: EXPLORATIONS IN QUEER THEORY

• "Accepting/Excepting Loss on the Borders: Violence and the Queer Body of Color" - Kevin Allred, UMass Boston [PhD Candidate, American Studies]
• "Cannibalized Subjects: Rational Autonomy, Inhibiting Ideology, and Gay and Lesbian Consciousness" - Christopher Kelly, Boston College [PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology]
• "Theory vs. Narrative: Naming the Silence and Bridging the Gap" - Shannon Farrington, Simmons College [MA Program, Gender/Cultural Studies Program]

Room 32-144: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND RACE: CONVERGING AND CONFLICTING CONCEPTIONS OF IDENTITY

• "Lost between 'the bush' and Belize City: the roots of Creole Belizean women's resistance in 19th century British Honduras" - Seneca Joyner, Northeastern University [MA Program, History Department]
• "When the Black Horror Met Germania: The German Reaction to French Colonial Troops in the Occupation of the Rhineland, 1919-1923" - Willeke Sandler, Northeastern University [MA Program, Public History]
• "The Octopus and the Banana: Masculinity, the Company Man, and the United Fruit Company in Central America, 1899-1941 " - Colin Rowan, Northeastern University [MA Program, History Department]

Room 32-155: LITERATURE AND IDENTITY

• "Circulating Exclusion: A Re-fashioning of Boundaries in In the Blood " - Shannon Payne, UMass Amherst [PhD Candidate, American Studies]
• "Race, Captivity and Nation in Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It? " - Abigail Dallman, UMass Amherst [PhD Candidate, English/American Studies]
• "Children at War in Gertrude Stein's World War II Era Texts" - Jennifer Hunt, Boston University [MA Program, English Department]

4:00 - 5:30 PM • Concurrent Workshops and Panel Presentations:

Room 32-124: GENDER AND NATIONALISM IN SOUTH ASIA

• "Understanding theGendered Nature of Religious Nationalism in India: Mother India, Mother Cow, Mother Goddess" - Jessica Fish, Harvard Divinity [MA, Theological Studies]
• "Professional IT Women and the Making of a Middle-Class India" - Smitha Radhakrishnan, UC Berkeley [PhD Candidate, Sociology Department]

Room 32-144: CASE STUDIES ON VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

• "Domestic Violence and Human Trafficking in Japan" - Kyla Hana Mitsunaga, Harvard University [MA Program, East Asian Studies]
• "Gender Vulnerability to HIV Transmission in Displacement Camp Settings" - Casey James Schmidt, Boston College [MA Program, International Development and Political Science]
•   "The Social Structure of Relationships among Military Couples: a look at larger forces impacting domestic violence" - Meghan Finley, Northeastern University [PhD Candidate, Sociology Department]

Room 32-155: CONSTRUCTIONS OF MASCULINITY AND FEMININITY

• "From Southern Belles to Special Forces: The Sanctity of the American Body" - Matt Sebold, Boston College [MA Program, English Department]
• "'One of Us, One of Us': Ethel Rosenberg and Jewish-American Assimilation Anxiety" - Sam Schottenstein, Simmons College [MA Program, Gender/Cultural Studies Program]
• "Gender in Post 9/11 America" - Maria Velazquez , Boston University Simmons College [MA Program, Gender/Cultural Studies Program]

5:45 - 7:00 PM •  "Making the Conference Real," Breakout Sessions with Faculty Mentors**: Rooms: 32-124, 32-144, Forbes Cafe & 32-155, Stata Center

• "Honest Talk about the Tenure Trade-off: How Do We Stay On Track without Derailing our Politics?" - Workshop led by Chris Bobel , Assistant Professor, Women's Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston     
• "Bringing Research Into the Field" - Workshop led by Wendy Luttrell , Associate Professor, Human Development and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education     
• "Liberation Health and Working for Social Justice within the Healthcare System " - Workshop led by Dawn Martinez , Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Simmons College
• "Working with Young Women to Research and Combat Human Trafficking: a case study in Serbia" - Workshop led by Andrea Powell, Executive Director, FAIR Fund, Inc.  
• "Bridging the divide between Academia and Activism " - Workshop led by Marlene Kim, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Boston
• "Negotiating raced and gendered subjectivities in international research" - Workshop led by Leigh Patel Stevens, Assistant Professor, Lynch School of Education, Boston College

7:00 - 7:30 PM • Closing Remarks

7:30 - 10:00 PM • Closing Networking Reception: Off-site, location TBA

**Faculty Mentors will help graduate students identify key strategies for negotiating the terrain between theory and practice

For more information about the conference or to register, contact Andi Sutton, GCWS Program Coordinator at:

Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Building 16-287
77 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge , MA 02139
T el:(617) 324-2085
Email: gcws@mit.edu