Our annual community meeting is to discuss the future directions of GCWS courses, faculty events, community events, and more. This meeting is open to current, incoming, and former board members, WGS program directors and chairs, WGS faculty, and current and former GCWS teaching teams.

This roundtable features a conversation about the genealogies and futures of black queer and trans studies across geographic and disciplinary borders, conversations that can help us take stock of the contradictory and complicated cultural moment we are in.

Join other feminist-minded faculty members from the GCWS Consortium at this social event to start the spring 2019 semester.

Can feminist praxis embrace an inherently anti-disciplinary vulnerability and refuse strictly bound notions, labels, frameworks, fields, or genres – including those assumed by invocations of ‘feminisms,’ ‘ethnography,’ or ‘research? Can notions such as solidarity and responsibility, trust and hope, vulnerability and reflexivity serve a useful purpose in ethically navigating the forms of epistemic violence in which metropolitan academics are, and will always remain, complicit?

With "The time of the border” we mean to invoke, of course, the terrible urgency of our current moment: the distinct but also overlapping historical, geographical, and other contexts that bear on the displacements of our time; border-crossings that claim our attention and others that remain invisible; conceptual frameworks that have meaningful explanatory power, but also do harm.

Join us to recognize authors and their recently published books at our first Fall 2018 event!

Join us for a free half day conference at MIT on how the recent #MeToo movement has impacted higher education, specifically at the graduate level.

Join other feminist-minded faculty members from the GCWS Consortium at this social event.

Roundtable discussion about Undoing Empire: Form, Function, Feminism

Roundtable discussion about Women of Color Feminisms in Authoritarian Times

This panel engages artistic practitioners who utilize their own bodies in their work. Three multi-media/performance artists will discuss the geographic parameters of their creative productions, the promise and perils of using their bodies as art, and the future of visual culture.

Various locations and dates around Boston

The theme of this year’s festival is Power & Access. 

This roundtable hosts scholars and activists who intervene in the racialized, gendered, and queer aspects of our thoroughly mediated worlds, perspectives, subjectivities, and selves. These participants write and reflect critically on media forms, working within and across multiple modalities, ranging from the conventional to the digital and the emergent.

This roundtable brings together queer and feminist scholars of race, diaspora, performance, and religion to reflect on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of contemporary crises within racial capitalism, such as:  masculinity and the militarization of policing;  gender, race, and incarceration; the gendered criminalization of immigrant and diasporic religions; and queer responses to policing and the “war on terror.”

A half-day event bringing together local muslim feminists and allies from academia, activist, and art spaces to share, discuss and celebrate Islamic feminist thought. 

This roundtable considers the totality of the carceral state, from the vantage point of black women’s histories, testimonies, experiences and creative works. Three interdisciplinary scholars will gather to ponder all of the mechanisms of the prison system, from its long historical trajectory to literary and visual representations.

We welcome you to join us at this reception as we toast to local faculty who have recently published books on topics in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. We will be celebrating over 30 books published since 2013 and the evening will include a book table where you can peruse copies of the featured works and very short book talks by our featured authors.

A symposium sharing feminist, hands-on approaches to learning, teaching, knowledge production, and publishing

Join other feminist-minded faculty members from the GCWS Consortium at this social event.

This panel will feature three feminist scholars who are conceptualizing new and evolving terminologies for the discourse of race, gender, and sexuality studies. The panelists, each trained interdisciplinarily, will consider the expansiveness of emerging language in the field along with the fraught limitations of contemporary keywords within feminism. The scholars will offer new terms for contemporary feminist studies, across and beyond disciplinary frameworks. Specifically, this event will utilize the multi-valent rubrics of digital media, film, and dance to participate in new ways of seeing and thinking through the field.

This roundtable explores the ways in which both "queerness" and "diaspora" each displace normative classifications of sexuality and nationality, with consequences for the imagination of "futurity" in literature, visual culture, and cultural politics. As queerness complicates the boundedness of an ethnic, national or religious collectivity that desires to reproduce its own identity, so may diaspora unsettle the normative white Europeanness of conceptions of same-sex desire. Presenters discuss how diaspora figures both geographical displacement and the crossing of figurative boundaries of person, culture, society, and state, and they elaborate ways that queering describes not only different embodiments of gender and sexuality, but also a skewing of normative epistemology and social organization.

At a moment when feminism’s relevance to the public sphere seems more urgent but also more contested than ever, this roundtable reflects on the promises and pitfalls of public feminisms. Bringing to bear their expertise, the invited participants address the possibilities of using film, social media, and popular writing as public forms of feminist intervention. In so doing, the discussion complicates questions of feminist engagements, their modalities, their “proper objects,” as well as troubles which feminisms stand in for Feminism proper and what counts as the public sphere.

The near-ubiquitous use of use of social media (and particularly networked and mobile communications technology in one form or another) by students and faculty invites questions about how these tools might be used in the classroom to facilitate dialogue and to foster collaborations between students and even across institutions. FemTechNet, a group of feminist academic scholars and teachers located within and beyond academe, has proposed a DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course) model of pedagogy that enables instructors engaged in feminist pedagogy to connect with each other and use technology to bring students and faculty from many different locations into shared dialogue. 

Join us to celebrate recently published works on topics in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  The event will feature over 30 books published since 2013. The evening will include a book table where you can peruse copies of the featured works and very short book talks by our featured authors.  

The graduate students from nine universities of the Boston-area Graduate Consortium in Women's Studies present an interdisciplinary graduate student symposium entitled "Power and (In)Visibility," to be held at MIT on Saturday, March 28, 2015.