CUNY Graduate School and University Center
Center for the Study of Women and Society
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/womencenter
[Return to home]
[Return to Directory by State]
[Return to Index of Expertise] Last updated 09/05/02
Contact Information:
365 5th Avenue, Room 5103
New York, NY 10016
Phone: 212-817-8905
Fax: 212-817-7466
CENTER DESCRIPTION
The Center for the Study of Women and Society within The Graduate Center, CUNY, promotes interdisciplinary research, scholarship, and training on issues pertaining to women and gender and the contribution of women to society. The center focuses on women in urban, national, and international settings. It collaborates with grassroots organizations to develop links between the urban communities and the university, conducts research, and sponsors a lecture series. Eighty faculty associates of the Graduate Center's Women's Studies Certificate Program provide the center with a wide net of expertise in many disciplines, fields, and areas, and on many particular multifaceted subjects.
AREA(S) OF EXPERTISE
Anthropology/sociology; body theory; environment; feminist thought and scholarship; global political economy; global technoscience; history; incarceration/crime; literature; mental health; queer studies; reproductive rights/technologies; Renaissance studies; women's studies.
RECENT PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES
CCF is an experimental program which addresses the transitional experiences of women leaving prison and returning to communities. It especially focuses on the educational needs of these women, many of whom had begun college in prison and wish to return to college upon release. A number of students in the Women's Studies Certificate Program are involved in CCF, acting as mentors to the women returning to college.
The Conviction Project aims at linking the social activism of CCF with academic studies and research goals and is an ongoing faculty and student seminar. Now in its third year, The Conviction Project Seminar will continue to focus on the history of the development of the prison-industrial complex, addressing both the impact of the privatization of prisons on those imprisoned and the intensification and extension of technologies of surveillance into everyday life. The seminar members will study the conditions and the experience of imprisonment of the body, mind, and spirit- both within and outside of prisons- especially in relationship to race, age, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality. This seminar will also be concerned with silencing and censorship, traumatized memory and bodily discrimination, abjection and abuse, and the role of education in relationship to these issues- inside and outside of prison. Given these general themes, in 2002 we are focusing especially on reconciliation and racial relationships both in global and local contexts.
As an extension of The Conviction Project, CSWS sponsors a two-day conference that brings together professionals form social service, policy-making, government and non-government organizations as well as not-for-profit agencies. They, along with many ex-offenders, discuss education for persons in prison and outside of prison. Each year this conference allows us to disseminate to various publics what we have learned through the Conviction Project Seminar. We have also put up a web site for CCF that we are in the process of developing as a site for public distribution of data on education in, and after, prison.
A two-day symposium on technoscience to be held April 10-11, 2003, the symposium promises to be a provocative and productive event and thirty-five scholars are already committed to participate. In convening the symposium, it is our hope that institutes and centers concerned with the study of women, sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, nation, and class will lead the way in rethinking political strategies and cultural criticisms for now and in the future. We are convinced that in taking technoscience as one of our primary concerns, we will be able to reconfigure the aims of recent cultural criticisms in order that cultural criticism can address some of the pressing questions of these times and help inform the future of global political practice.
With the National Council for Research on Women, CSWS received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant for 2002-2004. Together we will bring scholars from different parts of the world to study changing relationships of global capital, nation states, civil society, the private and public spheres, and the way these changes have provoked a need to reexamine definitions of citizenship and human rights. One of the project's aims is a seminar for 2002-2004 that will be hosted by CSWS. The seminar begins in Fall 2002 and will address the sites of accountability for human security around the world, the problems and possibilities that extend across cultural, social, and political borders, in particular on the gendered dimensions of human security, and their intersections with race, class, religion, sexuality, generation, and nation.
New Immigrant Women is a project of the Activist Women's Oral History Project, founded in the 1990's, with archival interviews and ongoing oral histories interviewing women artists who work with young people in the NYC community. The new project, funded by a Rockefeller Foundation planning grant, is locating oral histories that document the mobilization and experience of Latina and Asian American women in three American cities as the foundation of a National Women's Oral History Consortium.
Women's Studies Discipline Council. The council brings together leaders of Women's Studies programs and women's centers throughout the CUNY system several times a year for discussions on new and ongoing issues relevant to students, faculty, and programs for the purposes of mutual support and networking.
PUBLICATIONS
Newsletter- A semi-annual publication edited by students in the Women's Studies Certificate Program.
Brochure for the Center for the Study of Women and Society
Brochure for CUNY/BA Women's Studies across the campuses
Please send comments or corrections to webmaster@ncrw.org