Hamilton College
The Kirkland Project for the Study of
Gender, Society and Culture
http://academics.hamilton.edu/organizations/kirkland/
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[Return to Index of Expertise] Last updated 09/16/02
Contact Information:
198 College Hill Road
Clinton, NY 13323
Phone: 315-859-4716
E-mail: kirkproj@hamilton.edu
CENTER DESCRIPTION
The Kirkland project at Hamilton College is an on-campus organization committed to intellectual inquiry and social justice, focusing on issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and other facets of diversity. Through our educational programs, research, and community outreach, we seek to build a community respectful of difference. We aim to prepare our students to live and work in an increasingly complex multiracial and multinational world; to foster student and faculty scholarship related to our mission; to develop and support curricula and pedagogies that challenge students to think critically and to make connections between classroom learning and the society in which we live; and to initiate connections between the Hamilton community and the surrounding area, around the mission of the Project.
AREA(S) OF EXPERTISE
Arts; cultural, racial and ethnic diversity; education; feminist thought and scholarship; health and health care; leadership and leadership development; mentoring; science, math, engineering and technology; women's studies.
RECENT PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES
Service Associates Program. This program is designed to support students with demonstrated financial need who wish to pursue unpaid socially useful work in the not-for-profit sector. Students receive a $3,000 stipend for the summer.
"Making Change - Working for Social Justice," conference, Fall 2002.
Hamilton and Kirkland Colleges have a long tradition of training its students to help create a more just society. With this conference, the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture wants to bring together a critical mass of graduates working for social change-in order to define the problems facing today's students as they go into the world, to gather ideas about how to address those problems, to encourage students to consider social change work as a career path, as well as to celebrate their contributions.
Spring 2002 Artist- in-Residence. Sharon Bridgforth and Luz Guerra. Sharon Bridgforth is the author of the bull-jean stories, performance stories published by RedBone Press; her newest piece, “Con Flama” is in production at the Penumbra Theater. Luz Guerra is a consultant and educator who works with social change organizations across the nation. Luz Guerra and Sharon Bridgforth were on campus for a month's stay and during that time they taught a class, “Radical Writing,” led workshops, and organized performances.
Southern Accents: Resistance and Representation through the Arts. Fall 2000. The theme will allow us to explore a region with a rich and complex history of representation and resistance, but one that has also historically been represented in a reductive and one-dimensional way, both inter- and intra-regionally. We will explore a wide variety of creative genres produced by a broad range of Southern artists. Events in the series include performances by Footworks-a dance troupe that focuses on Appalachian clogging. They "dance out" the interconnections of clogging with African and African-American buckdance and Native American dance traditions. Performers include Sharon Bridgforth, a black Cajun lesbian writer and performer; Sheila Adams, a musician, ballad singer, and story-teller; Hazel Dickens; and Mimi Pickering, a musician/union organizer and filmmaker.
Spring 2002 Artist- in-Residence. Sharon Bridgforth and Luz Guerra. Sharon Bridgforth is the author of the bull-jean stories, performance stories published by RedBone Press; her newest piece, “Con Flama” is in production at the Penumbra Theater. Luz Guerra is a consultant and educator who works with social change organizations across the nation. Luz Guerra and Sharon Bridgforth were on campus for a month's stay and during that time they taught a class, “Radical Writing,” led workshops, and organized performances.
Spring 2001 Artist in Residence. Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, who graduated with an MFA from Rutgers University, has been a video art practitioner for well over a decade, making such pieces as She Don't Fade, Vanilla Sex, The Potluck and the Passion, andGreetings from Africa. Her first full-length film, The Watermelon Woman, is finally circulating on a wider scale, after having traveled the festival circuit for nearly a year. Dunye's work displays her passion for uncovering the hidden histories and continuities of black lesbian life while at the same time working towards cinematic representations of black women that refute racist stereotypes and work to de-essentialize black lesbian identities. She is at work on a film (tentatively titled "Inside") on the lives of incarcerated women.
Spring 2000 Artist in Residence. John O'Neal, actor and storyteller with Junebug Productions, will be on campus for a short residency, working with faculty and students on story-telling, community involvement activities, and educational development processes.
Spring 1999 Artist in Residence. Writer, actor, and director Ping Chong produced his award-winning show, "Undesirable Elements," a multi-media oral history piece, with a cast of Hamilton College students.
“Sex, Freaks, and the Elderly: Double Features in February,” film series, winter 2002.
For each of three evenings, we thematically paired a mainstream narrative film and an experimental or documentary film to create a dialogue between the dissimilar approaches to a topic. We followed the February series with an additional screening of The Life and Times of Sara Baartman: The Hottentot Venus in March.
Urban Service Experience. Starting in January 2001, several faculty and staff from the Kirkland Project and several Hamilton students gathered back at the College a few days before the start of the second term to live and work together for three days in nearby Utica, NY. We put together a wide-ranging program designed to provide students with an intense, hands-on introduction to the service needs and the many opportunities in Utica.
Most of the working hours were devoted to a combination of education-a driving tour of the city, information sessions and tours of local agencies-and much needed work on cleaning, renovation, restocking, cooking and serving food.
Teaching Associates Program. This program gives five students the opportunity to work with established teachers in an interdisciplinary course, "Coming of Age in America: Narratives of Difference." The associates help students with their writing and with processing difficult topics that may surface in class discussions.
Administration of a Hewlett Pluralism and Unity grant awarded to the College, summer 2001. We began the task of constructing a critical mass of faculty committed to goals of diversity by holding two open meetings to gather interest, bringing two consultants to campus, and holding teaching tables. The first institute was held in the summer of 2002 and was very successful; colleagues learned a lot and gained a sense of community.
College 130, “Coming of Age in America: Narratives of Difference,” was offered for the fourth time in the fall of 2001. Some 60 first-year students participated in this interdisciplinary course. Reading fictional and autobiographical coming-of-age narratives in the light of perspectives from the social sciences, students explored issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability, examining such institutions as the education, welfare, and the criminal justice systems.
Sophomore Seminar 230. Enthusiastic students from College 130 have long asked for follow-up courses for sophomores. The Kirkland Project is thus especially happy to launch our first pair of topic-related interdisciplinary sophomore seminars on “Social Movements.” A group of four sections of Sophomore Seminar 230 in Spring 2003 will focus on environmentalism; the second group of six or seven sections of 230, to be offered in Spring 2004, will focus on social movements culminating in or arising from 1968-called “Around 1968.” The general goals of College 230 are to open students' eyes to the ways in which power and privilege and their distribution affect and organize human lives at different levels-not just political and cultural but also individual.
Research Associates Program. This program is designed to support students who wish to make the connections between their own disciplinary or interdisciplinary projects and the mission of the Kirkland Project. Most suitable are projects which explore the relationships between gender and other significant factors of cultural analysis. We seek students working in each division (arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences), as well as from the interdisciplinary programs. Students and their mentors meet in a seminar twice a month over the spring semester. Students receive a stipend of $500 for a semester.
See our Journal Writing Program listed under Girls and Adolescents and our Girls and Women in Science program listed under Science, math, engineering, and technology.
Brown Bag Lunch Series. Specifically aimed at supporting faculty research, this series draws speakers from disciplines across the curriculum. Groups ranging from 20-30 professors, staff members, and students attend talks where faculty members present their scholarly work. Students and faculty members also have the opportunity to discuss classroom dynamics.
Educating for Democracy: The Richness and Challenge of Diversity. Fall 1999. This series focused on questions of access and equity in education. It included a conference run by the ACCESS project on welfare and education; lectures by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, Peter Schrag, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Ana Zentella, and Sonia Nieto; and panels by members of the Oneida Nation and Lucius Outlaw and Amie Macdonald.
The Battle Against Breast Cancer: Who's In Charge. Fall 1998. This lecture series helped bring to campus lectures from Byllye Avery, Anna Quindlen and Dr. Susan Love. We had an overwhelming positive community response with much support both from within the college and from the outside community.
The Body in Question. 2001-02 academic year. Our theme enabled us to capitalize on questions in the academy as well as political issues. In some fundamental sense we are our bodies (as Our Bodies/Our Selves testifies); academic disciplines all address the body; moreover (and crucial given our mission) certain dimensions of identity, especially race and gender, seem to be defined by bodily differences.
Annual conference of faculty and student work. Spring 2002 we ran our first conference, “Questioning the Body.” The conference featured work by faculty, students, and staff and started some stimulating conversations that we hope to nurture in the future. The papers that students presented were treated as if they were scholarly papers at a professional conference, and the discussions following the panels were very strong. We will continue the series each spring, concentrating on a theme that complements our annual programming.
“Masculinities” programming in the 2002-2003 academic year. Because there is no single masculinity, the series will emphasize the ways in which masculinities are shaped, performed, experienced and perceived through differences of race, class, sexual orientation and sex/gender. Though these categories overlap and intersect, our programs in the fall will for the most part highlight racialized masculinities, addressing Latino gang culture, the hip-hop generation of African-American males, European male artisans, and stereotypes about pan-Asian masculinity; one talk will center on transgendered masculinity. In the spring, our focus will be on sex/gender and sexual orientation. Throughout, we hope to raise questions about how biological factors, cultural understandings, and media representations interrelate in the creation of "masculinities."
Journal writing program for middle school girls, 2001-02. The Kirkland Project received a grant from the Women’s Fund of the Central New York Community Foundation to continue the work a former Research Associate began several years ago in the local school district. This grant allowed the student, under the guidance of her advisor, to expand her program to more schools in the area. This program centered on journal writing and discussion as outlets for thinking about identity formation, and united trained college students, as leaders, with small groups of middle school girls. Each term’s program culminated with a day-long conference at Hamilton College.
See also our program, Girls and Women in Science, under the Science, Math, Engineering , and Technology heading.
Mentoring Program. Beginning in fall 2002. This Kirkland Project initiative, pairing alums and students, is for those who are concerned with social service or social change. We especially want to reach out to women and men of color. Mentors might assist students with research projects, help them explore/develop a career, provide internships, etc.
Girls and Women in Science. This program brings 30 - 35 sixth grade girls, and their parents and teachers, from area schools to the College for two days of science activities. It ran for 4 or 5 years, but was discontinued due to lack of staff support. GWiS will be re-introduced in spring 2003. The program is designed to encourage the girls to participate in science and to see themselves as potential scientists. The girls and the adults will come to the College after school on a Friday for activities and a dinner with an invited speaker. The girls will spend the night with Hamilton women science majors. The next morning, the girls participate in two sessions of "hands-on" science activities while their parents and teachers will go to workshops (focused on what they can do to encourage their daughters/students in science and math and giving them some tools to do it with.) Following lunch, the girls will present the posters they made during their science sessions.
PUBLICATIONS
Annual newsletter.
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