Institute for Research on Women and Gender

Feminist Thought and Scholarship

Feminist Interventions. In addition to undergraduate and graduate teaching, the institute sponsors an annual public lecture series entitled Feminist Interventions, and has recently hosted conferences or colloquia on sexual violence against women, nationalism and sexuality, and queer theory.

A new interdisciplinary faculty workshop on "Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism" began in spring 2005, convened by Lila Abu-Lughod (Director, IRWAG) and Anupama Rao (History, Barnard). The workshop will explore critically the global locations and applications of discourses of women's rights and/as human rights. Our focus will be on the challenges scholars and theorists have been developing to the liberal underpinnings and transnational institutional circuits of this form of politics and policy-making. While acknowledging the emancipatory intent of humanitarian and women's rights discourse and the useful legal gains it makes possible, scholars with deep knowledge of particular regions and cultural traditions now question both the universalism of the concepts of “the human” and "woman" and the self-representations of liberalism (e.g. examining how and when it comes to be applied to disadvantaged groups, what talk of “rights” and even “tolerance” might hide in terms of systemic inequality, structural violence, and imperial relations; and what a serious study of “illiberal” religious traditions can contribute to relativizing liberalism and locating it historically and culturally). What would deep historical and social scientific study and an interrogation of the uneven geopolitical distribution of liberalism contribute to understanding the dilemmas faced by those working for women's rights transnationally, or in national settings outside the West?

Feminist News

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Women's and Gender Studies Prize

All Columbia, General Studies, and Barnard College undergraduates are invited to submit their best papers for consideration. Papers from every discipline, on any topic within “women's and gender studies”—broadly defined—will be judged anonymously by an interdisciplinary committee of Columbia and Barnard faculty and graduate students.