Institute for Advanced Feminist Research

U.S. public discourse on issues of justice—war, incarceration, gender violence, global capitalism—has, in recent years, depended increasingly on modes of expertise that exclude feminist engagements. Meanwhile, the academic environment has seen important developments in feminism’s ability to theorize explanations for such crises and also to diversify responses to them. Far from signaling an end to the relevance of feminist interventions, the current near absence of public representation and simultaneous proliferation of robust academic literatures requires a shift in the conventional approach to isolated academic labor. Feminism has generally encouraged collective strategies for the production of ideas. In this spirit, the multicampus research program and initiative on transnationalizing justice mobilizes the existing but loose network of feminist scholars within the UC system who have been grappling with the consequences of globalizing processes—including intellectual ones—through a shift to transnational theories of justice that attend at once to geopolitics, race, and other axes of power. Together, these scattered efforts have the potential to make a strong argument for the necessity of feminist thinking to the resolution of social problems, including and perhaps especially the misidentification of such problems—crime for imprisonment, gender violence for imperialism, religious fundamentalism for narrow secularism.