NCRW and its member centers strive to use research as a tool for effecting social change and action. During this session, member centers were asked to help shape a research agenda for NCRW that is both fundable and able to influence the public discourse. Moderator Linda Basch led a discussion geared toward identifying the most pressing issues, domestically and globally, that need to be addressed as we approach the new millennium.

Facilitators: Stanlie James (Director, Women's Studies Research Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison); Heather Johnston Nicholson; Abigail Stewart (Director, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan)

Roundtable Discussion Leaders: Electa Arenal (Director, Center for the Study of Women and Society, CUNY); Alice Dan (Director, Center for Research on Women and Gender, University of Illinois at Chicago); Carolyn Farrel (Director, Gannon Center for Women and Leadership, Loyola University Chicago); Cynthia Secor (Director, HERS Mid-America); Robin Sheets (Director, Center for Women's Studies, University of Cinncinnati); Irene Tinker (President, Equity Policy Center); Beth Willinger (Director, Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, Tulane University); Cynthia Deitch (Associate Director, Women's Studies Program, George Washington University); Mariam Chamberlain (Founding President, NCRW)

"Transforming Women's Studies Paradigms and Pedagogies: On the Politics and Ethics of Feminist Academic Practices" presented by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Associate Professor of Women's Studies, Hamilton College; Core Faculty, The Union Institute Graduate School)

Respondents: Sandra Morgen (Director, Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon); Barbara Ellen Smith (Director, Center for Research on Women, Memphis State University)

This session addressed the transformations in feminist theory and knowledge resulting from processes of globalization, post-colonialism, transnationalism, and development.

Moderator Janice Monk (Executive Director, SIROW) explained that the impetus for the session arose from the Women's Studies, Area and International Studies curriculum transformation project (WSAIS), funded by the Ford Foundation. The WSAIS project generated many questions regarding the integration of a global perspective within US feminist theory, and the ramifications of doing so on feminist theorizing, pedagogical practice and activism. Janice Petrovich (Deputy Director, Education, Knowledge, and Religion, The Ford Foundation) introduced the discussion of these issues by noting the Ford Foundation's deep commitment to gender issues over the years. She also remarked that the research and analysis conducted by NCRW member centers helps the foundation understand both the challenges facing women throughout the world, and the collective power that can be wielded to implement changes.

Chandra Mohanty began by asserting that the "new knowledges" produced by disciplines such as Women's Studies and Ethnic and Racial Studies have explicitly focused on questions of power and justice, helping us to rethink our ideas about education, democracy, and citizenship. As a result, we need to focus on political economy and economic literacy within feminist teaching and theorizing, and we must foreground questions about the politics of producing knowledge in feminist practice. In other words, as feminists, we must ask questions about the implications and effects of our theorizing on various communities of women and the relationships between them.

Her presentation addressed the politics of knowledge in feminist research and pedagogy on globalization and privatization, offering data from two different sites for the production of knowledge about globalization -- grassroots struggles against its effects in this country; and academic discussions regarding integrating global and local perspectives in Women's Studies curricula and pedagogy. The former, grassroots political struggles, illuminate a politics of knowledge which is anchored in people's struggles in poor and working communities, which within the United States are defined out of the purview of citizenship. The latter raises questions about how we teach in Women's Studies about the economic, political, and conceptual issues which are raised by this analysis of globalization.

In thinking about these questions, she argued, we need to foreground a paradigm of democracy which stresses power, history, memory, relational analysis, economic and social justice, and ethics. These are the issues that emerge as central to our analysis of both globalization and privatization, which is the explicit form political and economic globalization have taken in the United States. The process of privatization redefines citizenship, and recolonizes poor and working people, especially women, just as structural adjustment policies in the Third World have impacted poor people and women disproportionately, and have been policies of which gender was constitutive.

Privatization exemplifies an emerging ideology in which profit motives reign supreme and wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, in which individual benefit dominates any notion of the collective good. Nevertheless, Mohanty pointed out, public and private are integrally related. The histories of people's struggles to have protected rights coincide with struggles to be defined and treated as citizens, as people who have properly public lives. People who've been denied public rights have not therefore had private rights. In this sense, to be privatized is to be turned into something less than a person, to be owned and used by a proper person, to come under the control of someone who exercises the rights of a citizen and can demand that rights to his/her private property will be protected by the state of which he/she is a citizen. Struggles to equalize genders, races, and classes have centered around issues of what and who has public rights. To fight against being privatized is to fight to have both a public and private life, to fight to be a citizen in a democratic polity. She gave two examples of grassroots feminist literacy programs that have been successful in using this analytic framework, one which also undergirds many of the resistance practices to structural adjustment policies developed by Third World women.

International feminism, to be an inclusive feminism, embraces an approach emphasizing the articulation of many voices. Calls for global sisterhood, however, are often constructed on a center/periphery model where women of color constitute the periphery. Race is erased from any conception of the international, which is based on nation, and is devoid of race. Also, there is an explicit separation between international and domestic feminisms, and of the ways they are mutually constituted. Underlying the conception of the international is a notion of universal patriarchy operating in a transhistorical way to subordinate all women. Methodological strategies, therefore, need to make visible the organizational practices of third world women through a discrete case study approach. International is also collapsed into the culture and values of capitalism.

Missing from these definitions of international/transnational are three elements: 1) a way of thinking about women in similar contexts across the world in different geographical spaces, rather than as all women across the world; 2) an understanding of unequal relationships among and between peoples, rather than a set of traits embodied in all non-US citizens, particularly because US citizenship continues to be premised upon a white, eurocentric, masculinist, heterosexist regime; 3) a consideration of the term international in relation to an analysis of economic, political, and ideological processes which foreground the operations of race and capitalism. To talk about feminist praxis in global contexts would involve shifting the unit of analysis from local, regional, and national culture to relations and processes across cultures. Grounding analyses in particular local feminist practices is necessary, but we also need to understand the local in relation to larger cross-national processes. Mohanty advocated a shift in the conception of political organizing and mobilization across borders, as well as in ideologies with respect to justice, democracy, solidarity, accountability, engagement, etc.

In her response to Chandra Mohanty's presentation, Sandra Morgen underlined one key question: Where should theory come from? She stated that in foregrounding the ways global capitalist economic processes in different locations draw on, reinforce, and naturalize particular race and gender hierarchies, Chandra directs feminists back to activism and action as integral to the production of knowledge. Drawing from her own research on welfare reform, she argued that understanding it as structural adjustment helps foster a global dialogue regarding the role of the state in ensuring basic needs and rights, thereby creating the basis for a politics of solidarity.

Barbara Ellen Smith addressed the seemingly contradictory nature of the process of globalization. On one hand, she said, we have a concentration of new linkages, of bringing people into new relationships. But at the same time, we have trends in the opposite direction towards privatization, fragmentation, destruction of community, individuation. For many people, even though globalization may mean being placed in relationship with people all over the world, the direct lived experience of globalization is a loss of relationship, the destruction of social bonds, being thrown back on one's own individual resources, which for women of color and working class women are getting thinner all the time. In this context, it's no accident that we see an increase of political movements globally that are trying to assert a sense of community. This kind of community organizing,, however, brings up two very tricky political questions: 1) if the issue is defense of community, how can that be done in a feminist way, which is often seen as a profound threat to community?; and, 2) how can it be done in a way that is not just localized and particularistic, but that reaches outward and transnationally?

In terms of the role of feminist theory within this context, Smith argued that its purpose must be to analyze the global rather than the particular, and to emphasize the relational. Activism is outstripping theory, she maintained, and if we who have the luxury of doing intellectual work would seek to theorize the common context in which these diverse struggles are taking place, we might also be able to answer that most fundamental political question: On what basis can these diverse struggles unite?

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