Doing Feminisms In Troubled Times: Rage, Respectability, and Resistance
We live in troubled times, in a moment that has challenged what it means to do feminist work across intellectual fields and geopolitical spaces. Gender and sexuality studies programs and departments across the globe are facing increasing opposition, and have become key ideological sites upon which citizens and governments are waging political wars about free speech and the place of higher education in our world today. This panel engages how we think about our political present using feminist methods. Focused on key issues of rage, respectability, and resistance, panelists will critically address what it means to write scholarship focused on feminist methods, race, and/or xenophobia, in a moment of profound uncertainty for students and faculty who focus on gender and sexuality in work across academic disciplines. Are there norms of respectability that define feminist work in the academy today, and if so, how might we work against normative structures? What is the place of feminist rage to fight against critical issues that affect marginalized and excluded peoples? What forms of resistance might we engage to produce change in our current political climate?
This faculty development panel features three key feminist scholars from across disciplines, Sarah J. Jackson (University of Pennsylvania), Saher Selod (Simmons University), and Carla Kaplan (Northeastern University). The panel will address a range of critiques of feminist and gender studies, from debates about triggers in the classroom to white supremacist condemnations of feminist, queer and anti-racist intellectual work. Together, we will think about what it means to teach feminist scholarship today, and how we might utilize feminist and queer intellectual work to create substantive social and political change in a time of precariousness and unease.
Location:
Northeastern University
Cabral Center
Sarah J. Jackson is a Presidential Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies how media, journalism, and technology are used by and represent marginalized publics, with a focus on communication by and about Black and feminist activists. Her first book Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press (Routledge 2014) examines the relationship between Black celebrity activism, journalism, and American politics.
Her forthcoming book Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press 2020) focuses on the use of Twitter in contemporary social movements. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Communication, the International Journal of Press Politics, and Feminist Media Studies, among others. Jackson is frequently called on as an expert by local and national media outlets including NPR, PBS, the Associated Press, and the New York Times.
A founding member of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, Jackson also sits on the board of the Social Science Research Council’s Disinformation Research Mapping Initiative. She was a Fall 2018 fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and is a 2019 New America National Fellow.
Before joining the Annenberg faculty, Jackson was an associate professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. She holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota and a M.A. in Communication from the University of Michigan.
Carla Kaplan is a Professor of English and Gender Studies and the Chair of the Editorial Board of Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture & Society. Professor Kaplan has published five books, including the award-winning Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance and Zora Neale Huston: A Life in Letters, both New York Times Notable Books. She writes occasionally for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and The Nation. Kaplan has been a resident fellow at numerous humanities centers and institutions, including the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York City Public Library, the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of several most-prestigious research, teaching, and public service fellowships, incuding the Guggenheim and the National Endowment of the Humanities “Public Scholar” Award.
Saher Selod is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Simmons University. She joined the Department of Sociology in 2012 after completing her PhD at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests are in race and ethnicity, gender and religion. Her research examines how Muslim Americans experience racialization in the United States. Her book Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror (Rutgers University Press 2018) examines how Muslim men and Muslim women experience gendered forms of racialization through their surveillance by the state and by private citizens. She has published several articles in journals like Sociology Compass, the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. She is currently on the editorial board of Ethnic and Racial Studies.