Feminist Utopias

With every feminist critique of contemporary arrangements lies a vision of the world beyond–a feminist imagination. This panel explores artistic, scholarly, and activist practice and the utopian visions that drive and sustain it. What kinds of worlds do feminist, queer, trans, and other visionaries dream of? How do those worlds not only disrupt the existing gendered, sexual, racial, and imperialist capitalist order, but offer the possibility of new forms of collective and creative existence, and new forms of collaboration?  What insights do these utopian visions have for feminist technologies, embodiments, labor relations, ecological arrangements, and creative practice? What fractures or failures do our utopian visions reveal? How do they link our feminist histories to our feminist futures? How do they begin to enact those visions in the present? 

Panelists:

•  Adrienne Keene, Joukousky Family Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brown University

  Adrienne Keene is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies. Her research areas include college access, transition, and persistence for American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Students, including the role of pre-college access programs in student success. Additionally, she examines representations of Native peoples in popular culture, Native cultural appropriation in fashion and design, and the ways that Indigenous peoples are using the internet, social media, and new media to challenge misrepresentations and create new and innovative spaces for art and activism.

  As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Dr. Keene has a deep personal commitment to exploring research methodologies that empower Native communities and privilege Native voices and perspectives, with the ultimate goal of increasing educational outcomes for Native students. She is also dedicated to pushing back against stereotypes and misrepresentations of Native peoples on her blog, Native Appropriations (nativeappropriations.com), which has received national and international attention as a voice on contemporary Indigenous issues. 

• Frances Roberts-Gregory, Program Director, Initiative for Energy Justice, Harvard University

  Dr. Frances Roberts-Gregory joins the Harvard University Center for the Environment as a Postdoctoral Environmental Fellow. She formerly served as a Program Director at the Initiative for Energy Justice at Northeastern University and Climate Justice Program Officer at the Foundation for Louisiana. Her feminist activist research explores the experiences of women and youth of color advocating for environmental, energy, and climate justice, with a specific focus on Black and Indigenous women in Gulf Coast Louisiana. She completed her doctoral studies at UC Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and is a co-founding member of the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal. Frances is also the advisory board co-chair for the Hive Fund for Climate & Gender Justice and supports the Women and Gender Constituency at UNFCCC COPs. Her areas of scholarship include: Gender and Climate Change; Feminist Environmentalism(s); Environmental, Energy, and Climate Justice; Community Geography.

• Payal Kumar, Multidisciplinary cultural worker

  Payal (they/them) is a multidisciplinary cultural worker, sexual and reproductive health justice advocate, doula, and organizer whose work is rooted in the in-betweens. Currently based on Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Wampanoag territories, they invoke the power of intergenerational community building to construct tender new possibilities of being beyond borders and capital. Their illustrations, zines, spoken word pieces, and workshops have found a home across Chinatown walls and grassroots protests, in gallery spaces like the Museum of Fine Arts and international TRANS* Future Archives, and through collaborative learning spaces like the Allied Media Conference and the School of Arts and Social Justice Boston. payal's visual work alchemizes folk art from their ancestral villages in Bihar with traditional Americana motifs to amplify peoples’ movements and explore the in-between spaces of trauma, coloniality, queerness, and embodiment. Most recently, they were a speaker at the 2022 BIWOC Gathering Circle to speak on racial trauma, violence within medical systems, and coordinated statewide expansion of HRT and abortion access for patients facing structural barriers to care. They are an organizer with Subcontinental Drift Boston, a monthly multilingual open mic centering South Asian diasporic voices, and with the Boston South Asian Coalition (BSAC), a transnational organizing collective fighting for labor, race, caste, and gender equity. Through creative strategies, they cultivate playful spaces that challenge the state's monopoly on Imagination so that we may all fully unearth and activate our collective power.

• Yin Q, Red Canary Song

  Yin Q is a Queer, Chinese American writer/producer, sex worker rights activist, and mother. Yin is a Lead Organizer with Red Canary Song and the Creative Director of Kink Out.