Seminar
2018-2019 IRW Seminar Call
Public Catastrophes, Private Losses
The Institute for Research on Women (IRW) announces its twenty-second annual interdisciplinary seminar, “Public Catastrophes, Private Losses.” Wars, genocides, forced migration, and terrorism, as well as health epidemics and natural disasters remake lives. In the aftermath of physical and emotional dislocation, how do people process a sense of loss and rebuild their lives? A growing body of scholarship suggests that the impacts of catastrophic events vary across different contexts, bleeding into multiple domains. This seminar looks at the ways public catastrophes imprint themselves on lives, how individuals, as members of groups, narrate, process, and grapple with legacies of loss, and how states and non-governmental organizations address such events, serving the needs of some populations better than others.
Inspired by feminism, we are particularly interested in the ways the personal and public are intertwined, and how, in the aftermath of catastrophe, families and communities become repositories for loss, silence, mourning, witnessing, reconstruction, and reparation. What are the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to make sense out of overwhelming events or processes that have profoundly disrupted the life of their family, community or nation? How can states and other social institutions best respond to their needs? Recent social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, suggest that social inequalities shape understandings of whose lives count, and what kinds of deaths are grievable. We live in a precarious world, where the lives of so many are considered expendable.
We invite applications from faculty and advanced graduate students (ABD status required) whose projects explore aspects of our theme. Such studies may examine any time period(s) or geographical location(s) and be rooted in any disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach(es). Some possible topics relevant to the seminar theme include, but are not limited to:
- The effects of migration, exile, and dislocation
- Post-disaster recovery efforts
- Family memories of catastrophe
- Disasters and environmental racism
- Reparations
- “Disaster capitalism”
- Exceptional versus the “everyday” trauma
- False memories and the politics of witnessing
- Necropolitics
- Therapeutic culture and victimhood
- Sexual abuse during times of war
- Epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of trauma
- Analyzing and archiving survivor narratives
- PTSD and the medicalization of trauma
- Trauma-descendant groups and memory work
- Museums and memorialization
- Trauma-based social movements
Individuals from all disciplines, schools, and programs on all Rutgers campuses are welcome to apply. We also welcome proposals from Rutgers-based writers and activists.
The seminar will support up to eight Rutgers Faculty Fellows and up to four Graduate Fellows from the New Brunswick, RBHS, Camden, and Newark campuses. Seminar fellows are expected to attend all Thursday morning seminar meetings during Fall and Spring Semesters 2018-2019, provide a paper for discussion in the seminar, and open a seminar session with an extended response to another scholar’s paper.
Graduate students will receive a $5,000 stipend for the year as seminar fellows. Faculty fellows will receive either $4,000 in research support or a one-course teaching release for one semester to enable them to participate in the year-long seminar. In the latter case, departments will be reimbursed for instructional replacements at the minimum contractual PTL rate. Financial arrangements will be made in advance of the seminar with the department chairs and/or appropriate deans.
Applications should be received at IRW by Thursday, January 11, 2018. All decisions of the selection committee are final. 2018-2019 Seminar Fellows will be notified by Friday March 2, 2018. Please contact IRW at
2019-2020 IRW Seminar Call
This is What Democracy Looks Like: Feminist Re-imaginings
In January 2017, when millions of women took the streets to protest the Trump presidency, they chanted “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” But what does democracy look like? And what should it look like?
Today democracy is under attack across the globe. The weakness of traditional political parties has enabled the rise of aggressive and stridently nationalistic strongmen. At the same time, politics increasingly takes the form of positional warfare, making compromise impossible. We will reflect upon democracy’s history and potential futures during the Institute for Research on Women’s twenty-third interdisciplinary seminar, “This is What Democracy Looks Like: Feminist Re-imaginings.” How do we imagine democracy, construct it, critique it, and defend it? How can feminism help us to think through, and reclaim a sense of common purpose, cultivate empathy, and care for the most vulnerable?
While enabled by electoral mechanisms and constitutions, many argue that democracy is much more than that: it is a way of thinking, a set of values, and even a way of being. For the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the right to act and speak in public in ways that matter is the essence of democracy. Others focus on ideals of equality, fairness, or justice, or on processes such as deliberation and protest. Feminism has reinvigorated such discussions by enlarging the scope of the political imagination to include women, people of color, as well as the economically vulnerable, engaging many of those who have long been marginalized. But a focus on identities, without a sense of the common good, can also lead to fragmentation and the shrinkage of the “demos.”
What is the role of democratic citizenship in a global world that is now rife with nationalism? How can we acknowledge the role of gender, race, class, sexual, and other differences, while reclaiming a sense of our commonality?
We invite applications from faculty and advanced graduate students (ABD status required) whose projects explore aspects of our theme. Such studies may examine any time period(s) or geographical location(s) and be rooted in any disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach(es). Some possible topics relevant to the seminar theme include, but are not limited to:
- The ethics and politics of democracy
- Classical and contemporary democracies in perspective
- Facts, falsehoods, and the erosion of trust
- Borders, belonging, and citizenship
- Democracy in art and the literary imagination
- Money, corporations, and politics
- Psychology, therapeutic culture, and technologies of democratic selfhood
- Sexuality and citizenship
- Civic education and political socialization
- Exclusion as a threat to democracy
- Elections and electoral processes
- Environmental democracy
- Nationalism, transnationalism, and the mass media
- Women and social movements on the left and right
- Community organizing, movement building, and transformative politics
- Emotions, apathy, and participation
- Social media, political ideologies, and public opinion
Individuals from all disciplines, schools, and programs on all Rutgers campuses are welcome to apply. We also welcome proposals from Rutgers-based writers and activists.
The seminar will support up to eight Rutgers Faculty Fellows and up to four Graduate Fellows from the New Brunswick, RBHS, Camden, and Newark campuses. Seminar fellows are expected to attend all Thursday morning seminar meetings during Fall and Spring Semesters 2019-2020, provide a paper for discussion in the seminar, and open a seminar session with an extended response to another scholar’s paper.
Graduate students will receive a $5,000 stipend for the year as seminar fellows. Faculty fellows will receive either $4,000 in research support or a one-course teaching release for one semester to enable them to participate in the year-long seminar. In the latter case, departments will be reimbursed for instructional replacements at the minimum contractual PTL rate. Financial arrangements will be made in advance of the seminar with the department chairs and/or appropriate deans.
Applications should be received at IRW by Thursday, January 31, 2019. All decisions of the selection committee are final. 2019-2020 Seminar Fellows will be notified by Friday, March 1, 2019. Please contact IRW at
**Download application materials for the 2019-20 seminar**
2020-2021 IRW Seminar Call
Knowing Bodies: Science and the Sex/Gender Distinction
The distinction between sex and gender, nature and culture, has provided a foundation for feminist thought and activism over the past half-century. Today, however, this distinction is increasingly being called into question. Across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, many now ask whether biology and culture are truly distinct phenomena. Scholars are also calling into question the idea that one can even think about “sex” without gender or race. Clearly, the meaning of the sex/gender distinction has shifted over time, as different generational cohorts have revised their understandings in relation to expert knowledge, emergent sensibilities, and dissident worldviews. This IRW seminar considers conversations about gender, bodies, and science through the prism of cultural and generational change, exploring the growing complexity of how we understand sex, gender, and sexuality.
We invite applications from faculty and advanced graduate students (ABD status required) whose projects explore aspects of our theme. Such studies may examine any time period(s) or geographical location(s) and be rooted in any disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach(es). Some possible topics relevant to the seminar theme include, but are not limited to:
- Feminist genealogies and the sex/gender distinction
- Subjectivity and the body
- Medicalization
- Lay expertise and the challenge to science
- Sex, gender, and racial differences in scientific knowledge and biomedical research
- Trans embodiment
- Feminism, the LGBTQ movement, and popular attitudes toward medicine and the body
- The gender politics of psychoanalysis
- Neuropsychoanalysis
- Gender and the aging body
- The politics of cosmetic and gender-affirming surgery
- Gender and the pharmaceutical industry
- The science and politics of reproductive and sexual health
- Changing socio-legal understandings of bodies
Individuals from all disciplines, schools, and programs on all Rutgers campuses are welcome to apply. We also welcome proposals from Rutgers-based writers and activists.
The seminar will support up to eight Rutgers Faculty Fellows and up to four Graduate Fellows from the New Brunswick, RBHS, Camden, and Newark campuses. Seminar fellows are expected to attend all Thursday morning seminar meetings during Fall and Spring Semesters 2020-2021, provide a paper for discussion in the seminar, and open a seminar session with an extended response to another scholar’s paper.
Graduate students will receive a $5,000 stipend for the year as seminar fellows. Faculty fellows will receive either $4,000 in research support or a one-course teaching release for one semester to enable them to participate in the year-long seminar. In the latter case, departments will be reimbursed for instructional replacements at the minimum contractual PTL rate. Financial arrangements will be made in advance of the seminar with the department chairs and/or appropriate deans.
Applications should be received at IRW by Friday, January 31, 2020. All decisions of the selection committee are final. 2020-2021 Seminar Fellows will be notified by Wednesday March 4, 2020. Please contact IRW at
2021-2022 IRW Seminar Call
Futures
Icecaps are melting. Seas are rising. A pandemic rages. Racism is endemic. Fires burn. Poverty flourishes. Authoritarians rule. At a time of widespread skepticism toward science, and when leaders sow distrust in facts and truth, it is more difficult than ever to think of the future in affirmative ways. For intellectuals on the right and the left, the future can conjure visions of the end of history, or the sense that there is “no future.” In the face of these challenges, can we imagine alternatives?
Artists, writers, and theorists continue to imagine different worlds, as do progressive social movement activists. Participants in the worldwide citizens’ movement for social change and global justice proclaim, “Another World Is Possible.” Feminists and queer people have often been at the forefront of these dissident struggles, imagining alternative pathways to the future. Futures and futurity have often been understood in relation to linear notions of time, and understandings of progress. But queer theorists challenge normative teleology and as theorist José Esteban Muñoz put it, “The future is queerness’s domain.” Perhaps we need new conceptualizations of time and space that imagine futures in alternative ways. Visual theorist Tina Campt suggests that we “imagine beyond current fact to envision that which is not but must be.”
The 2021-2022 IRW Seminar takes “Futures” as its theme. We invite applications from faculty and advanced graduate students (ABD status required) whose projects explore aspects of our theme. Such studies may examine any time period(s) or geographical location(s) and be rooted in any disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach(es). Some possible topics relevant to the seminar theme include, but are not limited to:
- Climate change and environmental futures
- Abolitionist futures
- Afrofuturism and Afropessimism
- Digital technology and the future of work
- Education after Covid-19
- Liberal democracies: rethinking “the end of history”
- Technoscience and reproductive futurism
- Indigenous futures
- Speculative fictions and alternative histories
- Contingency, teleology, and history
- Myths of progress
- Alternative modes of collecting data and measuring futures
- Queer temporalities
Individuals from all disciplines, schools, and programs on all Rutgers campuses are welcome to apply. We also welcome proposals from Rutgers-based writers and activists.
The seminar will support up to eight Rutgers Faculty Fellows and up to four Graduate Fellows from the New Brunswick, RBHS, Camden, and Newark campuses. Seminar fellows are expected to attend all Thursday morning seminar meetings during Fall and Spring Semesters 2021-2022, provide a paper for discussion in the seminar, and open a seminar session with an extended response to another scholar’s paper.
Graduate students will receive a $5,000 stipend for the year as seminar fellows. Faculty fellows will receive either $4,000 in research support or a one-course teaching release for one semester to enable them to participate in the year-long seminar. In the latter case, departments will be reimbursed for instructional replacements at the minimum contractual PTL rate. Financial arrangements will be made in advance of the seminar with the department chairs and/or appropriate deans.
Applications should be received at IRW by Friday, January 29, 2021. All decisions of the selection committee are final. 2020-2021 Seminar Fellows will be notified by Friday March 5, 2021. Please contact IRW at
2022-2023 IRW Seminar Call
Care
Care work is essential work. It enables us to raise children and support the sick and disabled. It is the hidden backbone of our economy and our society. While care is necessary for the survival of our families, our communities, and the species, national leaders rarely prioritize care, and many are downright hostile to it. Witness the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly separating children from their parents at the Texas-Mexico border, and former First Lady Melania Trump’s jacket proclaiming “I really don't care, do you?” on visiting children in an immigrant detention center.
In contrast to this performance of callous disregard, care has long been a focus for feminists. In the 1980s, psychologist Carol Gilligan argued that women and girls were more likely to employ an “ethic of care” which made them attentive to the needs of others. Similarly, Sara Ruddick argued that “maternal thinking,” a set of values and ethical judgments derived from the ties between mother and child, should inform feminist models of ethics, politics, and policy. Another strain in feminist thinking about care foregrounds women’s domestic labor, which tends to be un- or undercompensated. According to feminist economist Ipek Ilkkaracan, women’s unpaid care work, including household production, and volunteer and community work, encompasses over 16 billion hours per day, or approximately 2 billion full-time jobs. The language of care can obscure the racialized and gendered power relationships that structure domestic labor and are residues of slavery, writes feminist historian Premilla Nadasen.
Indeed, most domestic workers in the United States are women of color. Debra Lancaster from the Rutgers Center for Women and Work notes that 95 percent of home health aides in NJ are women, more than half are immigrants, and more than 70 percent are Black or Latina. Paid care workers, such as home health aides who care for the sick and the elderly, are among the lowest paid workers. Increasingly, low-income women from the Global South leave their families to care for the children of more affluent families in the Global North. As Rhacel Salazar Parreñas notes, the “international division of reproductive labor” tends to benefit rich countries at the expense of poor countries. When migrant women attempt to provide care for their own children in their countries of origin as well as their employers’ children in the Global North, it creates a “care deficit” for the former.
Clearly, care-work is a political matter. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” wrote Audre Lorde in 1988. Recently, some have described a “care crisis,” precipitated by the growing pressures on family life, specifically mothers, and exacerbated by the COVID 19 pandemic. This crisis emerges in relation to the high cost of childcare, the shortage of childcare workers and caregivers for elderly and disabled populations, and the absence of a national childcare policy in US. Still, many low-income families have always been in survival mode. While some seek government solutions, others—often out of necessity—have pursued collective care projects. From STAR house, founded by trans activist Marsha P. Johnson in 1970 to provide sustenance, care, and community for New York City’s trans youth, through the queer communities of care created in response to the AIDS crisis, to the Ballroom communities of the present, care has been an important aspect of queer life. Writing in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, trans scholar/activist Dean Spade, advocates for mutual aid to help people meet “each other’s needs based in shared commitments to dignity, care, and justice.”
This seminar will address feminist and queer approaches to care. We invite applications from faculty and advanced graduate students (ABD status required) whose projects explore aspects of our theme. Such studies may examine any time period(s) or geographical location(s) and be rooted in any disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach(es). Some possible topics relevant to the seminar theme include, but are not limited to:
- The “care crisis”
- Racial capitalism, care, and survival
- Welfare states’ comparative social policies around childcare
- Impacts of COVID on care work
- Care and the political imagination
- Caring as a human rights and humanitarian issue
- Transformations of masculinity and the work-family divide
- “Self-care” and the limitations of individualism
- Demographic shifts and rising demand for paid carers
- Globalization of care work
- Emotional labor and the intimacy of care work
- Environmental stewardship and caring for non-humans
- Speculative futures and “planetary care”
Individuals from all disciplines, schools, and programs on all Rutgers campuses are welcome to apply. We also welcome proposals from Rutgers-based writers and activists.
The seminar will support up to eight Rutgers Faculty Fellows and up to four Graduate Fellows from the New Brunswick, RBHS, Camden, and Newark campuses. Seminar fellows are expected to attend all Thursday morning seminar meetings during Fall and Spring Semesters 2022-2023, provide a paper for discussion in the seminar, and open a seminar session with an extended response to another scholar’s paper.
Graduate students will receive a $5,000 stipend for the year as seminar fellows. Faculty fellows will receive either $4,000 in research support or a one-course teaching release for one semester to enable them to participate in the year-long seminar. In the latter case, departments will be reimbursed for instructional replacements at the minimum contractual PTL rate. Financial arrangements will be made in advance of the seminar with the department chairs and/or appropriate deans.
Applications should be received at IRW by Friday, January 28, 2022. All decisions of the selection committee are final. 2022-2023 Seminar Fellows will be notified by Friday March 4, 2022. Please contact IRW at