2007-2008 Speakers
2006-2007 Speakers
2005-2006 Speakers
2003-2004 Speakers
March 2005
Greta Gaard has been an environmental educator and activist since 1989. She teaches in the Women’s Studies Departments at the University of Minnesota and at Metropolitan State University. The author of numerous essays on ecological feminism, social movements, and queer theory, Gaard’s books include: ECOFEMINISM: WOMEN, ANIMALS, NATURE (1993), ECOLOGICAL POLITICS: ECOFEMINISTS AND THE GREENS (1998), and ECOFEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM (1998). She currently serves on the Board of Directors for EAGLE, working on issues of water privatization on the Great Lakes.
"A Feminist Perspective on the Corporatization of Water."
How should we think about water? Is water a basic human right, or an economic product for sale? This presentation explores the question of water privatization and its impact on communities here in the United States and abroad. It will explain how water becomes a feminist issue, particularly in less developed countries where water-gathering and water-maintenance is seen as part as women’s gendered role. In the U.S., a feminist perspective on water takes a more structural approach, building on an ecological feminist theory of democracy. Corporations are quietly approaching city and county councils with proposals for privatizing public water systems, and decisions are often made without public participation or knowledge. An ecological feminist and democratic perspective on water maintains that ordinary citizens need to know the costs and benefits of privatization, and be able to develop strategies for democratizing these decisions that affect their own local water treatment and delivery systems.
Articles:
WOMEN, WATER, ENERGY An Ecofeminist Approach
Water Privatization: Who Owns Great Lakes Water?
Toward a Queer Ecofeminism
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February 2005
Tara Mateik is an artist, curator, and activist living in New York City. Entering both political and biological cells as an ersatz scientist, his work critically explores the gendered signifiers and codes of these fantastic mythologies through performance, video, and intervention.
Screening of TOILET TRAINING: LAW AND ORDER IN THE BATHROOM - Tara Mateik with The Sylvia Rivera Law Project. (2003, 26 min.) Healthy adults use the bathroom 4 - 8 times during the day and 1 - 2 times per night. TOILET TRAINING surveys the policing of gender in restrooms; persistent discrimination, harassment, and violence towards people who do not culturally fit as male of female. What happens when laws are broken and order is disrupted in the bathroom? Through anecdotal case studies, TOILET TRAINING focuses on bathroom access in public space, in schools, and at work and related problems associated with "holding it." Concluding with examples of policy change, TOILET TRAINING provides a necessary foundation to address this overlooked issue.
Dr. Aurora Levins Morales is a poet, historian, and activist, who seeks to explore her own position as a feminist at the intersection of Puerto Rican and Jewish cultures. She has written two books, REMEDIOS: STORIES OF EARTH AND IRON FROM THE HISTORY PUERTORRIQUENAS (Beacon Press, 2001) and MEDICINE STORIES: HISTORY, CULTURE, AND THE POLITICS OF INTEGRITY (South End Press, 1998), co-authored GETTING HOME ALIVE (Firebrand Press, 1986) with her mother, Rosario Morales, and participated in the collective editing of TELLING TO LIVE: LATINA FEMINIST TESTIMONIOS (Duke, 2001). Her poems and short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies as well as MS magazine, CALLALOO, BRIDGES, and THE AMERICAN VOICE. Her latest project is a spoken word CD entitled SHEMA: WRITINGS ON LOVE AND WAR.
"History, Poetry, and Justice"
A combination of lecture and reading that will explore the ways that history, storytelling, and social change are connected. Themes included with cover areas of Women's and Gender Studies, Hispanic Studies, American Studies, and History.
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December 2004
Lisa Armstrong is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 2002, she published a book about American theories of organizing women from 1964 to the present entitled, Retreat from Organization: US Feminism Reconceptualized. Presently her research focuses on the daily talk of politics in one Indian women's organization with over six and a half million members, the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA). For the past ten years, she has worked alongside AIDWA to record the voices of organizing work in neighborhood, state-based and nationwide campaigns for women's rights in the face of structural adjustments propelled by the IMF/World Bank.
Solidarity Research: How does solidarity provoke feminist research yet remain apart from scrutiny? Largely unexamined for the questions of culpability it holds at bay, solidarity suggests a sky to the palpable limits of academic analysis. Wars (Vietnam, Iraq), fieldwork (Haryana, India) and the archive (Madison and New Delhi) offer sites to envision the potent vulnerabilities of solidarity and scholarship.
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November 2004
Margo Okazawa-Rey is Director, 
Women's Leadership Institute Visiting Professor, Women's Studies, Mills College in Oakland, CA. She is also Professor Emerita of Social Work at San Francisco State University and has held the Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Women’s Studies at Hamilton College and the National Endowment for the Humanities/Jack Gray Chair at the University of Hartford. Professor Okazawa-Rey’s articles on transnational feminist praxis, militarism, feminist movements and critical multicultural education are published in journals such as Affilia, Social Justice, Peace Review and the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies.
'GI Jane' or Johnetta and Juana: Gender, Race, Class, and Nation of US Militarism War is sine qua non of militarism - the apex, the climax, the peak experience - the point of all the preparation. Militarism and militarization are broader phenomena that involve institutions, practices, values, ideology, cultures, and that are inextricably intertwined with patriarchy, misogyny, racism, ethnocentrism, and fundamentalisms. Talk will focus on the various processes and outcomes of 
increased militarization of the US, using analytic lenses of gender, race, class, and nation.
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October 2004
Snapshots of Identity: Tales from a Queer Crip
Ann Kranz, shares stories about her life through poetry, prose, and song. She was born with a rare form of Muscular Dystrophy and has used a power-wheelchair since age 12. She grew up in a small, rural community in southern Minnesota as the fifth of six children, the only one with a disability. She is fascinated by the critical moments that helped to shape her identity as a disabled woman, feminist, and lesbian and attempts to capture them as "snapshots" in her written work.
Kranz will read from her manuscript, "Welcome To
My World: Exploring Disability Through Poetry and Prose," which she completed as part of her Master
of Liberal Studies degree from the University of Minnesota. Kranz is a program director at the
Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota. She has recently been selected as one of the 2004-05 President's Emerging Leaders at the University of Minn.
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September 2004
Rachel Raimist, is a filmmaker, scholar, educator, hip-hop feminist, activist, community organizer, and mother. She is most known for her documentary Nobody Knows My Name about women in hip-hop and as the Videographer/Editor of the award-winning films Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme and Estilo Hip Hop.
LOOKING FROM THE INSIDE OUT: Feminist Filmmaking Praxis Within Prison Walls
Feminist filmmaker, scholar and activist, Rachel Raimist, discussed her recent work filming incarcerated poets. For the past eight months Rachel has collaborated with Twin Cities poets Reggie Harris and Desdamona to connect local poets and performers with the Stillwater Poetry Group (SPG) inside Stillwater Correctional Facility. In a series of critical interdisciplinary workshops designed to promote positive reconceptualizations of self, community, and social justice, the artists use poetry to address themes like manhood, fatherhood, American dreams/nightmares and the value of a man/woman. The workshops, co-facilitated by both inside and outside artists, produce spaces of potential and possibility, where all can expand their critical thinking and work to affect change both inside and beyond the prison walls. She shared video clips and stories of this work.
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