Feminist Research Alliance Workshop
Founded in 2010, the Feminist Research Alliance Workshop advances and energizes interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration among feminist scholars locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. At our convivial meetings, faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars present and discuss research-in-progress. A fertile space for idea-incubation, the workshop also is community-building, enabling students and faculty to network with potential committee members, mentors, and colleagues beyond the boundaries of their home departments. All events are free and open to the public.
Fall 2024 Events
Wednesday, September 18, 2024 - 12PM (ET) via Zoom
Children, Agency, and Imagining Abolition: Chicanx and Black Feminisms Against the Prison Industrial Complex
Andrea Pitts, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
Placing Chicanx and Black anti-carceral projects in dialogue, this presentation examines children's literature and feminist theory to develop a political conception of youth within prison abolition projects. Such a politicized category considers children and young people as both threatened by forms of social oppression, and, importantly, as potential participants in forms of social mobilization and coalition building.
Andrea J. Pitts is an interdisciplinary researcher and educator whose publications and pedagogy focus on carceral medicine and radical health activism, Latin American and U.S. Latina/x feminisms, prison and police abolition, queer migration studies, critical transgender politics, and disability justice. They are the author of Nos/Otras: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance (2021), and co-editor of Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson (2019), Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance (2020), and Trans Philosophy (forthcoming 2024). Their current book project Latina/x Abolitionist Feminisms: Incarceration, Agency, and Coalitional Politics examines the philosophical contributions made by U.S Latina/x activists and scholars critiquing state violence, prisons, and policing from the 1960s to the early 2000s.
Thursday, November 14, 2024 - 12PM (ET) via Zoom
The complex dynamics of the engineering gender divide: a focus on women faculty advancement.
Matilde Sánchez-Peña, Assistant Professor, Engineering Education, University at Buffalo
Women faculty play a significant role in the diversification of engineering through their role modeling and mentoring. Therefore, significant resources have been invested in increasing their presence in the field. However, there are limited ways to grasp the impact of such investments as their proposed solutions are located within complex academic systems with many interdependent elements. In this talk, I will discuss results of a project addressing such challenge from a complex system perspective. Using feminist theories to operationalize the practices and processes that reflect a commitment to gender equity and interdisciplinary quantitative approaches, we gauge the actual causal impact of institutional initiatives aiming to increase the presence and persistence of women engineering faculty across the US.
Dr. Matilde Sánchez-Peña is an assistant professor of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo – SUNY where she leads the Diversity Assessment Research in Engineering to Catalyze the Advancement of Respect and Equity (DAREtoCARE) Lab. Her research focuses on developing cultures of care and well-being in engineering education spaces, assessing gains in institutional efforts to advance equity and inclusion, and using data science for training socially responsible engineers.
SPRING 2024 Events
February 21, 2024 - 12PM (EST) via Zoom
"'Our dimness brightened in her smile': Sex, Race, and Latinidad in US Higher Education, 1900-1920."
Pablo Mitchell, Thomas B. Lockwood Professor of Latinx History, University at Buffalo
Pablo Mitchell is the Thomas B. Lockwood Professor of Latinx History at the University at Buffalo and is the author of a textbook on Latina/o History (Understanding Latino History: Excavating the Past, Examining the Present) as well as Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920 and West of Sex: Making Mexican America, 1900-1930. He also recently completed a Queer Pasts digital history project, “Reclamation Projects: An Archive of Queer Latinidad." His current research examines the history of Latino/as in US colleges and universities.
April 17, 2024 - 12PM (EDT) via Zoom
"Care Work, the Problem of the Archive, and the Predicament of the 21st-Century Feminist Worker"
Kari Winter, Professor of American Studies, Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, University at Buffalo
Professor of American Studies in the Department of Global Gender Studies, Kari J. Winter is a historian, literary critic and screen writer who has served as the Director of the UB Gender Institute (2011-17) and Executive Director of the UB Humanities Institute (interim, 2017-18). She has published three books and many articles on gender, slavery, and resistance in the Atlantic worlds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
April 25, 2024 - 12PM (EDT) via Zoom
"Suzanne Simon Baptiste Louverture: Microbiography and Black Women’s Lives"
Robin Mitchell, Associate Professor, Department of History, University at Buffalo
Robin Mitchell is an award-winning Associate Professor in the Department of History, and the College of Arts and Sciences Endowed Professor, at the University at Buffalo. She is a 19th century French historian, specializing in discourses about race, gender, and sexuality. She received her doctorate in Late Modern European History from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. In addition to several published journal articles, and her first book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020), Dr. Mitchell is currently writing the first biography of Suzanne Simone Baptiste, also known as Madame Toussaint Louverture. It is currently under contract with Princeton University Press.