Student group

Students affiliated with Women's Studies program created a group called Collective for Equality, Justice & Empowerment. Check out their website here

CEJE will be organizing the Feb 27 panel on violence against women.

Feb 27 Colloquium

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE: LINKING GENDER & RACE”

February 27, 2009
12:30 – 1:30
SAUNDERS 541

PANEL SPEAKERS:

NJOROGE NJOROGE, PhD. Department of History (UHM)
JENNIFER ROSE, J.D. Gender Equity Specialist (UHM)

How is structural violence produced and reproduced?
Experienced and expressed?
Negotiated and navigated?
Accommodated and resisted?

This colloquium will, from various angles, address these profound, perplexing, and perennial questions in specific contexts, and through the insights of activists and academicians in the field and on the ground.


ORGANIZED BY THE COLLECTIVE FOR EQUALITY, JUSTICE & EMPOWERMENT
ceje@hawaii.edu

Feb 20 talk: Toward a Feminist Analysis of the Collapse of Public Education

Toward a Feminist Analysis of the Collapse of Public Education
Mari Matsuda Law School, UHM

--Co-sponsored with Department of Political Science--

February 20 (Friday)12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541

Abstract: This talk brings a feminist theory/critical race theory perspective to the analysis of the collapse of public education. Universal, quality public education as an ideal is an accepted part of liberal discourse in the United States, belied by the reality of large numbers of children with no access to minimally decent education. The actual expectation and experience of most American families is that finding adequate education for their children is a significant challenge. In Hawaii, educated parents are increasingly unwilling to send their children to public schools, a trend mirrored in other urban areas, and exacerbating a have vs. have-not education system. There are many material and ideological reasons for the decline of the public school. This talk will focus on the gendered aspects, considering, for example, the effect of teaching as “women’s work,” the abandonment of the feminist strategy of comparable worth, “private sphere” and privatization, and the third shift that women work in order to maintain functions – such as team mom and fundraiser – that shore up the defunded system of public education. I would like to make a tentative link to the larger problem of public quietude in the face of completely unacceptable social realities. Why do we accept largely inadequate public services, whether in health care, education, mental health, elder care – any number of areas that we all need, desperately, at one time or another? What is it about late-capitalist patriarchy that imposes the collective sense that created problems are intractable realities, and that organizing for change is futile?

Ann Dunham: A Personal Reflection

An article from Anthropology News, written by Dr. Alice Dewey and Dr. Geoffrey White.

news related to our previous panel on Ann Dunham

We organized a panel discussion on the contribution on Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barak Obama, in last September (see previous post). Here are some news related to the conference.

"A woman of the people:A symposium recalls the efforts of Stanley Ann Dunham to aid the poor "(Star Bulletin)

"Obama's mother's work focus of UH seminar" (Honolulu Advertiser)


"Long-range love of Obama’s absent mother" (Times online)

100 years of women at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Link to women's history walking tour at University of Hawai'i at Manoa. This site was created by Dr. Ruth Dawson and her students. Enjoy!

January 30 (Friday) WS Colloquium

Women's Studies Colloquium Series (Spring 2009)
January 30 (Friday) 12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541

Riding Astride: Self-Representation in Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West

By Kristin M. McAndrews (Department of English, UHM)


Abstract

In “Riding Astride: Self Representation in Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West,” I will discuss the way in which female identity emerges in a collection of stories I gathered from women who work with horses in Winthrop, Washington, a legally mandated Western theme town. To understand the complex cultural dynamics of these women and the humor they employ in storytelling, I found it necessary to commit myself to this geographic location in order to begin comprehend humor and gender in the American West. I also discovered the need to include my own experience, analyzing my off-centered relationship with the women I interviewed and the community I researched. What resulted from my work was another way in which to consider scholarship of women’s narratives.


Speaker bio: Kristin M. McAndrews is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. She works with folklore, oral narratives, auto/biography, humor, tourist and gender studies and culture and cuisine. Most recently, she has researched on the 1850 visits to Paris by Lot Kamehameha and Alexander Liholiho. Working at Bishop Museum and the National Library of France in Paris, she is looking at the ways in which these future rulers of Hawai`i enter and exit the discourse of the Grand Tour, a traditional narrative of upper class European young men.