Women’s and Gender Studies Programming
The Department of Women’s and Gender Studies offers programs and activities that highlight our interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational commitments. We often feature cutting-edge scholars, artists, activists, healers, community educators, creative writers, and more. For an up-to-date listing of a broad array of events and activities organized by the Women’s Center and our friends, check out the
Women’s Center Linktree.
Faculty News and Department Updates
Beth is interested in the uses of contemplative and mindfulness practices to inspire student critical consciousness and well-being, to animate individual and collective transformation, and to foster community responses to violence. She recently presented, "Mindful Community-Based Service Learning: A Gateway to Compassion and Social Justice,” at the DePaul-ACU Conference on Community Engagement, Service Learning, and Solidarity, with Helen Damon-Moore, Mona Antwan, and Heather Flett.
Presented on a number of panels and roundtables at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Baltimore, MD (2023). Her presentations included, “Silencing Palestinian Solidarity on U.S. College Campuses,” “Creativity as Dissidence & Resistance: Artistic Genres Linking Feminism and Activism from Iran to Palestine,” and “Teaching (at) “The Intersectionality of Struggles: Transnational Feminist Pedagogies of Solidarity."
Dr. Rocío Ferreira was awarded the Social Transformation Research Collaborative Faculty Research Fellowship to work on her manuscript: Women shoot. Images and poetics of political violence (1980-2000) in contemporary Peruvian literary and visual culture. Her project analyzes written and visual narratives by women writers and filmmakers produced before, during and after the 2003 release of the Final Report of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an account that shed light on human rights violations during the Internal Armed Conflict (1980-2000). These written and visual herstories address post-conflict trauma, recovery, and reconciliation, paying attention to Peru’s heterogeneity and resisting the attempt to silence people’s traumatic experiences from the national imagination.
Dr. Heather Montes Ireland
Along with Barrie Jean Borich (English) was awarded a Humanities X Fellowship to develop and co-teach a Spring Course, “Do Say Gay: Banned Books and LGBTQ+ Freedom.” Students will be introduced to the Gerber/Hart Library and its archives, which seek to preserve and make accessible the history and culture of LGBTQ communities in Chicago and the Midwest.
Dr. Montes Ireland published “Decolonization is Imminent: Notes on Boricua Feminism.” in Feminist Formations (Spring 2023); and her article “‘She's Been Doing Everything Right’: Mothers of Color and Economic Violence,” published in Women, Gender, and Families of Color (2022), was chosen as a featured article in the celebration of the 10 years of the journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color.
Her coauthored article, "Gendering the Intimate Labor of Toilet Cleaning in India's Hi-tech Sector" (with Dr. Kiran Mirchandani), was published in Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography (2022).
Dr. Mukherjee also was the Keynote Speaker at Alumnae Lecture Series, Golden Jubilee Celebrations of Department of Geography, Loreto College, Kolkata, India. Title: Gender and Geographies of Age, Aging and Care in Kolkata, India (May 23, 2023) And she present on a panel - 50 years of Studying Up with Prof. Laura Nader (Organized by Dr. Sarah Kunz, University of Essex, UK, and Dr. Paul Gilbert, University of Sussex, UK), December 8, 2022.
Presented on a roundtable discussion at the National Women's Studies Association Conference in Baltimore, MD (2023) entitled "Teaching (at) “The Intersectionality of Struggles: Transnational Feminist Pedagogies of Solidarity." One of the outcomes of this workshop is a network of professors interested in sharing knowledge and strategies on how best to teach transnational feminist topics, issues, and movements. Dr. Russo is also developing a project around “Calling In as a Feminist Practice to build Community Across Differences” at DePaul and beyond. It’s a practice to intervene in the automatic default of a “call out/cancel” response to disagreement or of ignoring and glossing over important differences and conflicts within feminist efforts.
WGS Department Updates
The WGS Department launched the Transnational Pedagogy Project with a focus on intersectional and transnational feminist pedagogy. The faculty leads are Dr. Sanjukta Mukherjee and Dr. Ann Russo working alongside Graduate Assistant Claudia Cisneros Mendez who is a student in our MA Program.
Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Take Back the Halls Violence Prevention program. This is a program initiated by Dr. Beth Catlett as part of the Beck Research Initiative. Through a collaboration with Heather Flett, founder of Taking Back Our Lives, TBTH has built a teen dating violence prevention and community activism program designed to prevent relationship violence among teens and develop young people’s leadership skills. The project has been generously funded by Illinois Criminal Justice Info.
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