Ann Russo is the Director of the Women's Center and a Professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies. Her scholarship, teaching, and organizing focus on queer, antiracist, and feminist movement building to end violence and to build socially just and caring communities. Integral to her work is exploring the praxis of building alliances and coalitions for social change.
Her most recent book Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power (2018) explores ideas and practices central to feminist anti-racist work, community accountability and transformative justice abolitionist organizing, and U.S-based feminist anti-imperialist efforts to address violence in the global south. The book shares approaches and practices that cultivate communal healing, intervention, accountability and transformation in response to systemic intimate, interpersonal and state violence. She weaves the concept of accountability throughout the book and approaches it as a set of everyday practices that contribute to the feminist work of transforming oppression and violence, rather than reproducing them.
She is the author numerous essays, articles, reports, and more (See below for more details)
Courses Regularly Taught
- WGS 415 Feminist Genealogies
- WGS 400 Feminist Theories
- WGS 314/414 Antiracist Feminism
- WGS 320/420 Transformative Justice
- ISP 102 Chicago Women's Activism
- WGS 303/480 Gender, Violence, and Resistance
- WGS 485 Women, Gender, Agency, & Social Change
Areas of Interest
- Feminist, Anti-Racist, and Queer Theories and Practices for Justice
- Transformative Justice: Collective Healing, Intervention, Accountability, and Transformation in response to interpersonal, community, and state violence
- Critical race theory: Interrogating Whiteness, Privilege, and Accountability
- Intersectional Movement-Building
Major Publications
- Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power
- Communities Resisting Violence, with Melissa Spatz (Women and Girls Collective Action Network, 2007)
- Talking Back and Acting Out: Women Negotiating the Media Across Cultures, co-edited with Sandra Jackson (Peter Lang, 2002)
- Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action for the Feminist Movement (Routledge, 2001)
- Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin's Art and Politics, co-authored with Cindy Jenefsky. (Westview Press, 1998)
- Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, co-edited with Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Lourdes Torres (Indiana University Press, 1991)
Select Articles & Essays
"Ten Strategies for Building Community Accountability," in Alice Kim, Erica Meiners, Jill Petty, Audrey Petty, Beth Richie, Sarah Ross, eds., The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences Working Toward Freedom (Haymarket 2018).
“Brokenheartedness and Accountability," Journal of Lesbian Studies Vol. 21, No. 3 (2017): 289-305.
“Stone Soup: Building Community, Creating Family - The Expansive Possibilities of Queer Love," with Francesca Royster, in Dustin Goltz and Jason Zingsheim, eds., Queer Praxis: Questions for LGBTQ Worldmaking (Peter Lang, 2015).
“Between Speech and Silence: Reflections on Accountability" in Silence and Power: Feminist Reflections at the Edges of Sound, edited by Sheena Malhotra and Aimee Carrillo Rowe. NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.
With Aimee Carrillo Rowe, “Anti-Racist Interventions in the Academy: Toward a Feminist Politics of Relation and Accountability," in Kimberly Vaz and Gary Lemons, eds., Feminist Solidarity at a Crossroads: Intersectional Women's Studies for Transracial Alliance. NY: Routledge, 2012.
“Stop the False Race-Gender Divide," co-authored with Melissa Spatz. In Who Should be First?, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Johnnetta Betsch Cole. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Also published as: "White Feminists' Refusals and Commitments: A Call to Mobilize toward Coalitional Antiracist Feminist Analysis, Practices and Pedagogy. In Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, 2nd edition, (Eds) Adams, Blumenfeld, Castaneda, Hackman, Peters, Zuniga. New York: Routledge. “Feminist Pedagogy: Building Community Accountability," with Laurie Fuller, FeministTeacher Vol. 26, No. 2/3 (2017): 179-97.
“Epilogue: The Future of Intersectionality: What's at Stake." In Michele T. Berger and Kathleen Guidroz, eds., The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy through Race, Class, and Gender. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009: 309-18.
“Women's Studies: Cultivating Accountability as a Practice of Solidarity." In Alice Ginsberg (ed.), The Evolution of American Women's Studies: Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies and Change. New York: Palgrave, 2008.
Communities Engaged in Resisting Violence. With Melissa Spatz, Executive Director, Women and Girls CAN. Report for Women and Girls Collective Action Network, 2007.
“The Feminist Majority Foundation's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid: The Intersections of Feminism and Imperialism in the United States," International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2006): 557-80.