This panel discussion moderated by Laura Flanders of

GRITtv features Sylvia Henriquez (Executive Director, National Latina

Institute for Reproductive Health), Lynn Paltrow (Executive Director,

National Advocates for Pregnant Women), and Miriam Yeung (Executive

Director, National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum). The panel was

part of the daylong conference Critical Intersections: Reproductive and

Economic Justice sponsored by The New York Women's Foundation and BCRW.

This panel discussion features a group of reproductive

justice activists and birth doulas who work across the spectrum of

pregnancy, birth, and women's health, connecting the traditional

reproductive rights movement with new social justice activism that

considers the complete physical, political, and economic well-being of

girls and women. Panelists include Aisha Domingue, doula coordinator at

the Brooklyn Young Mothers Collective; Mary Mahoney, assistant director

of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project and co-founder and

co-coordinator of the Doula Project; Lauren Mitchell, health educator

and co-founder and co-coordinator of the Doula Project; and Miriam

Perez, founder and sole blogger at RadicalDoula.com and editor at

Feministing.com. The discussion is moderated by Lucy Trainor.

Janet Jakbosen moderates this

discussion on Development and Sustainability, the second panel at

The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2010, "Feminism and Climate Change."

Panelists include Rachel Harris, Susan Shaw, Marcela Vasquez-Leon and Eleanor Sterling.

Janet Jakbosen introduces Anene Ejikeme who moderates this

discussion on Economic, Health and Social Justice, the first panel at

The Scholar and Feminist Conference 2010, "Feminism and Climate Change."

Panelists include Nancy Biberman, Laila Iskandar Kamel, Peggy Shepard and

Winona LaDuke.

Joni Seager delivered the morning keynote address at The

Scholar and Feminist Conference 2010, "Feminism and Climate Change."

Already among the most vulnerable populations worldwide, women and other

marginalized groups have been the most acutely affected by the

instabilities produced by climate change. Issues such as water scarcity,

drought, and other environmental problems threaten the world's food

supply, making it more difficult for disadvantaged groups to obtain the

basic necessities of life. Increased temperatures and more intense

weather patterns raise the likelihood of illness and disease, especially

among the poor. Diminishing resources, known to increase conflict and

war, are leading to greater numbers of "climate refugees" and displaced

people. In all of these situations, women are disproportionately

affected by the dangers that climate change poses to our world. Joni

Seager is a scholar and activist in feminist geography, international

women's studies, and global environmental policy. She is the author of

10 books, and more than 3 dozen reports, articles, and chapters in

books. In the environmental field, she was an early pioneer in bringing

feminist perspectives to bear on global environmental policy and

analysis. Her 1993 book, Earth Follies, has become a classic in the

field.

This talk offers a new reading of postcolonial women's writings. The conventional

model since the 1980s has been to emphasize issues of silence and invisibility,

the desire for voice and narrative space, and self-representation as a form of

empowerment and transformation. What is often eclipsed as a result is a valuable

political ethic based on coalition and solidarity with oppressed and marginalized

figures. By working across an expansive literary archive, stretching from Mary Prince's

slave narrative to more recent works by Miriama Ba, Bapsi Sidhwa, Edwidge Danticat

and Shani Mootoo, Professor Donnell identifies an alternative framework for reading

postcolonial women's writing, presenting a new model of feminist criticism rooted in

solidarity and coalitional ethics. Alison Donnell is reader in the Department of English and American Studies

at the University of Reading, UK. She is the author of Twentieth Century Caribbean

Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary and Critical History and has

been a Joint Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

since its founding in 1998.

This conversation, which took place on Grace Paley's birthday,

December 11, 2009, explores how imagination, truthtelling, and courageous action flow out

of Paley's life and work. A prolific writer, Paley's fiction highlights

the everyday struggles of women, what she calls "a history of everyday

life." In addition to her writing, Paley was also a committed activist,

passionate about numerous issues, including women's rights, the Vietnam

War, nuclear non-proliferation, and most recently, the war in Iraq. Her

death in 2007 was a great loss, but her work continues to inspire.

Speakers include: Beatrix Gates, poet and publisher of Grace Paley's first

book of poems; Yvette Christianse, poet and novelist; Ynestra

King, ecofeminist activist and educator, and editor of Dangerous

Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and

Development; Nancy Kricorian, New York-based writer and activist, author

of Zabelle and Dreams of Bread and Fire, and coordinator of the New York

City chapter of CODEPINK Women for Peace; Amy Swerdlow, founding member

of Women Strike for Peace and author of Women Strike for Peace:

Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s; and Lucila Silva

and Perla Placencia, members

of the Center for Immigrant Families (CIF), an inter-generational,

collectively-run organization of low-income immigrant women of color and

community members in Manhattan Valley. This event was co-sponsored by the Columbia Institute for Research on

Women and Gender (IRWAG).

Catherine Waldby is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social

Policy at The University of Sydney, Australia. In this lecture, delivered on November 6, 2009 at Barnard College, Professor Waldby

explores the emerging tensions between women's voluntary (public good) donation

of reproductive tissues for stem cell research and the increasing resort to transactional

forms of tissue procurement, for example egg sharing and egg vending. She locates this

tension in both a feminist biopolitical analysis and in the broader dynamics of the global

bioeconomy.

Introduced by Janet Jakobsen, Saba Mahmood delivered the

lecture, "The Politics of Freedom: Geopolitics, Minority Rights and

Gender" on October 5, 2009 at Barnard College. Originally titled "Should

Feminist Ethics Matter to Religious Politics?" Mahmood's talk marked the

sixth annual Helen Pond McIntyre '48 lecture. Associate Professor of

Anthropology at the University of California, Mahmood is an expert on

issues of secularism, gender, and modernity within the context of

Islamist movements in the Middle East and South Asia. In this lecture,

she reflects on why ethical practice and forms of embodiment matter to

questions of feminist politics and analysis. By engaging some common

misreadings of her 2005 book Politics of Piety, Mahmood urges

feminist scholars to critically re-think the normative status accorded

to secular conceptions of the self and body in contemporary debates

about religion.

Introduced by Christia Mercer, Eileen O'Neill presented closing remarks,

entitled "The History of Women," at "Women, Philosophy and History: A Conference in Celebration of Eileen O'Neill '75."

This two-day conference continued the groundbreaking work of Eileen O'Neill

by examining the standard narrative of the history of philosophy from a feminist

perspective. O'Neill's pioneering scholarship has brought to light the texts and ideas

of women in the early modern period, and demonstrated the substantial contributions

they made to philosophy. Her work has encouraged the analysis of thinkers as diverse

as Marie de Gournay, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anna

Maria van Schurman, Mary Astell, Emilie du Chatelet, and Damaris Masham. It has also

challenged philosophers to reconsider methodological assumptions that have hidden

these women and their works from view. The eminent international scholars gathered

for this conference will continue this exploration and discuss the methodological,

pedagogical, and philosophical implications of O'Neill's work. The conference also

celebrates the impact of O'Neill's commitment to women in philosophy more generally.