Where to find us: We meet on Zoom, with some hybrid in-person sessions at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, Room 5203. We generally meet once a month on Fridays from 2pm to 3pm. All are welcome!

The Gender and Transformation Workshop is unique in the New York City area in providing a venue for the continuing discussion of gender and postcommunism. It started in 1993 and its members have been women activists, academics, journalists, lawyers, and educators concerned about gender inequality in the newly non-Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Members of the Network of East-West Women were some of the earliest participants and speakers. The goal is to provide a venue for those from the region and working in and about it, to be able to provide their most recent work, including on western Europe and Eurasia.

From the beginning, topics have ranged from the academic to the political, often linking the two. Our first speaker, Anastasia Posadskaya of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, spoke about her research on factory workers but also about how her interest in the 1980s in women workers was often disparaged. Sessions on nationalism were held during the wars between the successor states of Yugoslavia, often with visitors from those countries as participants. Sometimes speakers have celebrated recent books with their presentations  while other speakers have presented papers that developed into books or articles seminal in debates about the region. Some presenters have become regular members of the workshop, while others have been scholars or visitors from the region. Each March, we try to present a panel of women attending the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of  Women meetings.

Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we continue to provide an avenue for scholars, including young scholars, to present their research to an informed and interested group, as issues of gender still form an important lens through which to view the ongoing changes and transformations.

The workshop is currently moderated  by Janet Elise Johnson (Brooklyn College, CUNY) and Mara Lazda (Bronx Community College, CUNY).

For a list of previous workshop speakers, click here.

Until 2019, the workshop was coordinated also by Nanette Funk (Brooklyn College, CUNY) and Sonia Robbins (NEWW), founders of the workshop, and met at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University.

The Gender & Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia workshop 
Is back in-person! (and on Zoom). 
2pm to 3pm New York Time, Fridays  

European Union Studies Center, CUNY Graduate Center 365 5^th Avenue, New York Room 5203

RSVP required. Contact Mara Lazda ([email protected])