Hushnuda Shukurova, Activist and Filmmaker 

Exploring the Complex Life of Rural Women in Tajikistan through Film

Our last presentation for the fall semester features the work of Hushnuda Shukurova, a Tajik feminist, activist, and film maker.  She will speak about her documentary, “Live Life Regardless,” which traces the life of a Tajik widow, mother of eight, who provides for many in her village. See trailer here: http://vimeo.com/khushnuda.

The workshop meets from 4:30 to 6:00 pm at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, New York University, 285 Mercer Street (between Washington and Waverly)

Friday, November 7 we are excited to bring two speakers:

Elżbieta Klimek-Dominiak, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Head of Gender Studies, University of Wrocław

“From Solidarity to Backlash: Engendering Polish Revolution and Transformation in Women’s Life Writing”

Prof. Klimek-Dominiak is Assistant Professor and Head of Gender Studies at the University of Wrocław. Her publications include : “Disintegration of a Jewish Polish Identity and Re-Invention of a Postmodern Hybridized Self in Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language.” Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies 3 (2011) and ”Fictions of Western Hypermasculinity and Freedom: A. Proulx’s Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories.” Anglica Wratislaviensia 47 (2009).

Her presentation interrogates the gendering of the Polish non-violent (r)evolution of ’ June 89, the current backlash against Polish democratization process in the form of  cultural war on “gender ideology” and considers how the process of reclaiming women’s representation of the Polish underground movement of the 1970s, 1980s and transformation has become a revolutionary force uniting the liberal feminist mass social movement of Kongres Kobiet (appr.10 thousand women in the Congress of Women with its regional chapters), the more academic feminist wing of the New Left of Krytyka Polityczna [Political Critique] and street movement associated with March 8, Manifa and One Billion Rising groups.

and

Jill Massino, Ph.D., Department of History, University of North Carolina, Charlotte. 

“We Want Rights, not Charity:” Gender and the Meanings of Citizenship in Post-Socialist Romania”

Jill Massino is an Assistant Professor of European history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she teaches courses on modern Europe, Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe, history and memory, and gender and war. Her publications include: Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe, coedited with Shana Penn (2009); “From Black Caviar to Blackouts: Gender, Consumption, and Lifestyle in Ceauşescu’s Romania,” in Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, ed. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger (2012); and “Something Old, Something New: Marital Roles and Relations in State Socialist Romania,” Journal of Women’s History (2010). She is currently completing a book manuscript, “Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Postwar Romania,” which blends archival, legislative, and media resources with oral history interviews to examine the lived experiences of women and men in socialist and post-socialist Romania. Her new project will explore Romania’s relationship with various countries in the Global South during the Cold War.

Our second meeting of the fall semester features Alexandr Berezkin, Russian sociologiest and LGBT and Intersex activist. He will speak on “Russian Intersexuality: Resistance and Conformity.”

Berezkin is a graduate of Kemerovo State University in sociology and has worked for over six years as a sociologist. His LGBTI-activism began in 2011, and in 2012 Berezkin became head of the regional branch of Russian LGBT Network in Vladivostok. He was the initiator and creator of a support and information group for intersex people “Association Russian-Speaking Intersex” in 2013. He has participated as a co-executor in the “Monitoring and assistance to victims of crimes motivated by homophobia and transphobia in Russia in 2011-2012”, which was organized by Russian LGBT Network and the German Foundation “Remembrance. Responsibility. Future”. He took part in the program “International Visitors Leadership Program on LGBT Human rights in Russia” in November 2013.

He is the author of over fifteen articles and worked at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok from 2010-2014. He was forced to resign in 2014, however, because of his activism and is now seeking political asylum and living in New York City.

 Please join us Friday, September 12 at 4:30 pm for the first talk of the Fall 2014 series: Ulrike Auga,  Ph.D. Associate Professor, Theology and Gender Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, and Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Visiting-Professor and Research Fellow, Union Theological Seminary, New York: “Resistance, Gender, Religion and the Radical Social Imaginary: A Genealogy from Eastern European Dissidence to New Social Movements” 

Ulrike Auga was born in East-Berlin and participated in the struggle of the peaceful revolution 1989. In that light she was educated as a Protestant theologian and was later trained as a cultural theory and gender scholar in Berlin, Geneva and at Cambridge (UK). After that she lived and worked for many years in South Africa, Mali, Palestine, and Israel.

Her interests are at the crossing points of an epistemological critique of religion and revised political and liberation theologies with cultural, gender, queer, postcolonial and post-secular theory, e.g.: religion, biopower/biopolitics, (epistemic) violence, resistance, agency and human flourishing, social imaginary and materiality in counter discourses to the neoliberal Empire, political contemporary transition contexts, new social movements; postcolonial critique of the intellectual; visual culture, resistance and agency.

All workshop sessions take place at the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, 285 Mercer St., 7th Floor. (Between Waverly and Washington Place)

 

New York University

Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
and the Network of East-West Women

present the

Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe Workshop

Fall 2014 Schedule 

September 12

Ulrike Auga, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Theology and Gender Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, and Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Visiting-Professor and Research Fellow, Union Theological Seminary

“Resistance, Gender, Religion and the Radical Social Imaginary: A Genealogy from Eastern European Dissidence to New Social Movements”

October 10

Aleksandr Berezkin, Independent Scholar in Social Science and Inter-sex Activist

“Russian Intersexuality: Resistance and Conformity”

 November 7

Elżbieta Klimek-Dominiak, Ph.D. Assistant Professor and Head of Gender Studies, University of Wrocław

“From Solidarity to Backlash: Engendering Polish Revolution and Transformation in Women’s Life Writing”

and

Jill Massino, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

“We Want Rights, not Charity:” Gender and the Meanings of Citizenship in Post-Socialist Romania”

December 5

Khushnuda Shukurova, Independent Filmmaker and Women’s Rights Activist from Tajikistan

 “Exploring the Complex Life of Rural Women in Tajikistan

through Film​”

 

Fridays 4:30-6:00 p.m.

at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies

New York University

285 Mercer Street, 7th floor

(between Waverly and Washington Place)

 

For more information, follow us at http://gendertransformationeurope.wordpress.com/

Contact Mara Lazda with questions at [email protected]

The year 2014 marks 25 years since the end of communism in Central-Eastern Europe (CEE) and 10 years after the enlargement of the European Union into the region. To mark this event Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe is planning to hold a conference on 22-23 November at Warsaw University entitled “Crises and Resistance in Central and Eastern Europe”.

These anniversaries are significant landmarks in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the continent as a whole. However, even more importantly, they occur during a time of intense economic and political difficulties in Europe. The economic crisis has brought a prolonged economic downturn that has worsened the living standards of its populations and brought political uncertainty and instability. The crisis has hit CEE particularly hard, shaking the neo-liberal economic model that has dominated over the past quarter of a century, and sparking a wave of instability as well as resistance that has spread throughout the region. The most notable events have taken place in Ukraine from November 2013 onwards but we have also seen significant unrest in countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina among others. On the other hand, in some countries such as Poland and the Baltic States neo-liberal commentators have claimed that a relatively strong economic recovery has taken place which shows the strength of the region’s economic model

It is in this context that we have planned this conference and invite anyone interested in participating to submit a paper or a proposal for a session. Debatte is a journal published by Taylor and Francis that seeks a radical critical analysis that is sympathetic to democratic, labour, feminist and ecologist movements in CEE.  In 2009 we organised a successful conference in London on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Communism. We hope our 2014 event will provide a forum for bringing acaLOGNULL NowTransReader::ReadIt() JJFileMT::Truncate(66118978) LOGNULL NowTransReader::ReadIt() JJFileMT::Truncate(0) demics and activists together to discuss the current economic and political climate in the region, look at how progressive social and political movements are responding to it and map out alternatives to the neo-liberal order.

Among the areas that we plan to discuss at the conference are:

— Economic crisis and alternatives
— The role of social movements in the region
— Gender and feminism
— Historical politics
— Migration, multi-culturalism and the struggle against racism and the far-right
— The nature of left parties in the region
— Ecology and the environment
— Welfare and poverty
— Education
— Health
— Ten years of European Union membership
— The balance sheet of the transition from Communism
— Culture
— The geo-political context of Central and Eastern Europe

The conference will consist of two plenary sessions together with a series of workshops held in parallel. If you would like to propose a panel or offer a paper for a workshop then please contact [email protected] as soon as possible.

Proposals for panels and abstracts of proposed papers must be received by 1 July 2014. Abstracts should be 300 words or less. When sending an abstract or proposal please include an e-mail address for correspondence.

We plan to publish at least one special issue of Debatte based on papers presented at the conference. If you would like your paper to be considered for publication in the journal please submit a full draft by 1 October 2014

The languages of the conference will be English and Polish, and we will be arranging translation between these two languages at the conference. Abstracts and papers should be submitted in one of these two languages.

We want the conference to be accessible to as many scholars and activists as possible from the region. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which is supporting the conference, has provided funds to help with travel and accommodation costs specifically for those coming to the conference from Central and Eastern Europe (including Poland apart from Warsaw itself). These funds are limited and will be allocated on the basis of need. If you would like to apply for help with such costs then please do let us know at the address above.

Admission to the conference will be free, but we will be asking those with institutional support to pay a fee of £80.

Further information about the conference can be found on the Debatte web-site at explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/pgas/debatte-conference-cfp.

Published in  www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/call-for-papers-debatte-conference-on-crises-and-resistance-in-central-and-eastern-europe2019-warsaw-november-2014.

The Call for Papers for our Fall 2014 Workshop is now available. Please see description here.

Deadline is July 15! 

 

Please join us for a talk on May 2, 4:30 – 6 p.m.

Ethel Brooks, associate professor,
Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology, Rutgers University

“Fraught Intimacies:
Entwined Histories — Jews, Romani, Germans — of the (Post) Holocaust”

Ethel Brooks is an associate professor in the departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University, and the undergraduate director in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Brooks is a Tate-TrAIN Transnational Fellow, and was the 2011-2012 U.S.-U.K. Fulbright Distinguished Chair, at the University of the Arts London. Brooks is the author of Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work, winner of the 2010 Outstanding Book from the Global Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She has contributed chapters to a number of books, including  Sweatshop USA and Sociology Confronts the Holocaust, and contributed to such  journals as We Roma, Nevi Sara Kali, and International Working Class History, as well as editorials for the Guardian.