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Announcement Presentations Schedule

Feb. 25: Johnson on three years of full-scale war in Ukraine and gender studies

Special Event: Brooklyn College Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies talk

Three Years of Full-Scale War: How Studying Ukraine can Change Gender Studies

moderated by Mara Lazda, Bronx Community College

Tuesday, Feb. 25 11AM-12:15PM
Brooklyn College Library, Woody Tanger Auditorium, and zoom 

This lecture is a moment to reflect on the third-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and to consider how studying Eastern Europe can change gender studies, including giving us insight into today’s other turmoils. Over the last four decades, gender studies has been transformed, moving from mostly the study of the West to taking the rest of the world seriously. Yet, still often invisible is this part of the world, the site of much mass violence, decades of state socialism, and one of the first places to be subsumed by right-wing anti-genderism. This lecture will reflect on key feminist issues today, such as reflexivity, intersectionality, decolonialism, and solidarity. 

Janet Elise Johnson is the Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies, Brooklyn College, 2023-2025, and Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.  Her research focuses on gender, feminist activism, corruption, authoritarianism, and gendered violence in Russia and Ukraine. Her most recent book is The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (co-edited with Katalin Fábián and Mara Lazda, 2022), which won the 2022 Heldt prize for the best book from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Since 2008, she has been one of the coordinators of a monthly workshop on Gender and Transformation in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia now based at the CUNY Graduate Center.

To register for the Zoom

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Announcement Schedule

Friday December 6

2pm to 3pm (New York Time) on Zoom and in-person at the CUNY Graduate Center

Sandra Russell (Mt. Holyoke College)

Traveling Dreamwork: Black Feminist Epistemologies and Anticolonial Resistance in the Post-Soviet “Periphery”

Russia’s war against Ukraine has provoked recent, and somewhat contentious, dialogue around the question of race, whiteness, and colonialism in Eastern Europe. As race, gender, and sexuality have been mobilized in media discussions of the war, there has been an absence of nuance regarding the instability of these categories. Frequently taken for granted is the extent to which these identity categories form through political, social, and ideological conditions, reflecting and refracting the contexts through which they emerge. This conversation has become even more contentious given Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza, wherein many leftist activist spaces have excluded the Ukrainian case from anticolonial resistance movements.

Such conceptualizations of race, gender, and sexuality quickly become monolithized in a Western political imagination, as is often the case with colonialist hegemonies. In my attempt to reckon with these urgent questions, I look to Audre Lorde’s 1976 “Notes from a Trip to Russia” as well as the USSR’s involvement in the “Free Angela Davis” movement (1971-72) as starting points to consider the translational, transmittable, and collaborative possibilities of Black feminist epistemologies and anticolonial and queer feminist movements in the peripheral contexts of the former Soviet Union—in Ukraine specifically, but also Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Georgia.

Dr. Sandra Joy Russell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Trained in Comparative Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, her work explores the material and cultural expressions of gender, sexuality, and race in Ukraine, with a focus on the biopolitical entanglements of state and nation-building projects, as well as on contemporary queer, feminist, and anticolonial solidarities in the region.

Dr. Russell’s latest chapter, “‘Are These Guys Gay or Merely from Moscow?’: Homonationalism and Martyrology in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Literature” was published in the edited collection Queer Transnationalities in March 2023. Her forthcoming article, “‘She’s Our Fathers’ Daughter’: Angela Davis, Black American Subjectivity, and the Soviet Imaginary,” will be published in American Communist History next year. In addition to her research and teaching, she is also the Associate Editor of Ukraïnica: Ukraine’s Primary Database—an online catalogue of English Translations of Ukrainian Literature and Film supported by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

To register for the workshop and to receive the paper, use this link

In-person: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute

Questions? Mara Lazda ([email protected])

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Schedule

SPRING 2024 SCHEDULE

Friday February 9 2pm to 3pm (New York time)

Unveiling the War and Constructing Identities: Exploring Memes in Ukrainian and Russian Social Media during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Alina Mozolevska, Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine)

On Zoom, 2pm to 3pm 

REGISTER FOR FEB 9 HERE

Friday February 23 2pm to 3pm (New York time)

Collective Mobilisation in Defence of Women’s Rights and Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Poland

Olena Morozova (V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University/University of British Columbia)

and 

Ania Switzer (University of British Columbia)

REGISTER FOR FEB 23 HERE

Friday March 8 2pm to 3pm (New York time)

Jewish Women in Post-World War II Eastern and Central Europe: Special Issue of Nashim

Eleonore Lappin-Engel (Vienna) and Andrea Pető (Central European University)

REGISTER FOR MARCH 8 HERE

 Friday April 12 2pm to 3pm (In-person, CUNY Graduate Center and on-line)

Seditious Bodies: The Subversive Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Hungarian Feminist Performances

Aniko Szucs (Queens College, CUNY)

REGISTER FOR APRIL 12 HERE

Friday May 3 2pm to 3pm (In-person, CUNY Graduate Center and on-line)

A Feminist Response to the War in Ukraine: Vlada Nedak in conversation with Janet Elise Johnson

Vlada Nedak, CEO of Project Kesher Ukraine and the Women’s Opportunity Fund of Ukraine

REGISTER FOR MAY 3 HERE

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Schedule

Fall Schedule 2023

We continue to meet on Fridays from 2pm to 3pm (New York time), with some Zoom and some hybrid sessions.

 We are excited to add several special sessions, co-hosted with the Endowed Chairship in Women’s and Gender Studies, Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Sept. 8, 2023, 2-3PM: Zoom

Bénédicte Santoire (University of Ottawa)

Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Long-term Protracted Conflicts: Exploring the Cases of Moldova and Georgia 

Santoire Zoom registration link 

Tuesday , Oct. 10, 2:15-3:30PM:  Hybrid: Brooklyn College and Zoom.

 Kristen Ghodsee (University of Pennsylvania) in conversation with 

 journalist  Liza Featherstone

on Everyday Utopia, ​​“You and Me and Baby Makes Misery: Expanding Our Networks of Love and Care,” and Alexandra Kollontai

Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library 

Ghodsee and Featherstone Zoom registration link. 

Co-hosted with the Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies, Brooklyn College,  Janet Elise Johnson 

Monday, Oct. 30, 2:15-4:45PM : In-person at Women’s Center, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Cynthia Enloe (Clark University), 

Book Launch:

 Twelve Feminist Lessons of War , 

in coordination the new Institute on Gender, Law, and Transformative Peace at CUNY Law

Brooklyn College Women’s Center

Enloe Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0sc-qrpjgrGNEsuaOm7n3aSStb5fTtakJy

Friday, Nov. 10th 2pm to 3pm: Zoom

Ivan Simic, Charles University, Prague

Gender Policies Towards Muslim Men in Socialist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria

Simic Zoom registration link

Friday, Dec. 8 12:30-2: In person and via zoom

(special CUNY REEES Workshop)

Nicholas Boston (Lehman College, CUNY) presents new research on “The Amorous Migrant: Polish Gay Men in the United Kingdom, 2004-2020“.

CUNY Graduate Center (room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute), with reception to follow. Registration link for Zoom

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Presentations Schedule

May 12: Kanjuo Mrčela on Gender Pay Gap in Slovenia

Join us Friday, May 12, 2pm to 3pm (New York time)

in person and online when we welcome

Aleksandra Kanjuo Mrčela

professor at the Department of Sociology of Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, on:

“Which invisible hand makes Slovene women earn less than men?”

This presentation is based on a longer project co-authored with Alena Křížková, Andreja Poje, and Andrew Penner.

The transition to the full flagged market economy didn’t bring the best results for the highly educated and experienced female labor force in Slovenia. On the contrary, from 2010 to 2018 the gender pay gap rose from 0,9 to 9,3 %. The contribution seeks to understand the impact of intertwining structural and individual factors on the economic situation of women and men in a small, transitional, globally embedded economy. The paper is based on data that show negative trends, especially in terms of increasing differences in wages of women and men. In the analysis, in addition to theoretical discussions on the position of women and men on the labor market, we analyze the results of a survey conducted in 2016 (in time of the rising gender pay gap) on a representative national sample and some recent smaller research endeavors that gave us insight in the placement of women and men in different organizational/sectoral environments, as well as in the individual strategies of men and women in the labor market. We analyzed experiences of workers regarding working conditions, employment, wage and promotion as well as opinions and experiences of employers regarding the recruitment, promotion and rewarding of female and male workers.

We ask that participants read the paper in advance. After a short presentation, we will invite participants to discuss.

In-person attendees: Register & receive paper here

On-line attendees: Register & receive paper here

In-person location:
European Union Studies Center

CUNY Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue

Room 5203

Questions? Workshop co-coordinators

Mara Lazda ([email protected]) and Janet Johnson ([email protected])

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Presentations Schedule

Spring 2023 schedule

Feb. 3 (online)

Framing Gender-based Violence in the Period of Anti-genderism: case studies of Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland

Alexandria Wilson-McDonald, Professorial Lecturer | School of International Service

American University | Washington D.C.

Feb 24 (online and in person: Room C 201) 

HOLDING SPACE FOR UKRAINE AFTER ONE YEAR OF FULL-SCALE WAR

“Here is our front”: Hybridization of Normative Femininity During Russia’s War on Ukraine

Oksana Kis, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, visiting professor, the New School of Social Research

in discussion with Olena Nikolayenko, Professor of Political Science, Fordham University, and Karyn Grossman Gershon, CEO, Project Kesher

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcuduuprjMpEtZne19X-xropy6oVhBs0HRh

Mar 17 (online)

“Strong family makes strong Russia:” Maternity and “traditional values” in a militarizing state

Yulia Gradskova, Center for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden

Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYkf-2gpzouHNEsgfas1sMEfLfM9ZsnTK14

April 21 (online)

Debunking Myths on/in the East of Europe

Adriana Zaharijević, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Serbia

Zoom registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAtce-qrDotHND52CDOruKwi7SpF0MMSY5U

May 12 (online and in person: Room 5203)

Which invisible hand makes Slovene women earn less than men?

Aleksandra Kanjuo-Mrčela, Professor Chair for Organizational and Human Resource Management and Development, Centre for Organisational and Human Resources Research,  University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcscO2urTMvHt0gcmMAPI4J1ua0cbTUvz2I

RSVP required. For Zoom participants, register with the link. For In-Person participants, email [email protected] to register

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Presentations Schedule

Friday Feb 24th: Reflecting on the War on Ukraine with Oksana Kis

Feb 24 (Hybrid session: online and in person at the CUNY Graduate Center: Room C 201). 2pm to 3pm (New York Time)

 CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York

HOLDING SPACE FOR UKRAINE AFTER ONE YEAR OF FULL-SCALE WAR

“Here is our front”: Hybridization of Normative Femininity During Russia’s War on Ukraine

Oksana Kis, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, visiting professor, the New School of Social Research

in discussion with Olena Nikolayenko, Professor of Political Science, Fordham University, and Karyn Grossman Gershon, CEO, Project Kesher

Register for Zoom link here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcuduuprjMpEtZne19X-xropy6oVhBs0HRh

Ukrainian women’s responses to the Russian full-scale military aggression against Ukraine as well as the Ukrainian society’s perception (reaction) to those responses are striking. Women’s self-mobilization for defense efforts manifested itself in two seemingly different ways: on the one end – large scale voluntary enrollment to the military to serve at the battle front, on the other end – simultaneous massive grass-roots volunteer movement of humanitarian nature at the home front. As different (or even opposite) as they may appear at first glance, these two women’s ways of engaging with defense efforts share an important common feature: both claim their rootedness in Ukrainian normative femininity with direct references to national historical legacy and folk traditions. Instead of considering these women’s wartime roles as mutually exclusive, I argue that they represent different modalities of a hybrid femininity that offers a broad spectrum of socially acceptable social roles for modern women, with women’s active citizenship defining a value attached to respective activities.

Note for in-person: Effective January 25, 2023, non-CUNY visitors will no longer need to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 to enter the building. Instead, they will be required to show a government-issued photo ID to the security officers at the lobby’s front desk.

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Schedule

Spring 2023 Workshops beginning Feb 3

We’re back  for a second semester with Zoom, hybrid, and in-person sessions!

Join us Friday February 3, 2pm to 3pm NY Time (Zoom)

“Framing Gender-based Violence in the Period of Anti-genderism: case studies of Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland.”

Alexandria Wilson-McDonald, Ph.D.

Professorial Lecturer | School of International Service

American University | Washington D.C.

Alexandria Wilson-McDonald, Ph.D., is a professorial lecturer in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on the politics of gender in Central Eastern Europe. She examines the gendered elements of de-democratization and social movement activism in the region. Her current book project examines the contemporary framing of gender-based violence by gender equality activists in Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland. Her forthcoming article in Communist and Post-Communist Studies examines Slovakia as a unique case in which activists have deployed a gender equality frame of violence using explicit feminist language. She has conducted extensive field research in Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland, where she was affiliated with the Faculty of Sociology at Masaryk University, Czechia, and the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw, Poland. Dr. Wilson-McDonald has been awarded numerous research grants, including a Fulbright Research Grant, Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics, a Rothman Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, and a postdoctoral research grant by the Kosciuszko Foundation. She currently teaches courses in comparative politics, research methods, and European politics. 

We ask that workshop attendees read the paper in advance. Please email [email protected] for the paper.

Register for Zoom link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUuc-2opzMpHtfbb5ADrX8q5wLbC3VD6L-i

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Schedule

Celebration of Ann Snitow’s last book

 Visitors: 
An American Feminist in East Central Europe

just published in Polish translation

“A feminist organizer in East Central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall reveals the struggles of women fighting for their rights during the rise of the Right in Europe

Visitors tells the story of Ann Snitow’s adventures as a Western feminist helping to build a new, post-communist feminist movement in Eastern Central Europe. Snitow stumbles onto this fast-changing, chaotic scene by chance, but falls in love with the passionate feminists she meets in Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania. What kinds of feminism should they hope for?

Visitors is a book about forging enduring relationships and creating formerly unimaginable institutions—a feminist school, the Network of East-West Women, women’s centers, gender studies programs. It is about unity amid fractiousness and perseverance through uncertainty, Snitow’s flickering lodestar. Visitors moves gracefully between vivid anecdote, political analysis, and unsparing introspection. It is richly peopled with “brilliant” comrades and vexing detractors alike, all described with respect and humor. Every sentence is imbued with the experience and insight of this sui generis feminist activist, writer, and pedagogue of 50 years. Most of all, Visitors is the story of friendship, the heart and sinew of the leaderless feminist movement.

Reading like the best historical novel, it is intimate and worldly, resolutely unsentimental yet finally, even as the political skies darken, optimistic in the conviction that feminism can make life meaningful, fascinating, fun, pleasurable—and better for everyone, even as better is redefined again and again.”

In person RSVP: [email protected] and on Zoom, Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUtdO-oqzkoHddWdeQYsDWLIKoplZ2kNjUK

European Union Studies Center

CUNY Graduate Center

365 5th Avenue, New York

Room 5203

Note for in-person attendees: ID and proof of vaccination or negative PCR test within 7 days required.

Ann Snitow was Professor Emerita of Literature and Gender Studies at Lang College, The New School. A longtime activist, Snitow cofounded The Network of East-West Women, No More Nice Girls, Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, Take Back the Future, and New York Radical Feminists. She co-founded the women’s studies program at Rutgers University and gender studies programs at The New School, where she taught for three decades. Snitow’s best-known book is The Feminism of Uncertainty. Visitors is her sixth book.

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and the author of the bestselling Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. Her recent memoir, In the Darkroom, won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.

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Schedule

Fall 2022 Schedule

We’re back in-person! (and on Zoom). Please see below requirements for attending in person.

Fridays, 2pm to 3pm New York Time

2pm to 3pm New York Time,

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

Sept 30 (in-person and online)   

“Gender and State Repression in Belarus”

Olena Nikolayenko, Professor of Political Science, Fordham University

Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZApdOGhpzkiH9zvpuFy0fKU9WxiA-RHiOBz

Oct. 7 (online only)   

“Resisting Genderphobia in Hungary”

Judit Takacs, Research Professor, Centre for Social Sciences – Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence, Budapest, Hungary

Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUtdumvpz8iHtUafvaXkj0W_X6S5k14YUPG

Nov. 4 (online and in person)

“Women and sexual health. The intersections of medical science and politics during state socialism in East-Central Europe”

Katerina Liskova, Associate Professor, Masaryk University, Czechia

Dec.2 (in person and online) 

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIqceirrDwpHtcw3BT-rOHoi3HMPgwVmoSN

Celebration of friend of the workshop, Ann Snitow’s last book, Visitors: An American Feminist in East Central Europe, just published in Polish translation.

MałgorzataTarasiewicz, President, Network East-West Women

Katheryn M. Detwiler,  Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies, The Stevens Institute of Technology

Sonia Jaffe Robbins, Co-Founder of the Network East-West Women

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUtdO-oqzkoHddWdeQYsDWLIKoplZ2kNjUK

RSVP required. For Zoom participants, register with the link. For In-Person participants, email [email protected] to register. To enter the Grad Center, identification, proof of vaccination are required, or  negative PCR test results received within 7 days.