Berkshire Conference of Women Historians » Conferences

The Spring “Little Berks”

nmina — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:10:12 +0000

Dear Members of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians:

There are a few spots left for the Spring Meeting! This weekend retreat will offer an opportunity to join with other historians in taking stock of the challenges facing higher education today. And, as is our tradition, the weekend will also feature some exciting new scholarship in women’s history.

Friday night’s program opens with a welcome reception at 6:00pm. Libations may be in high demand for our evening program, a discussion of Chris Lorenz’s recent article from Critical Inquiry, “If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management.” (A PDF of the article will be sent on May 19th to all who have registered by then.) Ardis Cameron, University of Southern Maine, will facilitate the discussion. Saturday night’s program will feature two scholars working in the field of beauty culture. Brenda Elsey, Hofstra University, will give a paper entitled, “‘I have united all Chileans:’” Augusto Pinochet and the Miss Universe Contest of 1987.” Karen Tice, University of Kentucky, will give a paper based on her new book, Queens of Academe. Her talk is entitled, “Queens of Academe: Student Bodies and the Politics of Race.”

The Spring “Little Berks” will be held in at the Guest House Retreat and Conference Center in lovely Chester, Connecticut, on June 1-3, 2012. The rate for the weekend (inclusive of food, beverages, and lodging) is $292 per person based on double occupancy. A few single rooms may be available at the price of $384.

To view the facility: http://guesthousecenter.org/

As the website puts it: the “Guest House is a delightful new retreat and conference center in the scenic Connecticut River Valley. We offer spacious guest rooms with private bathrooms, superb cuisine, and amenities that range from a grand piano in our lobby to wireless internet in every room. Guests can focus on their work without distractions, while enjoying a nurturing and comfortable environment.

Our facility is a beautifully renovated country inn on private wooded land, adjacent to a state forest with hiking trails and two neighboring lakes. Conveniently located midway between New York City and Boston, Guest House is easily reachable via major highways or by train.”

To reserve a room, please take these two steps:

1) send an email to Kathi Kern at kern@uky.edu (please be sure to mention the name of your roommate or if you need assistance finding a roommate)

2) send a deposit of $100 (made out to the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians) to Berks treasurer Ardis Cameron at: 24 Pond Road, South Portland, ME 04106. Your deposit needs to be received by May 19^th. The balance can be paid by cash or check at the conference.

The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians will underwrite the cost of graduate students by 50% and untenured faculty (who lack institutional funding) at the rate of 30%. If you qualify in one of these categories, please indicate your request of a scholarship when registering. All scholarship requests need to be received no later than May 19.

For directions and travel information:

http://guesthousecenter.org/page/4441-Location

Hope to see you there!

All best,

Kathi Kern

Secretary, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

2014 Berkshire Conference on Women’s History Themes

nmina — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:01:47 +0000

Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche

University of Toronto: May 22-25, 2014

Proposals due Jan 15, 2013

For the first time in its history, the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History (also known as the “Big Berks”) will be held outside of the United States, at the University of Toronto, on May 22-25, 2014. The major theme of the conference is Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche.

Our theme reflects the growing internationalization of this triennial conference. It recognizes the precariousness of a world in which the edged-out millions demand transformation, as well as the intellectual edges scholars have crossed, re-created, and worked to bridge in the academy and outside of it. We invite all modes of critical thinking and work that represents a wide range of historical methodologies. In addition to established historical approaches and sources, we seek sessions using other evidence, such as visual and material artifacts, sonic objects, oral traditions, and affective archives. We encourage methodological risk-taking and hope for a mix of established and newer approaches. We especially invite conversations across centuries, cultures, locales, and generations. We welcome media panels that bridge historical and contemporary work related to art, image, film, and other types of cultural production and cultural institutions.

The conference in Canada prompts conceptual, historical and analytic engagement with critical edges – sharpening, unsettling, de-centring, decolonizing histories in a global context. Edges are spatial: impenetrable borders, stifling boundaries or protective borders and spaces of smooth entry. Edges evoke the creative and the avant-garde. Entangled in the idea of edges are rough encounters, jagged conflicts as well as intimate exchanges. It speaks to the alternative spaces the “edged-out” have carved for themselves and to efforts made to create a common ground, or commons, on which to make oppositional histories.

As a nation-state shaped by imperialist histories and its own colonial dynamics, past and present, Canada itself sits on the edge of a powerful if, perhaps, waning American empire. Like other white settler societies, it is a colonial state that has operated through dispossessing First Nations peoples, guarding the edges of white citizenship, and endorsing patriarchal models of assimilation; yet, this history unfolds and is resisted in myriad ways. Its historical trajectory, on the edges of empire, includes colonization first by the French with the resulting ongoing Francophone presence, and later the British. Its distinctive features include socialized medicine, same-sex marriage, and official but contested multiculturalism. On Anishinabe land, Toronto, a creative, cosmopolitan, and contested city, is both “home” and “elsewhere” for many of its diasporic residents. What better place to consider edges as sites of hope, excitement, and possibility but also of danger, displacement, struggle, and exile?

Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche invites contributions from the edges because change so often emerges from such sites, however slowly, painfully or partially. Many scholars who write about the “edged-out” seek to talk back to the powerful or challenge the empowered by listening to others. This conference is interested in de-centring US scholarly dominance by inviting histories of the Caribbean and Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, Africa and the Middle East, and Indigenous, francophone and diasporic cultures around the world. We welcome papers that destabilize the white, able-bodied, liberal citizen subject through focus on bodies and objects on edges of all kinds. The theme also invites work that queers gender and sexual binaries. How can we historicize emergent, residual, and ongoing gender constructs such as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as well as gender performances, sexual practices, and social identifications that challenge binary modes of gender and sexuality?

Our theme encourages critical reflection on how gender, as analytic category, material embodiment, cultural resource, or signifying system works in many ways. Gender has its many ragged edges: where private and public spheres have been defined and redefined; where class, gender, race, ethnicity, nation, kinship, sexuality, and ability/disability have interacted; where masculinities and femininities have been constructed, reconstructed, and deconstructed. So, too, is gender on the edge of debate: a term in need of scrutiny to expose its uses, contradictions, strengths, and weaknesses. The theme respects feminist theory and praxis as a critical stance in need of constant interrogation. Western forms of feminism, for instance, have long faced challenges from in and outside its borders. We invite work on non-western and other feminisms and scrutiny of feminisms within the context of historically shifting global power relations and international alignments. The conference seeks to operate at the edges by engaging anti-racist, anti-colonial, and other critiques. It provocatively asks if “mainstream” feminism can reinvigorate its critical edge. Should we, as scholars, however we are positioned, seek to destabilize the centre and authorize the margin? Or sharpen our critique in a world that, now, as so often in the past, stands seemingly on the brink?

Please submit proposals to one of the 2014 subthemes (and note a second choice):

Borders, Encounters, Conflict Zones, and Memory

Empires, Nations, and the Commons

Law, Family, Courts, Criminality, and Prisons

Bodies, Health, Medical Technologies, and Science

Indigenous Histories and Indigenous Worlds

Caribbean, Latin America, and Afro/Francophone Worlds

Asia, Transnational Circuits, and Global Diasporas

Economies, Environments, Labour, and Consumption

Sexualities, Genders/LGBTIQ2, and Intimacies

Politics, Religion/Beliefs, and Global Feminisms

*A detailed Call for Papers will follow; the logistics of inviting global speakers explains early due date.

For questions, write: bcwh@utsc.utoronto.ca or visit the Berks website at http://berksconference.org

***

ANNONCE des thèmes de la «Berkshire Conference on Women’s History»

Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèch

Université de Toronto: du 22 au 25 mai 2014 Envoi des propositions : avant le 15 janvier 2013

Pour la première fois de son histoire, la «Berkshire Conference of Women’s History» (désignée ci- après comme «Big Berks») se tiendra à l’extérieur des États-Unis, à l’Université de Toronto, du 22 au 25 mai 2014. Le thème central de la Big Berks de Toronto est Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche.

Notre thème illustre l’internationalisation croissante de ce congrès triennal. Il reconnaît également la précarité d’un monde où des millions de personnes marginalisées exigent des changements et où des intellectuelles et des intellectuels innovateurs créent des brèches, repoussent les limites et tissent des liens à l’intérieur comme à l’extérieur du monde universitaire. Nous espérons recevoir des propositions issues de tous les modes de réflexion critique et représentatives d’une vaste gamme de méthodologies. En plus des approches et des sources historiques usuelles, nous vous invitons à soumettre des présentations basées sur d’autres assises, notamment les artéfacts visuels et matériels, les objets sonores, les traditions orales et les archives affectives. Nous encourageons en effet la prise de risques sur le plan méthodologique et espérons présenter une brochette de pratiques établies et de nouvelles approches. Un appel tout particulier est lancé aux spécialistes dont les analyses traversent les siècles, les cultures, les lieux et les générations. Ainsi, nous souhaitons recevoir des propositions de panels sur les médias établissant des liens entre travaux historiques et contemporains (touchant à l’art, l’image, le film et d’autres types de productions et d’institutions culturelles).

La Big Berks de Toronto entend susciter un engagement conceptuel, historique et analytique afin de multiplier les brèches conceptuelles, en affinant, déstabilisant, décentrant et décolonisant les histoires dans un contexte d’envergure mondiale. Les brèches envisagées pour le congrès ont d’abord un caractère spatial: il s’agit de débattre de frontières impénétrables, d’entraves étouffantes ou enveloppes protectrices, et de points d’entrée fluides. Évoquant la créativité et l’avant-garde, le concept de brèche suggère en outre un enchevêtrement de confrontations brutales, de conflits déchirants mais aussi d’échanges intimes. Il évoque les espaces alternatifs que se sont construits les personnes et populations «marginalisées» ainsi que les efforts déployés pour créer un espace commun où bâtir des histoires à caractère oppositionnel.

État-nation façonné par des récits historiques impérialistes et sa propre dynamique colonialiste, aujourd’hui comme hier, le Canada est lui-même en marge d’un empire américain très puissant, bien que peut-être en déclin. Comme d’autres sociétés investies par les Blancs, c’est un État colonial fondé sur la dépossession de Premières nations, sur une citoyenneté blanche aux marges policées et sur l’imposition de modèles patriarcaux d’assimilation. Son histoire s’est néanmoins déployée de façon très diverse selon le temps et l’espace et en suscitant une myriade de résistances. Vécue sur les marges de trois empires, la trajectoire historique du Canada comprend une première colonisation française, toujours vivante dans la présence francophone au pays, puis celle des Britanniques. Les signes distinctifs du pays comprennent aujourd’hui un système de santé public, le droit au mariage entre personnes de même sexe et un multiculturalisme officiel, même si contesté. La ville de Toronto, située en territoire Anishinabe, est un lieu créatif, cosmopolite et un foyer de contestation, qui est à la fois un «chez-soi» et un «ailleurs» pour bon nombre de ses résidentes et résidents. Quel meilleur endroit où examiner marges et brèches comme porteuses d’espoir, d’enthousiasme et de possibles, mais également de danger, de déplacement, de lutte et d’exil?

Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche encourage la soumission de communications issues des réalités marginales, car elles sont souvent les moteurs de changements, aussi lents, douloureux ou partiels soient-ils. Nombre de spécialistes ripostent aux puissants en s’intéressant aux groupes marginalisés et en les écoutant. Le congrès entend atténuer la domination des États-Unis dans les cercles universitaires en faisant place aux histoires des Caraïbes et de l’Amérique latine, de l’Asie et du Pacifique, de l’Afrique et du Moyen-Orient, ainsi qu’aux cultures indigènes, francophones et à celles des diasporas du monde entier. Nous faisons appel aux présentations qui déstabilisent le sujet blanc, libéral et bien portant pour faire place à des corps et à des objets qui font brèche d’une manière ou d’une autre. Avec ce thème des Histoires sur la brèche, nous invitons également les travaux qui soumettent à l’épreuve du queer les binarités de genre et de sexe. Comment historiciser l’émergence, les traces ou la persistance de constructions sociales de genre comme le «masculin» et le «féminin», ainsi que la performativité du genre, les pratiques sexuelles et les identifications sociales qui contestent les modes binaires du genre et de la sexualité?

Notre thème incite à la réflexion critique sur les nombreux modes d’opération du genre, en tant que catégorie analytique, manifestation matérielle, ressource culturelle ou système de signifiants. Le genre présente aussi son lot de brèches irrégulières: là où les sphères privées et publiques ont été définies et redéfinies; là où la classe, le genre, la race, l’ethnicité, la nation, la parenté, la sexualité et les in/capacités ont interagi; là où les masculinités et les féminités ont été construites, reconstruites et déconstruites. Le genre comme concept sera donc lui aussi sur la brèche: il faut le débattre et le passer au crible pour en exposer les usages, les contradictions, les atouts et les limites.

Ce thème central de la brèche tient compte de la théorie et de la praxis féministes qui favorisent des questionnements constants. Les formes du féminisme occidental, par exemple, sont depuis longtemps contestées, de l’intérieur comme de l’extérieur. Nous sommes en quête de travaux sur les féminismes non occidentaux et autres, et invitons à l’étude des féminismes dans le contexte sans cesse mouvant des rapports de pouvoir et des alignements internationaux. Ce congrès veut explorer des marges et des brèches en s’ouvrant aux critiques antiracistes, anticolonialistes et autres. Il interroge la possibilité d’une revitalisation de l’esprit critique du féminisme mainstream. Devrions-nous, comme universitaires et quelle que soit notre position, chercher à ébranler le centre au profit de la marge? Affûter nos critiques d’un monde qui, aujourd’hui comme si souvent dans le passé, semble être au bord du gouffre?

Veuillez soumettre vos propositions en les rattachant à l’un ou l’autre des sous-thèmes suivants (et en indiquant un second choix):

Frontières, rencontres, zones de conflit et mémoire

Empires, pays et bien commun

Droit, famille, tribunaux, criminalité et prisons

Corps, santé, technologies médicales et sciences

Histoires indigènes et mondes indigènes

Caraïbes, Amérique latine et mondes afro/francophones

Asie, circuits transnationaux et diasporas mondiales

Économies, environnements, travail et consommation

Sexualités, genres/LGBTIQ2 et intimités

Politiques, religion/croyances et féminismes mondiaux

*Un appel à communications plus détaillé suivra; les contraintes logistiques liées à l’invitation de conférencières internationales expliquent cette date d’échéance précoce. Pour toute question, écrire à bcwh@utsc.utoronto.ca ou visiter le site du congrès: http://berksconference.org

Follow-up on Little Berks Digital Storytelling Panel

fiacovetta — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 18:14:13 +0000

The topic of our Saturday evening panel will be digital storytelling and feature projects at the University of Kentucky and at Concordia University in Montreal. Kathi Kern of the University of Kentucky, and our Berks secretary, will begin the session and help frame the discussion by drawing on some of the digital storytelling projects which her students have created on topics such as celibacy, girlhood, and the politics of the hijab. She will also comment on using digital storytelling in the women’s history classroom and on its radical potential for teaching future generations.

We will then turn to a presentation on the Montreal Life Stories project at Concordia University (http://www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca/), with two of its participants speaking on their respective roles and projects within this well-funded and ambitious enterprise. Anna Sheftel will discuss her experiences working with survivors of mass violence who tell their stories, including Holocaust survivors and victims of violence in the former Yugoslavia. Her research also took her to Bihać, a city in the northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 2005, to research wartime memory in the region, and she will speak as well on the lessons learned there about the political and ethical potential of oral history. One of the founding members, and committee coordinators, of the Montreal Life Stories project, Lisa Ndejuru has also been centrally involved in the Rwandan working group and with various performance-based workshops that draw on oral narratives and experiment with different ways of creating dialogue around such difficult stories. In addition to discussing those efforts, she will also talk about getting these stories into the high school curriculum by highlighting a learning module on genocide that drew on a Rwandan graphic artist’s work. This promises to be an informative and intellectually engaging, and also emotionally moving, evening. We hope it will inspire others to speak about their own efforts at using oral and digital storytelling methods to educate and empower those in the classroom and beyond it.

2010 Little Berks

kschrum — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:03:11 +0000

The Little Berks will be held June 4-6, 2010, at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Our President, Kathy Brown, has invited Anjali Arondaker from the University of California, Santa Cruz to speak with us this year.

These “Little Berks” meetings are open to all members and their guests. We urge you to attend, to bring your colleagues and students, and to introduce them to the work of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. “Little Berks” meetings provide a relaxed and informal setting in which to meet and converse with other historians, as well as becoming more involved with the running of the organization.

This year’s location is the Willits-Hallowell Center at Mt. Holyoke College. For more information visit the Willits-Hallowell website.

Cost:

We have reserved a block of 20 double rooms. The double room rate is $115 per night, but does not include tax. Registration will be $120.00. This fee will include the cost of dinner on Friday and Saturday evening as well as breakfast on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Both dinners will include vegetarian options. Payment for registration can be made by check to Susan Yohn at the meeting. Please make your checks payable to Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

Registration:

Because we need an accurate count of who will be attending for our dinner orders, please complete the online registration form. This will register you for the meeting only; lodging arrangements are separate.

You must contact the Willits-Hallowell Center directly to make your room reservation. Please call the Center at (413) 538-2217. Be sure to indicate that you are with the Berkshire Conference. If you will be sharing a room, please give the Inn the name of your roommate.

We can underwrite the room and board expenses of junior faculty and graduate students. We will pay 30% of the room and board costs for recently employed or underemployed faculty, and 50% for graduate students. If you would like to take advantage of these subsidies, please contact Susan Yohn at smyohn@verizon.net before making your reservations.

Agenda:

On Friday evening, we will begin with drinks at 5:30, followed by dinner at 6:30 and a speaker (to be announced) after dinner.

The business meeting is scheduled for 3pm on Saturday at the Center followed by drinks, dinner, and a speaker (to be announced). At our afternoon business meeting we will discuss several administrative issues including plans for the Big Berks meeting in 2011.

During free times on Saturday and Sunday members may enjoy hiking, the Mt. Holyoke Art Museum, or short trips to nearby Amherst and Northampton.

The Art of Gender in Everyday Life, Idaho State University

sdouglass — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:32:42 +0000

Anderson Center announces a multidisciplinary conference, The Art of Gender in Everyday Life VII, at Idaho State University (ISU), March 10th & 11th, 2011. I All conference sessions and keynote are FREE and open to the public. We encourage people to drop by for as much or as little of the conference as they like. A complete list of conference sessions, schedules, and other details can be found on our website at http://www.isu.edu/andersoncenter. If you’d like more information about The Art of Gender in Everyday Life VII conference or the Anderson Center, or to schedule an interview with Anderson Center staff, please contact Heidi Harold at (208) 282-2805 or gndrctr@isu.edu.