UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The Penn State Women’s Studies Graduate Organization presents its 16th-annual conference on Friday-Saturday, Feb. 24-25. The two-day program, “Feminism, Race, and the Anthropocene,” offers opportunities for academics, students and activists to gather and exchange ideas in feminist scholarship, collaboration, creativity and teaching across disciplines.
The schedule of events includes a pre-conference lecture and reception on Friday, Feb. 24, in the Willard Building on Penn State’s University Park campus. The sessions on Saturday, Feb. 25 will be held at the Penn Stater Conference Center. Registration for the conference is free.
“Feminism, Race, and the Anthropocene” focuses on feminism’s role in understanding and critically investigating the new geological age called the Anthropocene in an interdisciplinary and transnational context, giving special attention to questions of indigeneity and highlighting the contributions that academics and activists have made in understanding the intersectionality of injustice in relation to global climate change.
Keynote speaker, Zoe Todd, assistant professor of anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, conducts innovative research on feminism, indigeneity, and decolonialism in relationship to the Anthropocene. Her research is on fish, colonialism and legal-governance relations between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian State. Her work employs a critical indigenous feminist lens to examine the shared relationships between people and their environments and legal orders in Canada, with a view to understanding how to bring fish and the "more-than-human" into conversations about indigenous self-determination, peoplehood, and governance in Canada today.
Research presentations and projects from graduate and advanced undergraduate students in a variety of disciplines will be featured onsite at the conference venue.
The 2017 conference is sponsored by several departments and entities connected to Penn State, including: African Studies, African American Studies, Anthropology, Architecture, Art History, Center for Women Students, College of Arts and Architecture, Communication Arts and Sciences, Commission on Racial/Ethnic Diversity (CORED), French and Francophone Studies, Geosciences, Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature, History, Institute for Arts and Humanities, Institutes of Energy and the Environment, Interinstitutional Center for Indigenous Knowledge (ICIK), Lifelong Learning and Adult Education, School of Labor and Employment Relations, Philosophy, Plant Science, Political Science, Population Research Institute, Psychology, Richards Civil War Era Center, Rock Ethics Institute, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and UPAC.
For more information and to register for the conference, please visit the conference website.
For more information about this event, or for questions about accommodations or the physical access provided, contact Meredith Field at mpf169@psu.edu in advance of your attendance.