THE WOMEN’S CENTER SIGNATURE EVENTS 2011 - 2012

 

What do women still want?

NI UNA MAS: REMEMBERING THE MISSING WOMEN OF JUAREZ El feminicidio en Mexico ha pasado de ser inimaginable a ser invisible de nueva cuenta.

Tuesday, October 11th / 6:30 p.m.

Student Center / Rm 314AB

6:30 – 8:00 p.m. – Remembering the Missing Women of Juarez Since 1993, over 400 women have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez. Four hundred and fifty more women are missing and the crimes have spread to Chihuahua City. Join a panel of artists and activists to discuss the femicide in Juarez, the Rastros y Crónicas: Women of Juarez exhibit and its impact, and their work. Panelists:

Dolores Mercado – Associate Curator / National Museum of Mexican Art

Linda Tortolero – Special Projects Director / National Museum of Mexican Art

Artist – to be named 8:00 p.m. – Silent Procession

8:00 – Candlelight Vigil Pauline Villapando – University Ministry

Proclamation of the Names / Quad

With the Women of Juarez We cry for Justice, With the Women of the World We cry for Compassion, With the Women of Today, We give Hope and Life.

Ni Una Mas! / Not One More! (2008) – Judithe Hernandez

FALL QUARTER

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 PERSPECTIVES: BROADENING THE CONVERSATION ABOUT VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Wednesday, October 19th / 7:00pm Student Center / Rm. 314 AB

Part of The Women's Center's annual Violence Against Women / Violence Against Communities series, this year's discussion will focus on critiques of the social systems that perpetuate economic and gender inequality and how those systems create divisions among and between communities, including communities of

color, immigrant communities, lgbt communities.

Panelists:

Yasmin Nair is a Chicago-based writer, activist, academic, and commentator. Self-described as the bastard child of queer theory and deconstruction, Nair has numerous critical essays, book reviews, investigative journalism, op-eds, and photography to her credit. Her work has appeared in publications like GLQ, The Progressive, make/shift, Time Out Chicago, Windy City Times,

Bitch, Maximum Rock’n’Roll. Nair is part of the editorial collective of Against Equality and a member of the Chicago grassroots organization Gender JUST.

Owen Daniel-McCarter is the founding collective member and project attorney at Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois which provides free, zealous, life-affirming, and gender-affirming holistic criminal legal services to low-income and street-based transgender and gender non-conforming people

targeted by the criminal legal system in Chicago. He is also a volunteer attorney for Cabrini Green Legal Aid, First Defense Legal Aid, and the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, as well as an adjunct instructor at DePaul University.

Traci Schlesinger is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at DePaul University. She has published numerous journal articles which have been widely cited by both scholars and the courts including "The Failure of Race-Neutral Policies: How Mandatory Terms and Sentencing Enhancements Increased Racial Disparities in Prison Admission Rates” in Crime &

Delinquency and "Equality at the Price of Justice: How Mandatory Terms and Sentencing Enhancements Disproportionately Affect Women" in NWSAJ. Her book, The Limits of Equality: Sentencing Policy and Colorblind Racism, was published by VDM Press in 2011. Her commitment to abolishing prisons and dismantling white supremacy extends beyond her teaching and research.

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WHAT DO WOMEN STILL WANT? WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH LUNCHEON AND DISCUSSION

Thursday, March 1st / 12:30pm Student Center / Rm. 120

8th Annual Women's History Month Luncheon: As part of the University's commemoration of Women's History Month, The Women’s Center will host a luncheon and roundtable discussion featuring Chicago-area activists.

Panelists:

Mischelle Causey Drake, graduate of DePaul’s College of Law, is the Chief Operating Officer & General Counsel of Jane Addams Hull House Association, a multi-faceted human service organization that provides services to children and families throughout metropolitan Chicago. She is a life-long advocate for the rights of women and girls.

Mona Noriega, Commissioner of the city’s Department of Human Relations, has dedicated her life and career to eliminating prejudice and discrimination and to advancing the appreciation of Chicago's diverse population. Co-founder and past member of the Board of Directors of Amigas Latinas, an organization committed to the empowerment and education of Latina LBT, Noriega also

worked as the Regional Director of Lambda Legal Defense's Midwest office.

Jane Hussein Saks, Director of the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Chicago’s Columbia College, has served on or advised boards and committees of the Chicago Foundation for Women, National Public Radio’s Radio Diaries, the Chicago History Museum’s “Out at CHM” lecture series, Human Rights Watch Chicago, the Funding Lesbian

& Gay Issues group of the Donors Forum of Chicago, and the Friends of South Africa’s Constitutional Court.

K. Sujata, President and CEO of the Chicago Foundation for Women, previously served as director of programs for the Eleanor Foundation and as executive director of Apna Ghar, a domestic violence agency supporting Chicago's South Asian and other immigrant communities. Sujata also served as director of Chicago Continuum of Care (now Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness) and, as director of planning and development at Interfaith

Housing Development Corporation,

WINTER QUARTER

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WHAT DO WOMEN STILL WANT? WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH PERFORMANCE AND DISCUSSION

Thursday, March 1st / 6:30pm Student Center / Rm. 120

As part of the University's commemoration of Women's History Month, The Women’s Center and Women’s and Gender Studies Program will host a performance and discussion featuring Chicago area women artists/ activist/scholars. Our shared history unites families, communities, and nations. Knowing women’s stories reasserts the absence of women’s voices and knowledge production in political and socio-cultural spheres. These stories both instruct and celebrate, challenge and caution, inspire and fortify. . .

Sharon Bridgforth, a resident playwright at New Dramatists, is a writer working in the Theatrical Jazz Aesthetic. She is the current Visiting Multicultural Faculty member at The Theatre School at DePaul. Her piece, blood pudding, was produced in the New York SummerStage Festival. Bridgforth is author of the Lambda Literary Award winning, the

bull-jean stories and love conjure/blues, a performance/novel.

Kimberlee Pérez - a queer Chicana performer-scholar, teaches Intercultural Communication in the College of Communication at DePaul. Her research interests include the cultural and resistive work of performance through embodied action, narrative, and queer intimacy and collaboration, and also identity formation, particularly of queer, Latina/o and Chicana/o experience. Her work has been published in Performance Research, and Text

and Performance Quarterly.

Laila Farah, a Lebanese-American feminist performer-scholar, is Associate Professor and Graduate Director in Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul. She continues to work on future performance pieces, as well as touring with her production of Living in the Hyphen-Nation. Her creative scholarship includes research with and the performance of “Third World” women and women of color, postcolonial identities and ethnographic performance.

Misty De Berry, a Chicago-based writer and actor, was awarded a Fellowship from the Ellen Stone Belic Institute at Columbia College Chicago, which supported the development of what is now Milkweed. She has worked with esteemed theaters as the NYC Hip-Hop Theater Festival and the 78th Street Theater Lab, with whom she won the best original production by an ensemble at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival for Boy Steals Train.

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SEXUAL ASSAULT AWARENESS MONTH PROGRAM

Thursday, April12th SC 314 AB / (evening)

Program currently in development with Rape Victim Advocates and the Chicago Metropolitan Battered Women’s Network.

A CONVERSATION WITH ACHY OBEJAS AND MYRIAM J.A. CHANCY

Tuesday, May 8th / 6:00pm Cortelou Commons The Women’s Center will host a reading and conversation between Achy Obejas and Myriam J. A. Chancy, authors whose works explore the artist’s/the immigrant artist’s relationship to home countries and their responsibility to bear witness when those countries are suffering from violence, oppression, poverty, and tragedy.

Achy Obejas, poet, novelist, translator, journalist, is the Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Chair in Latin American and Latino Studies and the Department of English. An accomplished journalist, Obejas worked briefly for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Reader. She has also written for The Windy City Times, The Advocate, High Performance, and The Village Voice. She is currently a

cultural writer for the Chicago Tribune. Her short stories have also been widely published in journals and anthologies. Her novels include We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994), Memory Mambo (1996), which won a Lambda Award, and her third novel, Days of Awe (2001), which won the 2002 Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction.

Myriam J. A. Chancy, Haitian-Canadian writer born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is the author of several academic and creative books including two influential books of literary criticism, Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997) and Searching for Safe Spaces : Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997). From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba and the

Dominican Republic, closes a trilogy on Caribbean women’s literature and is forthcoming. Her first novel, Spirit of Haiti (2003) was shortlisted for Best First Book (Canada/Caribbean region) of the Commonwealth Prize. Her second novel, The Scorpion’s Claw (2005), is taught in universities and colleges throughout the US and Canada. Her third novel, The Loneliness of Angels (2010), also taught at various universities and colleges, was longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature and shortlisted in its fiction category.

Spring Quarter