Scholars from both Oregon and California will converge today for “Feminism Unbound”, a symposium to explore issues related to women, gender and feminism.
The two-day conference, sponsored by the Social Sciences Feminist Network, features 16 panels and presentations by graduate students from different disciplines. The event will take place in the EMU and Gerlinger Hall.
Barbara Sutton, SSFN coordinator and the event’s general coordinator, said the conference started as a collaborative effort by graduate students. She believes there are not enough opportunities to present work at the University, and the conference is one way to alleviate the problem.
“It seems sometimes we lack connections between the different disciplines,” she said. “We wanted to create this friendly space for grad students.”
Sutton said she expects presenters from UCLA, USC, the University of California at San Diego, as well as the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Roxanne Gerbrandt, a sociology GTF, said she hopes those who attend take away a view that corrects some of the misunderstandings of feminism, such as the belief that feminists simply hate men.
“The goal [of the conference] is to be progressive and form better relationships,” she said.
Each presentation will consist of a panel representing the different disciplines and will last approximately one hour. Presentations will include discussions on religious identity, women and higher education, as well as women’s empowerment.
Sutton said the presentations are structured differently, some having a high degree of visual representation. She said the conference organizers gave each presenter freedom in planning the panels.
“Our policy was to get as many people [to present] as possible,” she said.
Karin Almquist, a GTF of romance languages, said she became interested in the conference because she wants to hear what people have to say about feminism.
Almquist, who will be presenting a panel entitled “Melancholy Gender and ‘Postcolonial’ Narratives of Loss: A Study of Three Francophone Women’s Novels Across Cultures,” said she was compelled to speak at the conference.
” I hope to get people thinking about the importance of being emotionally connected to our personal histories, as opposed to burying our past,” she said.
Almquist said the conference is a start, but there is more work to be done for feminists.
“The questions that certain feminist scholars raise are relevant to all spheres of our lives — and not just to men and women in the U.S.,” she said. “A conference such as this provides a public forum in which to discuss matters that concern us all, to exchange ideas on how to bring about positive change, and most likely to be exposed to and learn about some aspect of women’s studies that is entirely new to us.”
Registration for the conference begins at 8:30 a.m. today and tomorrow and is free. The first presentation will begin at 9 a.m. each day, and both days will end with a multimedia production that begins at 9 p.m.