Women & Gender Studies Students Travel to St. Louis

Nine students enrolled in Women and Gender Studies classes attended an international conference called Global Feminisms: The Role of Women in Building States and Societies at Washington University in St. Louis from March 30 to April 1, 2006. The students were accompanied by Dr. Erin Kenny of the Interdisciplinary Studies Center, and expenses for the trip were covered jointly by the Women and Gender Studies Program and the Interdisciplinary Studies Center.

The conference was designed to explore the ways women around the world are re-configuring power relations in their local communities and forming grass-roots organizations to resist forms of structural oppression, including gender violence. For the panelists (assembled from Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, Croatia, India, the Netherlands, Peru, Trinidad, Canada, and the United States), the conference was the culmination of a year long program sponsored by the Center of New Institutional Social Sciences (CNISS) and the New Century Scholars (NCS) program of the Fulbright Foundation. Panelists presented empirical data and analyses from their research projects and then dialogued with discussants and the audience to illustrate how gender problems are not confined to regions or countries, but have impacts on the global community and global politics.

Drury students were engaged throughout the presentations, and asked important questions about the politics of compassionate research and the role of cultural relativism in the global world. By meeting with these scholars from around the globe, Drury students also interacted with students from campuses in other cities to further their own insights about how feminist scholarship contributes to state building and creating new ways of negotiating their positions around the world.

Following the bridging efforts of the conference, the nine Drury students “de-briefed” with Dr. Kenny to brainstorm on ways to incorporate international issues of gender into their own lives and the GP 21 curriculum. The students agreed that the experience gave them a new way of viewing the world.