Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon gave a guest lecture in Dr. Jackie Cuevas’ course, “Survive and Thrive: LGBTQ UT,” at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Solomon’s lecture was based on her published article “Tejano Drag Kings: Reclaiming Space, Place, and Culture Through Performance,” which Dr. Cuevas assigned for the class.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon published the collaborative article “Latina/e Lesbian Archival Praxis and Memory Work: A Plática/Roda de Conversa with Malflora Collective” in the Journal of Lesbian Studies. Co-authored with fellow Malflora Collective members Melissa Aslo de la Torre, Mariana Meriqui Rodrigues, Guadalupe Ortega, Anahí Ponce, and Alexandra Nichole Salazar, the article examines nontraditional and community-based archival practices among Latina/e lesbians and explores memory work as a form of collective, cultural, and decolonial praxis. The article can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon and psychology major and feminist studies minor Karla Vazquez ’26 attended the 2026 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Conference in San Antonio. They attended many illuminating sessions that bridged Chicanx studies, feminism, and anti-imperialist praxis, including workshops on Chicanx-Palestine solidarity and Chicana feminist zine-making.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon attended the 2025 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico (Borikén) from November 13–16. She presented on a roundtable titled “Archiving Malflora: Latina/e Lesbian Memory Work as Decolonial Praxis,” along with four other members of Malflora Collective, her collaborative PEH project focused on preserving Latina/e lesbian histories. The roundtable focused on creative strategies for archiving community stories through zine-making, podcasting, and digital archival practices, while also contending with the fraught nature of online platforms.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson and her Summer 2025 SURF students presented their findings at the 13th Race, Ethnicity and Place conference in Albuquerque, NM from November 5–7. Their panel was titled “Race, Gender, Slavery and Freedom in Everyday Life on the British coast of Central America, 1750-1830.” Dr. Johnson and three students presented their papers: anthropology and feminist studies double major Dina Gaxiola ’28 presented “The Case of Jane Trapp: Race, Gender, Slavery and Freedom in Early British Central America,” psychology and sociology double major Sophia Hernandez ’28 presented “From Enslavement to Influence; Gendered Agency, Racial Boundaries, and the Story of Ariadne Broaster,” Dr. Johnson presented “Living across lines of freedom in the early history of Belize: The origins of the Bonner family,” and biology and environmental studies double major Shae Whitney ’28 presented “Maria Middleton – Slave, Criminal, Transported Convict: Understanding Gender, Race and Freedom across the British Colonial World.” The students may have been the only undergraduates presenting papers at this conference. The papers were well received, with one audience member sharing that this was the most interesting panel they had attended.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon published a peer-reviewed article, titled “Tejano Drag Kings: Reclaiming Space, Place, and Culture Through Performance,” in WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, a top feminist studies journal. This article theorizes Tejano drag king performance as a critical source of resistance to state repression and cisheteronormative cultural standards. While drag kings in general, and Latino drag kings in particular, remain marginalized subjects in popular drag discourse, this article spotlights the work of Tejano drag kings and theorizes how their embodied performance and parody of masculinity serves as a vessel for feminist worldmaking. The article can be accessed here.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon, alongside her Mellon Publicly-Engaged Humanities (PEH) Research Assistant Mia Santoscoy ’26, attended the 2025 Lesbian Lives conference in New York City from October 24–26. They presented on a roundtable titled “Latina/e Lesbian Archival Praxis and Memory Work: A Plática/Roda de Conversa with Malflora Collective,” which included seven members of the Latina/e lesbian collective co-founded by Dr. Solomon with support from the Mellon PEH grant. In the roundtable, Malflora Collective members discussed the non-traditional and community-based archival practices that Latina/e lesbians engage in, arguing that their memory work is rooted in collectivity, lived experience, and cultural reclamation as a form of decolonial praxis. Together, they highlighted how noninstitutional archives and digital memory projects like Malflora Collective are crucial for preserving the stories of marginalized communities and fostering transnational solidarity in the face of cultural and political oppression.

Sociology and feminist studies graduate Emily Dimiceli ’25 received an honorable mention for the prestigious Joe Feagin Undergraduate Paper Award for her fall 2025 sociology capstone project. This national award, presented by the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Minorities section of the American Sociological Association (ASA), recognizes outstanding undergraduate scholarship. Emily accepted the honor at this year’s ASA meeting in Chicago. In its commendation, the award committee described Emily’s paper as “ambitious original research… well-grounded in racial theory, including conceptualizations of colorblind racism and historical racism.”

Sociology and feminist studies double major and race and ethnicity studies minor Emily Dimiceli ’25 has been accepted into the 2025 American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Honors Program. As a part of the program, she will present her capstone research paper, titled “‘Obama was voted president by white people’: Predictors of Americans’ Perceptions of Racism,” at this year’s ASA annual meeting in Chicago, IL.

On International Women’s Day, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon released the first episode of her collaborative podcast, Malflora Podcast, which is a series of pláticas (community conversations) with Latina/e lesbian activists, writers, artists, and scholars. Malflora Podcast is published by Malflora Collective, a community project dedicated to preserving the lives and legacies of Latina/e lesbians. Dr. Solomon first conceptualized Malflora Collective as a 2024 Mellon Publicly-Engaged Humanities Summer Fellow. Since then, the project has grown to include a team of nine members, including Communication Studies/Latin American and Border Studies double major Mia Santoscoy ’26, who is currently serving as Dr. Solomon’s Research Assistant. In Episode 1 of Malflora Podcast, members from Malflora Collective introduce themselves and their work memorializing Latina/e lesbian history and culture. Listen here or on all major streaming platforms.

On December 9, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon hosted the Lavender Literary Society’s discussion of Dr. Lydia Otero’s book, L.A. Interchanges: A Brown and Queer Archival Memoir. Solomon and Otero engaged in an intergenerational dialogue centered on queer and lesbian Chicane literature, history, and activism. The virtual event was coordinated by the American LGBTQ+ Museum and can be viewed here.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon attended the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Detroit, MI, where she offered a presentation titled “Teaching to Transgress Imperialism, Settler Colonialism, and Zionism: The Feminist Studies Classroom as a ‘Radical Space of Possibility’ in Texas.” She presented her work alongside Drs. Ruba Akkad of Austin College, Isis Nusair of Denison University, and Iveta Jusova of Carleton College on the panel, “Anti-Zionist Feminist Pedagogies: Teaching Toward Palestinian Liberation and an End to the Genocide in Gaza,” which was well-attended by feminist faculty and students from around the world. Reflecting on her strategies and experiences teaching about Palestine within a feminist context since arriving at Southwestern in fall of 2023, Dr. Solomon’s presentation concluded with a recording of SU alumna Brigit Reese’s 2024 commencement speech on Gaza, which received a standing ovation from the audience.

This summer, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon participated in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) Publishing Workshop to support her Mellon Publicly-Engaged Humanities project, Malflora, a forthcoming multimedia platform dedicated to publishing and preserving Latina/e lesbian stories. In the workshop, she learned from a wide range of speakers who work in book, magazine, and multimedia publishing and helped produce Issue 7 of the online magazine, PubLab. As an art director for the magazine, she curated a portfolio of Anel I. Flores’ paintings focused on lesbian intimacy, bodily autonomy, and queer liberation, which you can access here.

On June 23, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon led a community teach-in at Alienated Majesty Books entitled “No Pride in Genocide: A Teach-In on Zionist Pinkwashing.” The teach-in focused on defining and dismantling pinkwashing, or the process of promoting LGBTQ+ rights to appear progressive while simultaneously upholding oppressive systems that directly harm LGBTQ+ people, such as settler colonialism and occupation. The teach-in was part of a larger series of educational events in Austin focused on Palestinian liberation, which enabled a broader public to engage in critical dialogue informed by activist-oriented scholarship.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon participated on a panel entitled “Atravesades Igniting through Art, Community, and Place-Making” with co-panelists Anel Flores and T. Jackie Cuevas at El Mundo Zurdo Conference in San Antonio. She presented her paper, “Somos Lesbianas: Chicana Lesbian Place-Making and Place-Taking En Comunidad,” which examines how Chicana lesbians take up art and writing as vessels for challenging oppressive forces and building coalition in the 1991 anthology “Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About.” edited by Carla Trujillo. In her paper, Solomon examines how Chicana lesbians integrate and redefine cultural customs in their creative expressions of self, spirituality, and familia that push back against the heteropatriarchal logics of Chicano nationalism. Underscoring the anthology form as a critical source of feminist coalition, she asserts that the voices featured in Chicana Lesbians intervene in dominant discourses on Chicana lesbian life toward a shared state of conocimiento - a spiritual and activist consciousness that tasks us with imagining and enacting new worlds.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon participated in the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship Conference in Los Angeles, CA, from February 15-18. With co-discussants X’andrí and Alexandra Salazar, she presented on a roundtable entitled “The Pleasures and Intimacies of Jotería Spacemaking Within and Beyond the University.” Their roundtable focused on the necessity of cultivating spaces to exist and commune as jotería (queer Latinxs) against continued assaults on our humanity. As politicians and their constituents continue to target and alienate LGBTQ+ folks, this roundtable asserted that jotería spacemaking is an act of survival.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon attended the American Studies Association Conference in Montreal last week, where she chaired and participated in a roundtable entitled “Community Knowledge and Solidarity Work as Public Scholarship and Collective Healing.” She presented her collaborative zine project with Ruba Akkad (TCU), situating zines and zinemaking as forms of community-accountable scholarship and healing.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon published an essay entitled “Ana Castillo: A Multigenre Author” in the collection Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers, edited by Dr. Norma E. Cantú and published by the University of Arizona Press. Dr. Solomon’s essay examines the central themes of feminist friendship, queer intimacy, and women’s spirituality in a selection of Ana Castillo’s essays and novels, including Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994), The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), Sapogonia (1990), and So Far From God (1993). Released this month, you can find the collection here.

Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon published an article, “Beyond Sexual Deviance: Elevating the Expansive Intimacies of Chicana Lesbian Life in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About” in the Journal of Lesbian Studies. In this article, she expands popular readings of Chicana lesbianism focused on sexuality by tending more deeply to the affective terrains of love and kinship represented in the 1991 anthology Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About,edited by Carla Trujillo. Countering the (il)logics of white supremacy and Chicano nationalism, which reduce Chicana lesbians to symbols of sexual deviance, she argues that Chicana Lesbiansembodies an expansive matrix of intimacies that reconstruct the Chicana lesbian figure from a one-dimensional symbol of sexual deviance to a multi-faceted figure who redefines what it means to love one’s people and culture beyond colonial paradigms that privilege heterosexuality. The article can be read here.

Feminist Studies faculty and students presented their research at the national Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) summer institute. This year’s conference, “40 years of MALCS, Centuries of Activism: La Lucha Sigue for Racial, Reproductive and Decolonial Justice,” took place on July 13-15, 2023, at UC Davis. Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Meagan Solomon presented “Reflections on Chicana/Latina Lesbian Feminism from This Bridge to the Digital Dyke Age.” Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo, MALCS chair and conference co-chair, presented on a roundtable titled “Chicana Movidas: Reflections on 50 years of Chicana Knowledge-Making” with her co-contributors to the Chicana Movidas anthology. The following students presented papers under the guidance of Sendejo: Myla Benally “Restoring the Meaning of Hózhó Within a Decolonial Framework: A Return to Balance and Beauty” and sof varnis “Weaving as a Decolonial Practice: Reconciliation, Transformation, and Spiritual Activism Among the Mampujan Weavers.”

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo was invited to participate as a faculty mentor in the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Crossing Latinidades engages cross-institutional and cross-regional comparative research, training doctoral students, and new scholarship in emerging areas of inquiry about Latinos. The initiative serves as the anchor of the consortium of R1 Hispanic Serving Institutions at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Sendejo is among a group of Latino Studies faculty across the U.S. who will be paired with doctoral students through the professional mentorship program.

Southwestern’s Feminist Studies Program was well represented at the annual meeting of WGS South last weekend. Elena Welsh ’22 presented a paper entitled “Slow Pleasure/Slow Death: Rituals of Survival in Queer Media” as part of a panel on LGBTQ Health. Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Jordan Johnson presented a paper entitled “Feminist Science Studies and Multispecies Justice: Responding to Weedy Entanglements” as part of a panel on Multispecies Feminisms.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala attended the El Mundo Zurdo conference for the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa at the University of Texas at San Antonio from November 4-5. The roundtable that Bahrainwala and Sendejo co-organized was titled “Reflections on Radical Love, Care, and Consent: How Anzaldúa Informs Our Liberatory Praxis.” Bahrainwala presented “Pandemic lessons: Consent as anti-Racism,” and Sendejo presented “Movidas of Healing: The Spirit Work of Movement Era Chicanas.” The roundtable was well attended by lead scholars in the field of Anzaldúan Thought.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo attended the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from November 10-13. This year’s conference theme was “Killing Rage: Resistance on the Other Side of Freedom.” Sendejo presented a paper titled “The Spirit Work of bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa: Lessons on Radical Love as Resistance,” which drew from her book manuscript in progress.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Jordan Johnson published the article “Staying with the Trouble with Wilderness: Reworking Nature and Culture in the Plantationocene” in this fall’s issue of The Journal of Posthumanism. The issue is available here.

Associate Professor of Feminst Studies Brenda Sendejo was invited to present her research as part of Mexic-Arte Museum’s  Chicano/a Art Movimiento y Más en Austen, Tejas 1960s to 1980s  exhibit and lecture series. Her paper was titled “The Chicana Movement in Austin: A Legacy of Activism, Feminism, and Intergenerational Encuentros” and drew on themes from the exhibit that intersect with Sendejo’s work on the Chicana/o movement and emergence of Chicana feminist thought in Texas. The lecture series and exhibit were supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo was elected chair of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), a professional organization for self-identified Chicana, Latina, Native American/indígena mujeres and gender nonconforming academics, students, and activists. Sendejo cochaired the program committee for the MALCS 2022 Summer Institute, held July 27–30 in Fort Collins, Colorado. She also organized and served as a presenter on a roundtable about healing and re-membering as decolonial feminist praxis, informed by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Jordan Johnson ’11 will receive a stipend to participate in the Bucknell Summer Institute this June.

Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Feminist Studies Program Sequoia Maner’s coedited book, Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, was published by Routledge Press. The title is available with a 20% discount from the publisher with the code HUM20 at checkout.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo presented “Intellectual Genealogies of Chicana Feminist Thought” at this year’s National Women’s Studies Association conference in San Francisco, CA. This presentation was an extension of her work in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era(University of Texas Press, 2018), which won first place for nonfiction multiauthored book at the 2019 International Latino Book Awards.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo  published “Radical Mami Love: Chicana Consejos del Corazón” in Voices from the Ancestors and Beyond: Chicanx/Latinx Spiritual Expressions  (University of Arizona Press, 2019). Sendejo presented on her work along with anthology editor Lara Medina and cocontributor Martha P. Cotera at this year’s Texas Book Festival.

Several environmental studies and feminist studies alumni, including Keara Hudler ’18, Lilly Dennis ’18, Muriel DiNella ’18, Nataley Ford ’18, and Joanna Mendez ’18, along with Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Joshua Long, published an article in the Journal of Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice titled “Intersectional Sustainability and Student Activism: A Framework for Achieving Social Sustainability on University Campuses.”

Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies Sequoia Maner  published several pieces of writing in The Langston Hughes Review  (vol. 25, no. 2). Alongside a review of the anthology The BreakBeat Poets vol. 2: Black Girl Magic , she published two poems of her own. “The Substantia Nigra” is an ode to Muhammad Ali in the wake of the Ferguson uprisings, and “When Bodies of Water Exhale” reflects on the tethered nature of African Americans to bodies of water.

Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies Sequoia Maner was a guest visitor to Dr. Emily Rutter’s African American Literature & Culture course at Ball State University in Muncie, IN, on October 14. She discussed her scholarship regarding Beyoncé’s Lemonadeand Tupac Shakur and also performed poetry.

Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies Sequoia Maner  gave a lecture and guided a series of workshops titled Langston Hughes: Writer for All Ages  for Humanities Texas and their 2019 program The Harlem Renaissance on October 9. Alongside Drs. Jennifer Wilks, Samantha Pinto, and Phil Barrish, Sequoia guided a class of over 50 secondary teachers from across Texas in the poetry & (after)life of Langston Hughes so that they might incorporate new strategies and skills into their classrooms. She emphasized the blues mode and vernacular traditions, Hughes’s landmark essay “The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain” as the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance, and the dream series of Hughes’s poetic canon.

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Sociology Luis Romero and  Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Feminist Studies Sequoia Maner were invited to be featured speakers at the University of Texas at Austin. Sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts under a grant provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Romero and Maner presented “Professional-Life Experiences and Postgrad Transitions” to underrepresented graduate students of color. They discussed a variety of aspects concerning the management of career and personal development in graduate school, including pedagogical approaches to studying race, gender, and class in the classroom; navigating microaggressions from students, colleagues, and administration; and juggling home and work lives. Romero and Maner also talked about how to prepare for the job market as an emerging scholar, how to maximize  professional conference opportunities, and how to position oneself for tenure-track positions.

Mellon Teaching Fellow Sequoia Maner presented original poetry and research at The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), which was organized around the topic of “Underground Histories.” As coeditor of the forthcoming volume Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, to be published by Routledge in October 2019, Maner previewed work that concerns the use of autopsy reports as material for poetic engagement, including her poem “Upon Reading the Autopsy of Sandra Bland,” a finalist for the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize.

Amiel Padayhag, class of 2019; Grace Gnasigamany, class of 2020; Administrative Assistant to Faculty Kelly Lessard; and Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Feminist Studies Program Sequoia Manerparticipated in Riding the Freedom Trail, a tour of Civil Rights memorials and monuments in Selma and Montgomery, Ala. They experienced a profound weekend of reckoning with the nation’s racial past. They accompanied a group that included local residents of Georgetown, Austin, and greater Williamson County. A member of the group was the daughter of a man lynched in nearby Taylor, Texas. Some of the highlights of their trip included walking over the Edmund Pettus Bridge and talking with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member and civil rights leader Annie Pearl Avery in Selma. In Montgomery, they participated in a special reflection session with the staff of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) following the tour of the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is dedicated to the memory of lynching victims. The group also toured sites such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Legacy Museum, the Freedom Riders Museum, and the Rosa Parks Museum. Memorably, the group attended a special Sunday service at Dexter King Memorial Church, where, from the church’s basement, pastor Martin Luther King Jr. organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A documentary is being made about this experience in conjunction with film students from The University of Texas at Austin.

Mellon Teaching Fellow of Feminist Studies Sequoia Maner published the article “The Ethics of Interiority in the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Beyoncé” in volume 17.1 of the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism.

Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Feminist Studies Program Sequoia Maner performed poetry at the Six Square District Cultural Arts Festival, an event that celebrates art and brings awareness to Austin’s historically black Eastside, on Sept. 1, 2018.

• Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer published a new essay in the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (Cambridge UP, 2017). Co-written with Eunjung Kim, Kafer’s chapter, “Disability and the Edges of Intersectionality,” uses the writings of Michelle Cliff and Audre Lorde to describe an intersectional approach to disability studies.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer has a chapter in the new anthology Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader,edited by Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David Rubin, and Angela Willey (University of Washington Press, 2017). Her contribution, “At the Same Time, Out of Time: Ashley X,” is an abridged version of the chapter of the same title in her book Feminist Queer Crip(Indiana UP, 2013). Another version of the chapter was published earlier this year in the latest edition of the Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis (Routledge, 2017).

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer led a workshop on “Disability Rights & Justice: Theories, Activisms, and Movements of Relation” as part of the Fulbright Pakistan Fall Enrichment Seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Nov. 3. Over 100 graduate students from Pakistan attended the Fulbright Seminar, which was focused on “US Social Movements.” While on campus, she also met with graduate and undergraduate students in Women’s and Gender Studies.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer was invited to speak at Yale University in honor of Donna Haraway’s receiving the Wilbur L. Cross Medal. There were two symposia celebrating Haraway’s work. Kafer spoke in the opening symposium, which centered on “The Cyborg Manifesto.” Her talk “Cyborgs and Other Crip Kin” stems from new work on crip technoscience. A program for the symposia, held Nov. 2–3, is available here.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo was invited to present as a part of a panel at the 2017 American Library Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, Ill. This panel, titled “Giving Voice to Diverse Collections Through Digitization,” included other professionals from Amherst College, Washington University, the University of Minnesota, and Washington State University. The panel focused on ways that digitization of material in archives and special collections can help to give voice to underrepresented groups in the historical narrative. Sendejo presented on the Latina History Project, a collaborative project between Sendejo, Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer, and Southwestern’s Special Collections. Over 100 librarians and archivists were in attendance. The panel was organized and planned by Director of Special Collections & Archives Jason W. Dean.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer gave an invited talk at Portland State University (PSU) on May 11. She spoke about coalition-building and imagining social justice futures. While at PSU, she met with students, staff, and faculty from the Disability Resource Center, the Queer Resource Center, and the Women’s/Gender/Sexuality Studies Department, among others.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer reviewed Christina Crosby’s memoir, A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain (NYU, 2016), for the American Literary History Online Review. Kafer was also an invited keynote speaker at the Shepard Symposium on Social Justice at the University of Wyoming, April 5–8. Her talk, “Health Rebels: A Crip Manifesto for Social Justice,” focused on the possibilities of coalition-building around issues of health, illness, and disability. While at the symposium, Kafer gave an interview with Wyoming Public Radio, spoke on an invited plenary panel, and met with students interested in social justice.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer was invited to share a work in progress with the Department of Anthropology at Rice University as part of their brown bag series. Her presentation explored race and disability in relation to notions of mourning, loss, and death. While at Rice, Kafer also met with graduate students and led two workshops with undergraduate students in the “Disability Inside Out” class.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer gave an invited talk at Vanderbilt University on Feb. 23. Her talk, “Wanting: Disability in Relation,” discussed disability in the context of other movements for social justice. While at Vanderbilt, she participated in a workshop with the Disability Justice Caucus of the Nashville Feminist Collective.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer had a short essay published in the new issue of SouthAtlanticQuarterly. Her piece, “Other People’s Shit (and Pee!),” is part of a collection of essays edited by Kathi Weeks on “The Politics of the Public Toilet.”

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer gave an invited lecture at St. Edward’s University in Austin on Sept. 26, 2016. Her talk, “Seeing Animals, Seeing Crips: Crip Reflections on the Work of Sunaura Taylor,” explores potential points of connection between disability studies and critical animal studies.  

Associate Professor of Anthropology Brenda Sendejo and alumna Tori Vasquez ’15 co-authored an article titled “‘Unboxing the Buried Seeds of My Belonging’: Latina/o History, Decolonized Pedagogies and the Politics of Inclusion” for the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology News Column. The article is about their work on the Latina History Project at Southwestern. Project contributors include current students Stephanie Garcia, Class of 2018, Denise Ovalle, Class of 2017, alumna Adriana Romero ’16, and project co-director Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer was invited to deliver a plenary lecture at the Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies, Cripping Critical Animal Studies Conference at the University of Alberta on June 21-23. Her talk, “Seeing Animals: Crip Reflections on the Work of Sunaura Taylor,” prefaced the opening of a show of Sunaura Taylor’s work at the FemLab Gallery on the University of Alberta campus.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer is serving as the 2016 McAndless Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at Eastern Michigan University. Over the course of the winter quarter, she contributed to a faculty seminar on disability studies, met with students, and participated in a women’s and gender studies class. She delivered a public lecture on disability and social justice on March 17, and will make her final visit to campus March 30–April 2.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer gave the opening keynote address at the Crip Futurities Conference at the University of Michigan in February. Her talk, “Blackness, Disability, and Trauma: On Methodological Haunting,” explored connections between race, disability, and death in the contemporary US

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer published her essay “Un/Safe Disclosures” in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (10.1, 2016). The essay uses the frame of the “trigger warning” to explore disability studies approaches to trauma and “safety” in academic spaces.

Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer gave the opening keynote address at the Crip Futurities Conference at the University of Michigan in February. Her talk, “Blackness, Disability, and Trauma: On Methodological Haunting,” explored connections between race, disability, and death in the contemporary US.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Alison Kafer will speak at West Kentucky University in The Institute for Citizenship and Social Responsibility. 

Alison Kafer, associate professor of feminist studies, was invited to give a reading from her book “Feminist Queer Crip” at New York University on February 25, 2015. While on the campus, she met with graduate students to discuss their work.

Alison Kafer, associate professor of feminist studies, delivered the annual School of Interdisciplinary Studies Distinguished Lecture at the University of Toledo on February 19. She was invited to speak about her book Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013).