The Pembroke Challenge Exceeds Goal to Endow New Research at the Pembroke Center
Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77 P’06 P’09 and David M. Sherman '79, P'06, P'09
with President Simmons on November 4, 2011 at the announcement of the successful
Pembroke Challenge. Photo by Hank Randall
Surpassing its $1 million goal, the Pembroke Center announced the completion of the Pembroke Challenge on November 4th, having raised $1,504,265 to endow new research initiatives. In October 2010, Elizabeth Munves Sherman ’77 P’06 P’09 challenged the wider community to raise $750,000 in support of the innovative research initiatives at the Pembroke Center. When the amount was met, she and her husband David Sherman ’79 P’06 P’09 donated $250,000, but the Center and its supporters went on to raise over $1.5 million to support new research.
Pembroke Center Offers New Courses for 2011-12
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Reproductive Health: Science and Politics, Sarah Fox
Reproductive health issues such as contraception, abortion, sexually transmitted infections and gay and lesbian health are some of the most controversial and politically charged issues in the US today. After an introduction to the interpretation of medical literature we will explore scientific, political, religious and cultural aspects of these important public policy issues. Successful national and international programs will be discussed. Although all views are welcome, it is expected that students will be respectful of other’s opinions and will incorporate the best available scientific data into their conclusions.
Iranian Women's Resistance Strategies: Gender Discrimination and the Law Since 1979, Mehrangiz Kar
Soon after the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, women’s legal rights were targeted in the name of Islam by the new government. Family Law, Criminal Law, and even Constitutional Law have been designed or amended in ways that have imposed notable gender discriminations on Iranian women’s public and private lives. Iranian women from both secular and religious backgrounds have consistently employed various methods of resistance against these laws. Women from different social and political groups have designed strategies and adapted tactics to resist this discrimination or to find alternative solutions for the current discriminatory situation. In addition to ordinary women, some of the women have essentially been in the elite of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they have also worked towards putting an end to discrimination.
This course highlights Iranian women’s strategies to resist the legal means of gender discrimination imposed on them after the Islamic Revolution. This course also discusses women from various socio-economic and political backgrounds who demand equality and have been actively working towards this goal through different strategies. We will review the rules and regulations that control women’s privacy according to Islamic outlooks. Students will learn about the discrimination imposed on Iranian women and also the creative and innovative ways through which they overcome these discriminatory laws.
Theories and Politics of Sexual Consent, Joseph Fischel
What is sexual consent good for? Does the language of sexual consent facilitate useful ethical interrogation? Or does it neutralize any worthwhile inquiry into power inequalities? This course interrogates sexual consent through surveying political theory texts, liberal and feminist legal scholarship, studies in sex and gender, court cases, and literature. We query how and to what effect the idea of consent organizes sexual politics and politicizes sex. We first consider consent in legal and political discourse; we next turn to modern theories and doctrines of sexual consent; we then explore case studies. The last weeks focus on youth.
Violence and the Media, Kay Warren
This course examines the role of diverse media and media makers in constructing and shaping our understandings of violent conflict on the global stage. We will contrast the ways in which cultural, cognitive, evolutionary, sociological, political, and psychodynamic theories reverberate in media representations and offer explanations to the public of the cause, effect, and dynamics of violence. The course examines how media makers tactically use "cultural," "racial," "ethnic," "gender," "sexual," and "status" differences in order to naturalize their versions of conventionally accepted motives behind violent acts. We interrogate the ways in which forms of violence are thought of as "individual," "interpersonal," or "collective," as "religious" vs. "ethnic," "racial" vs. "non-racial," "female" vs. "male," and "state-sponsored" vs. "terrorist." Throughout the course, we will explore case studies of violent conflict and news reporting – 9/11, the Cold War, counterinsurgency wars in Latin America, the war in Iraq, international trafficking in persons, the Rodney King beating, the "troubles" of Northern Ireland, the Rwandan genocide, the Columbine school shootings, the Brandon Teena killing, and the Vincent Chin murder.
Desiring the Nation: Gender and Nationalism in South Asia, Poulomi Saha
This class examines the development and afterlives of nationalisms in South Asia to consider the attachments that tie citizens and subjects to the nation and to one another. What are the political, personal, and ideological commitments that allow or prevent individuals from belonging to the nation? Beginning with early 20th century anticolonialism, we will trace multiple nationalist movements that lead up to the 1947 Partition of British India, and to the 1971 independence of Bangladesh. Through novels, short stories, and films, we will examine the role of gender in anticolonial protest and in early nation-building in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Post-Colonial Technoscience & the Body, Crystal Biruk
This seminar examines the intersections of race, gender, culture, and sexuality with science and technology in colonial and post-colonial contexts. How is the body a site of contestation for power enacted through medical, scientific, or technological interventions? What are the social and historical dimensions of such encounters between the global North and South? Drawing on colonial-era primary sources and accounts by science studies scholars, post-colonial theorists, historians, and anthropologists, we analyze how the uneven flow of technoscientific experts, practices, objects, and knowledge reconfigures and transforms bodies, selves, and societies. The course’s geographic focus is sub-Saharan Africa.
Recent and Forthcoming Books by Faculty Affiliated with the Pembroke Center
Faculty from many fields participate in the Pembroke Seminar, take part in Pembroke Center roundtables, and teach courses that are cross-listed Gender and Sexuality Studies. The Pembroke Center recently asked our affiliated faculty to share news about their most recent and forthcoming books. Click here to see the book list.
Kay B. Warren Appointed Director of the Pembroke Center
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The Pembroke Center is pleased to announce that Kay B. Warren, the Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. ’32 Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology has been appointed incoming director. During her tenure, Warren will be developing a range of initiatives to support advanced interdisciplinary research on transnational issues across the humanities and social sciences. The Center also will be developing new courses for its interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies concentration that deal with transnational issues and with theory and research framings that crosscut the humanities and social sciences. |
“The faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and students involved in Pembroke Center research are grappling with global issues that get to the heart of the human cost of social change,” said Warren. “Through new research initiatives, conferences, the Pembroke Seminar, our journal, and other programs, the Center will be engaging other departments at Brown and forging connections with academic institutions around the world.”
Warren earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Princeton, began her career at Mount Holyoke College, and served on the senior faculties of Princeton and Harvard before coming to Brown in 2003. She directed the Politics, Culture, and Identity Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies where she held a joint appointment from 2003-2009.In 2009-10, Warren directed the year-long Pembroke Research Seminar on “Markets and Bodies in Transnational Perspective.”
Warren’s vision includes expanding the Pembroke Center’s research mission to deal with the global circulation of new health technologies, labor migration, illicit trade across borders, emergence of new social media, and development strategies that target the poor. In studying these issues, scholars will grapple with the difference that historical contexts, culture, and representations of the body and technology make for the way these issues play out around the world. Center research will continue to draw also on literary, medical and artistic representations of difference, on investigations into forms of meaning, as well as into values and ethics.
While Warren is on sabbatical for the 2010-11 academic year to finish her book on transnational human trafficking, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, will serve as acting director of the Pembroke Center.