Gender and Women's Studies at UIC

Happy First Day of Fall Classes! 📚📝🤩

Dear GWS Students,

Welcome to the 2024-2025 academic year! I am thrilled to be serving as interim director of GWS this year. I know the world has not been an easy place this past period for many of us. Yet I feel deeply privileged to be part of a space like GWS where we have the opportunity to build community and share our visions and practices of feminist, q***r, and trans study, justice and liberation with one another.

I am especially excited that GWS has grown in powerful directions with faculty and students committed to learning, expanding and connecting sub fields like Black Studies, LGBTQ Studies, APIA Studies, Media Studies, Latinx Studies, Disability Studies, Middle East/North African Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Social Movement Studies, Empire Studies, and more. What a gift it is to be part of such a program!

I want to be clear: GWS is your home on campus, your space, and your community. Come hang out on the 12th floor of University Hall! Attend our events! Get to know other GWS students! We are here to support and get to know you!

This year, my vision is to continue to help make the GWS program and our courses and research more visible and relevant at UIC and across campus–from fields like medicine to engineering, art, and far beyond. The time is now–to affirm the significance of gender and sexuality–and feminist and LGBTQ analyses–to all fields and professions at UIC!

~ Professor Nadine Naber

Gender & Women's Studies (GWS) is looking for undergraduate students interested in a small paid job that will entail working with the Director, Professor Nadine Naber, to promote GWS courses across campus. The job will entail approximately 2-3 hours a week throughout the year. The pay rate is $16.20 per hour.

Applicants must be undergraduate students currently enrolled at UIC, have taken at least one GWS course, and have interest in the study of gender, sexuality, and feminism.

Applications due 9/10/24.

Apply via Handshake app. Job #9228860.

Contact [email protected] with questions or concerns.

Congratulations! Liliana Macias, PhD student in History, GWS graduate student concentrator, and Vice President and Co-founder of Raíces Chicago Story Coalition was featured on Chicago Tonight: Latino Voices! Liliana was interviewed about her work with Raíces. "We want to support organizations to tell their stories, so that we could collaboratively tell a larger, more complex story about Chicago and Latinos in Chicago," said Macias.

Watch the interview at https://news.wttw.com/2024/08/02/after-noticing-lack-or-representation-chicago-latinos-historical-records-group-aims

more about Raíces at https://www.raiceschicago.org/Learn

UIC students, are you looking for some courses to finalize your fall schedule? You're in luck! Check out what GWS is offering! See the full course list at go.uic.edu/GWSFall24

We're thinking about the exciting classes GWS faculty are teaching this fall. Have you finalized your schedule? Check out our full list of courses at https://gws.uic.edu/academics/courses/fall-2024-course-offerings/. Enroll today!

The Power Lab Presents: Summer Kickstart Symposium on Friday, 8/2/24, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

The start of August is a great time to prepare or think about preparing for a great new academic year! We invite students to get advice and support from alums (some very recent graduates) and coaches from across the U.S., as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Mentoring Circle (a.k.a. The Power Lab).

Get ready for the fall semester with workshops featuring seasoned coaches (alums, grad students, faculty). Sessions are geared toward supporting first-generation & underserved students' success. Open to all students.

Register in advance for this meeting at https://uic.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0uc-uoqzMqGdfh6q8g6lDvXyidqZ-ZIVaM

Exciting news! GWS alum and instructor Dez Brown was recently selected as one of the 2024 Editor-in-Chiefs of The Seventh Wave Magazine and is curating a digital anthology of creative writing and art focused on video games from q***r POC writers and artists.

Learn more and submit your work at https://www.theseventhwave.org/anthologies/.

Submissions are due Thursday, July 18.

We are LOVING these updates from the Revolutionary Seeds research team about their time in South India exploring grassroots movements on environmental justice and food sovereignty.

Follow UIC Global Asian Studies Program and the Revolutionary Seeds blog at https://revolutionaryseeds.blogspot.com/ for updates.

Team members include:
* Nia Cunningham, GWS major and Social Justice minor
* Liana Jeffries, Black Studies and Anthropology double major
* Amira Altamimi, Global Asian Studies major
* Professor Gayatri Reddy, GWS and Anthropology
* Professor Anna Guevarra, Global Asian Studies and GWS affiliated faculty member

Join our friends at WRLC and Gallery 400 this Thursday, June 20, 5 p.m. for an important conversation about abortion, care, and reproductive justice activism.

DATE: June 20, 2024

TIME: 5:00–6:30 pm

LOCATION: Gallery 400 Lecture Room, 400 S. Peoria

ABOUT THE EVENT:
In Clinic Pictures, exhibiting artist Carmen Winant gathers archival photographs of the everyday work done by health clinics and abortion providers across the Midwest to make visible quotidian intimate acts of care, including women answering the phone, leading workshops and protests, and physicians caring for patients. The work is part of her larger project, The Last Safe Abortion, which was presented at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Join Winant and UIC Women’s Leadership and Resource Center Director Natalie Bennett for a conversation about Winant’s work within the larger historical context of reproductive justice activism in the United States.

Additional support for this program is provided by the UIC Women’s Leadership and Resource Center.

ACCESS INFORMATION: This program is free and open to the public. For questions and access accommodations, email [email protected].

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:
Carmen Winant is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Her work utilizes archival and authored photographs to examine feminist care networks, with particular emphasis on intergenerational, multiracial, and sometimes transnational coalition building. Winant’s recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Sculpture Center, the Wexner Center of the Arts, ICA Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. Winant’s artist’s books include My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), and Instructional Photography: Learning How To Live Now (2021); Arrangements, A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (both 2022), and The Last Safe Abortion (2024). Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 FCA Artist Honoree, and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is also a community organizer, prison educator, and mother to her two children, Carlo and Rafa, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner.

Dr. Natalie Bennett is the Director of the Women’s Leadership and Resource Center. Dr. Bennett comes to the Women’s Leadership and Resource Center as a scholar-activist whose research, teaching and activism centers the lives of black women and girls. Her interests are transnational in scope, located at the intersection of black feminisms, gender/class/sexuality and social policy in Jamaica, and migrations in the African diaspora. Dr. Bennett has taught at Hunter College (CUNY), Long Island University, the University of Nebraska, DePaul University, and the University of Illinois Chicago. Her publications focus on transnational migration and Caribbean immigrant women’s labor, racial and sexual identities among African American le****ns, and the politics of same-sexualities in Jamaica. Dr. Bennett received her Bachelor of Science (BS) in Biology and Sociology from Union College (Schenectady, New York) and her doctorate (PhD) in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Most recently, she served as the Assistant Director of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois Chicago.

CONGRATULATIONS Jayre Vazquez MSW Student, Jane Addams College of Social Work GWS Graduate Student Concentrator and GWS 101 TA Scholarship Recipient LARES Graduate Scholar Award for Fall 2024 La. “This award not only invests in my education, empowering me to reach my academic aspirations, but also enhances my capacity to make a positive impact within the wider social work field. I am profoundly thankful and privileged to receive this recognition, and I will carry this gratitude and happiness as I persist in my efforts to foster positive transformation in the Latinx community and beyond.”

CONGRATULATIONSw Liliana Macias PhD Student, History GWS Graduate Student Concentrator and GWS GA New Organization Raices Chicago Story Coalition In January 2024, Liliana co-founded Raices Chicago Story Coalition, a non-profit that collaborates with Latine/x organizations and communities of Chicago to cultivate the visibility and accessibility of these stories. Learn more: https://www.raiceschicago.org/

Join us to honor our brilliant students and these amazing community honorees!

Check out these crash prizes! DEADLINE TO APPLY APRIL 12!

Have you checked out our FALL 2024 Course offerings!

Come work with us! DEADLINE TO APPLY APRIL 12!

We invite you to a panel exploring what happens when Le****ns decide to come together to build a team, an org, a movement--and how Le****ns have helped us develop tools for constructing a more livable city and world.

Featuring
- Tracy Baim, Windy City Times
- Evette Cardona, Polk Bros. Foundation
- Neena Hemmady, ComEd
- Lisa Marie Pickens, Affinity Community Services

Tuesday, March 26, 2024
3-5 PM CT
LCC and Zoom
RSVP: go.uic.edu/MakingSpaces

Thanks to our co-sponsors: UIC Gender and Sexuality Center, Gender and Women's Studies at UIC, and UIC Honors College.


[ID: Purple text on a tan background describing the event (same info on this page). In the center are photos of the featured speakers. At the bottom is the Chicago skyline with buildings in a rainbow of colors. Multicolored swirls are at the top and bottom.]

Don't miss this timely OpEd in Truthout: https://truthout.org/articles/chicago-ballot-amendment-would-tax-real-estate-moguls-to-fight-homelessness/

Join GWS for this important event!

Check out this event with our very own Dr. Ronak!

Congratulations to Dez for their recent publications!! Our students are the best!😎🤩🥳

Congratulations to Dr. Naber on receiving a grant for her amazing work with MAMAS!!!! We are so proud!!!😄

Congratulations to Dr. Reddy on her SECOND publication these last couple months!!! Hooray!!🤩

https://www.facebook.com/share/u3BqveUhEiP9hY79/?mibextid=WC7FNe

Join us for this exciting event about a potential future career opportunity with your WGS Degree!

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS! This 3-week research trip will allow undergraduate students to gain some understanding of environmental conservation and food sovereignty grassroots movements in South India. Through visits to a forest preserve (Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary), organic farms and food cooperatives (Navadarshanam, Timbaktu Collective), students will explore alternatives - environmental and collective - to rapid climate change, capitalism, and urbanization.

WHEN: May 15- June 8, 2024

CO-LED BY:
Dr. Gayatri Reddy, Associate Professor, Gender & Women’s Studies and Anthropology
Dr. Anna Guevarra, Professor and Founding Director, Global Asian Studies (GLAS)

TO APPLY: Fill out the application and submit the requested materials via the QR code on the flyer or bit.ly/SouthIndiaResearch2024 before the deadline. Interviews to select participants will be conducted the week after the deadline.

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS: February 29, 2024, 11:59 pm CST