New Books, New Feminist Directions

In Fall 2021, the Gender Institute established a book launch series called “New Books, New Feminist Directions,” in which faculty can share and discuss their recent monographs with UB’s Gender Institute community, as well as the wider virtual community. These hybrid events will include a guest commentator who will discuss the significance of the book and its relevance for the field. This series highlights the superb feminist scholarship at UB, while also celebrating a colleague’s achievement.

SPRING 2024 Events

Meghana Joshi

Teaching Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo

Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin

with commentary from Professor Dr. Anika König, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie

Friday, March 15, 2024
12:00 - 1:30pm (EST)
via Zoom
Free and open to the public.

Children are Everywhere engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’

Meghana Joshi has an M.A. and M.Phil. in Social Work with a specialization in Child Welfare and Reproductive Health from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India. Subsequently, she has worked on issues of childlessness, stigma, and medical treatment in urban slums in Mumbai, and on maternal and community health in the rural Himalayas. She finished her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2017. After a brief stint at Central Washington University, she has been employed as Teaching Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at UB since 2018. Her book on gendered reproduction, fertility anxieties, intensive parenting, and childlessness is based on research in Berlin, Germany. She teaches on Medical Anthropology, Culture and Reproduction, Men and Masculinities, and Ethnographic Research. Her newly developing research interests include anthropology of loneliness and emergent forms of care.

Anika König is visiting professor at the Insitute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. Her work focuses on reproduction, especially transnational surrogacy, genetic testing, kinship, care, and gender. She has also worked extensively on violence, the senses and the body. Her recent work investigates the effects of major crises like the Covid pandemic or the war in Ukraine on the global fertility industry, and the gender health gap in Germany with a particular focus on endometriosis. Her work has appeared, among others, in Medical Anthropology, Biosocieties, New Genetics and Society, and Social Anthropology.

FALL 2023 Events

Corrie Stone-Johnson

Professor, Educational Leadership and Policy, University at Buffalo and Owner of Black Rock Books

Feminist Cash Mob: Black Rock Books

Photo shows a sign with "43 Hamilton Black Rock Books" pointing to a shop with books on a shelf.

Tuesday, November 14, 2023
5:00 - 7:00pm (EST)
43 Hamilton Street, Buffalo
Free and open to the public.

Join the UB Gender Institute in celebrating and supporting Black Rock Books, founded by UB Faculty member Corrie Stone-Johnson from the Graduate School of Education. Black Rock Books is an independent book store focused on literary fiction, underrepresented voices, and educational justice. 

SPRING 2023 Events

Irus Braverman

Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Geography

Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel

Photo: Braveman is smiling, underneath her new book: Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Isreal.

Wednesday, May 3, 2023
3:30 - 5:00pm (EDT)
509 O'Brian Hall & via Zoom
Free and open to the public.

Irus Braverman is Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Geography at the University at Buffalo, where she teaches Wildlife and Biodiversity Law, Law and Genetics, Israel/Palestine: Environmental Justice Issues, and topics related to law and animals. Her main interests lie in the interdisciplinary study of law, geography, and anthropology. Writing within this nexus, Braverman has conducted ethnographic research of illegal houses, trees, checkpoints, public toilets, and zoos. 

Settling Nature draws on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork to document how the administration of nature in Palestine-Israel advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement alongside the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space. Highlighting the violent repercussions of Israel’s conservation regime, Braverman plants the seeds for possible reimaginings of nature that transcend the grip of the state’s settler ecologies.

The book discussion will feature Leila Harris as a commentator. Dr. Harris is a Professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability and also in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. 

Good through June 1, 2023: use code MN89940 for 40% OFF the purchase of Settling Nature

Mishuana Goeman

Professor of Gender Studies, Chair of the Indigenous Studies

Photo of Mishuana and her new book. Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies edited by The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective.

Keywords: For Gender and Sexuality Studies 

Thursday, March 2, 2023
12:30 - 1:50pm (EST)
114 Cooke Hall & via Zoom
Free and open to the public. 

Mishuana Goeman is a Professor of Gender Studies, Chair of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo, and affiliated faculty of Critical Race Studies in the Law School at UCLA. Her work focuses on feminist interventions into an analysis of colonial spatial restructuring of Native lands and bodies in the twentieth century.

Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies introduces readers to a set of terms that will aid them in understanding the central methodological and political stakes currently energizing feminist and queer studies. The volume deepens the analyses of this field by highlighting justice-oriented intersectional movements and foregrounding Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms; transnational feminisms; queer of color critique; trans, disability, and fat studies; feminist science studies; and critiques of the state, law, and prisons that emerge from queer and women of color justice movements.

Reflecting the interdisciplinary breadth of the field, this collection of eighty essays by scholars across the social sciences and the humanities weaves together methodologies from science and technology studies, affect theory, and queer historiographies, as well as Black Studies, Latinx Studies, Asian American, and Indigenous Studies. Taken together, these essays move alongside the distinct histories and myriad solidarities of the fields to construct the much awaited Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies.

The book discussion will feature commentary by Dr. Kyla Tompkins, Professor of English and Gender & Women’s Studies, Pomona College.