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.
Professor, Educational Leadership and Policy, University at Buffalo and Owner of Black Rock Books
Feminist Cash Mob: Black Rock Books
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.
Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Geography
Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel
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.
Professor of Gender Studies, Chair of the Indigenous Studies
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.
Associate Professor of English
Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad
Thursday, November 17, 2022
3:30 PM via Zoom
Riding Jane Crow foregrounds Black women’s experiences as passengers and workers on or near the American train. Focusing on the period from 1860 to 1925, the book reads the train compartment as a contested travel space or problematic work site. To “ride Jane Crow” is to challenge the mythological aura of the railroad in American culture. Reading legal, labor, and travel history; census records and town directories; blueprints, newspapers and town councils records; diaries, short stories, letters, film, and photographs, the book examines the large cultural archive of the railroad in the U.S. and that archive’s notable absence of women of color, studying how the space of the archive replicates some forms of the American train car; both are repositories that inadequately hold the African American woman.
This discussion will feature Madhu Dubey, Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Black Studies at University of Illinois Chicago, as a commentator.
Get 30% discount on Miriam Thaggert's book using the code: S22UIP and ordering through press.uillinois.edu
Associate Professor, Arts Management Program
Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism
Friday, September 23, 2022
3:30 - 5:00 pm (EDT)
Hybrid - 509 O'Brian Hall / Zoom
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgJv4XEEDYg
This Book Launch is part of Gender Institute's Social Reproduction Theory Lecture Series which is sponsored by The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, and co-sponsored by the Arts Management Program.
In Art Work Katja Praznik counters the Western understanding of art – as a passion for self-expression and an activity done out of love, without any concern for its financial aspects – and instead builds a case for understanding art as a form of invisible labour. Focusing on the experiences of art workers and the history of labour regulation in the arts in socialist Yugoslavia, Praznik helps elucidate the contradiction at the heart of artistic production and the origins of the mystification of art as labour.
This profoundly interdisciplinary book highlights the Yugoslav socialist model of culture as the blueprint for uncovering the interconnected aesthetic and economic mechanisms at work in the exploitation of artistic labour. It also shows the historical trajectory of how policies toward art and artistic labour changed by the end of the 1980s. Calling for a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions behind Western art and exploitative labour practices across the world, Art Work will be of interest to scholars in East European studies, art theory, and cultural policy, as well as to practicing artists.
Get 25% discount on Katja's book using the code: ArtWork25 and ordering through University of Toronto Press.
This Book launch will also feature Silvia Federici, Feminist Activist, Writer Scholar, and Teacher - who will be discussing her latest book Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism.
This will be a double book launch will be an intergenerational conversation on the past, present, and future of Social Reproductive Theory. Federici and Praznik will engage in a transgenerational feminist discussion to point out the relevance of social reproduction and the ways feminist interventions in this terrain provide alternatives to capitalist relations.
Get 25% discount with using the code: Silvia for any of Federici's title books at https://pmpress.org/.
Katja Praznik
Associate Professor
Arts Management Program
Silvia Federici
Feminist, Activist,
Writer Scholar, and Teacher