February 1, 2023 - 12PM (EST) via Zoom

The formal practice of city planning in the US falls short of its ideal to create places that are healthful and livable, especially for women and people of color. In the face of institutional failures, Black, brown, and indigenous women function as community planners, building relational infrastructure, and seeding broader policy change. The leadership of women (commensurate with stagnation of municipal policy) is especially evident in the arena of urban food systems, a key public infrastructure. Drawing on experiences from Buffalo (and nationally), the speakers will illustrate the ways in which Black and brown women transform urban food systems, through practices that span kitchens to policy spaces. The speakers conclude with a call for reimagining city planning as an act of public nurturance.

Aprirl 26, 2023 - 12PM (EDT) via Zoom

Dr. Pilcher will discuss the framework and a chapter excerpt from their ongoing project and monograph, “Small-Gauge State: Gender, Jim Crow, and Government Films." The project examines gender and race in a range of government films made in segregated Georgia during the mid-twentieth century and their resonance today, in Georgia’s booming, state-subsidized film and TV industry and American nonfiction media more broadly. Made in the Jim Crow South by agencies and production teams with varied and at times divergent interests and aims, these films envisioned gender and race from institutional perspectives that were attuned to local and regional ideologies of segregation but also adaptive to national and international trends and networks—their context and content reverberate today.

Loren Pilcher (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. Their research focuses on documentary and nontheatrical film and media, with an emphasis on images of gender and race in the US and American South. They are currently working on a book project about government films produced in Jim Crow-era Georgia and their reverberations in contemporary media.

May 5, 2023 - 12PM (EDT) via Zoom

Addressing discrimination based on certain identities, such as race or gender, is a major concern for American colleges and universities. In 2011, the Department of Education clarified that sexual harassment is a form of discrimination that schools must eliminate under Title IX, the 1972 U.S. civil rights law that guarantees the right to equal educational opportunity regardless of sex. Colleges and universities now spend millions to manage sexual harassment through specialized bureaucracies often spread over multiple offices with upward of 50 employees. Yet Title IX was not originally intended to address sexual harassment in schools. The term “sexual harassment” did not even exist at the law’s inception. In this talk, Reynolds uses the case of Title IX to understand the specific pathways through which the meaning of existing laws can change over time while the text of those laws remains the same. Triangulating multiple data sources across linked case studies of three universities, Reynolds argues that the mutual interpenetration of social networks across the educational and legal domains stimulated the shift, which exemplifies a more general process that she calls the endogenous repurposing of law. This concept clarifies how people within the organizations regulated by law not only creatively define the meaning of legal compliance: they also introduce innovative interpretations of law that stimulate broader cultural changes in norms of behavior and material shifts in the balance of rights and powers in society at large. 

October 6, 2023 - 12PM (EST) via Zoom

Recording available upon request by contacting ub-irewg@buffalo.edu.

Talk Description: Murshid will read and discuss extracts from her in-progress monograph, Love, Sex, Desire, and Violence -- The Intimacies of Transnational Middle-Class Bangladeshis in the US, in which she analyzes relationships of love, desire, sex, and violence of transnational middle-class Bangladeshis--liminal bodies occupying various social locations in the US and Bangladesh, living bilocating yet bordered lives.

Nadine Shaanta Murshid is Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the School of Social Work. Her research focuses on economic institutions, migration, structural violence, and partner violence in the lives of individuals in and from the global South.

November 3, 2022 - 12PM (EST) via Zoom

Recording is available here.

Dr. Curtis will discuss:
• Cellular and clinical electrophysiologic differences between men and women.
• Sex-specific differences in the incidence and clinical presentation of arrhythmias.
• Gender differences in the management of patients with cardiac arrhythmias that lead to disparities in care.

Dr. Curtis is SUNY Distinguished Professor, Charles and Mary Bauer Professor of Medicine, and Chair of the Department of Medicine in the Jacobs School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. She did her undergraduate training at Rutgers University in New Jersey and graduated from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. She completed her residency in internal medicine at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, and fellowships in cardiovascular disease and clinical cardiac electrophysiology at Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Curtis is Past President of the Heart Rhythm Society and a recipient of their Distinguished Service Award and the President’s Award. She is Past President of the Cardiac Electrophysiology Society and the Association of University Cardiologists. She is President Elect of the Association of Professors of Medicine. She is on the editorial boards of many of the key journals in cardiology and electrophysiology, and she is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 

December 1, 2022 - 12PM (EST) via Zoom

Recording available upon request by contacting ub-irewg@buffalo.edu.

Talk Description: This talk draws upon Reed-Danahay’s longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork (since 2015) among French citizens who migrated to London in recent decades. She will focus on issues of emplacement and displacement among middle-class French women, and will explore their motivations, desires, and aspirations for moving to London through examples of life stories and personal narratives. This discussion draws upon a book manuscript in progress that concerns what Reed-Danahay terms the “sideways migration” of middle-class, more or less “privileged” migrants who move from one wealthy liberal democracy to another.

Deborah Reed-Danahay is Professor of Anthropology at UB. She is the author or editor of six previous books, including Education and Identity in Rural France: The Politics of Schooling; Autoethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social; Locating Bourdieu; and Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities Trajectories, Emplacements. Reed-Danahay has held a Jean Monnet Chair (European Commission) and is recipient of the rank of “Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques” (France).