In this final, virtual session of the interdisciplinary Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, Gannit Ankori (Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator, Rose Art Museum, and Professor of Fine Arts and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University) and Faith Smith (Marta F. Kauffman '78 Professor of African and African American Studies, Professor of English, and Affiliate in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation, Latin American, Caribbean and Latin Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University) will moderate a conversation about artworks on view in the Rose Art Museum. Topics addressed relate to gender-based violence, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and continuing to this day. 

Register here: https://brandeis.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fvH8UmArQHukbUbu5hfSFQ#/registration 

Organized by Brandeis professors Shoniqua Roach and V Varun Chaudhry, this session will host speakers Erica R. Edwards and Roderick Ferguson from Yale University. It will address the violent connections between mainstream feminist anti-gender-based violence movements and carceral regimes and the often-unrecognized queer, trans, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color feminist genealogies that trouble (and attempt to abolish) them.

This session will undertake a comparative discussion about the logics of settler colonial genocide and sexual violence against Native and enslaved Black women with regards to the delineation of citizenship. It will lay bare the foundational inequities facing Black, Indigenous and other marginalized people that must be addressed in order to eliminate violence and other residuum of slavery and settler colonialism. This session is organized and moderated by University Professor and PI Anita Hill. Speakers for this session are Sarah Deer, University Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas, and Crystal Feimster, Associate Professor of African American Studies, American Studies and History at Yale University.

Organized by Brandeis professors Harleen Singh and Faith Smith, this session will host speaker Jyoti Puri (Simmons University). It will grapple with the conjoined Anglo-colonial histories of South Asia, the Caribbean, and South Africa from the moment of emancipation (1834) in Victorian England to independence, apartheid and beyond (1947, 1962, 1991 and more).

Organized by Yuri Doolan (Brandeis University) and moderated by Ji-Yeon Yuh (Northwestern University), this session will host speakers Kimberly McKee (Grand Valley State University), Christine Hong (UC Santa Cruz), and Jeong-Mi Park (Chungbuk National University). It will engage the experiences of three generations of women and children whose lives have been shaped by various forms of imperial violence originating on the Korean peninsula: (1) Japanese “comfort women,” (2) camptown sex workers for the U.S. military, and (3) transnational adoptees.

Feminist activism and movements in Latin America have a longstanding history. During their first encuentro, or meeting, in Bogotá, Colombia (July 1981), Latin American and Caribbean feminist activists and groups declared November 25th as “International Day Against Violence Against Women” in honor of Dominican political activists Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa, who were brutally murdered in 1960 by order of the country’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo. While gender-based violence has gained visibility at national, regional, and international levels, and important legislation has paved pathways towards addressing violence against women, Latin America remains the region with the highest rate of sexual violence in the world (UNDP, 2017). In a concerted effort to address the expanse of gender-based violence and its contemporary conditions in the region, please join us for a rich discussion organized and moderated by Brandeis professor María J. Durán and featuring Rosa-Linda Fregoso (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Bernadine Hernández (University of New Mexico).

Organized by Brandeis professor Ilana Szobel, this session will host Patty Berne (Co-Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid) and Maria Palacios (Poet, Author, Performance Artist, and Disability Rights Activist). It will examine a wide range of issues unique to the experiences of sexual assault victims who have a cognitive, sensory, emotional, or mobility disability. By locating the conversations about sexual gendered violence in contemporary disability justice frameworks, the session will focus on prevention of sexual violence against people with disabilities, modes of resistance and self-empowerment of disabled victims, as well as on the creation of support systems by and for survivors with disabilities.

Organized by Brandeis professor Brandon Callender, this session will host speakers Ashlee Blackwell, writer and producer of Horror Noire and founder of Graveyard Shift Sisters, and Justin Phillip Reed, poet and author of the hybrid collection With Bloom Upon Them And Also With Blood: A Horror Miscellany. Engaging artists and scholars working at the intersections of black feminist and black queer horror, it will discuss how the horror film genre can thematize, trigger, and inspire complex engagements with sexual violence.

Organized by Brandeis professor Dorothy Kim, this session will discuss online gender violence as a tool of toxic masculine culture and the political far-right. Featuring researcher, writer and strategist Sydette Harry, as well as artist and designer mattie brice, this session will also discuss organized resistance efforts among social justice activists, writers, academics, political figures, and legal experts.