Center for Research on Women & Social Justice

Reflecting the mission of the university for the 21st Century, the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice brings together scholars, professionals, students, advocates, community leaders, and the concerned public to study women, men, and social justice through intellectual dialogue and scholarly research. Its mission is to facilitate individual and collaborative research, develop new curriculum, and disseminate scholarship to wider publics.  

The center also puts on a series of lectures and workshop “conversations” that explore the past and future of Feminist Studies, interrogating issues of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and the relationship of the study of women and gender to disability studies, critical race theory and ethnic studies, transnationalism and postcolonial studies, legal studies, queer studies and science studies.  Featured right with Professor Eileen Boris is Dorothy Roberts, who gave the 2011-12 Hull Lecture on Race and the New Biocitizen.  To learn more about the center, visit the website.

New Sexualities

Since 2007, the New Sexualities Research Focus Group has highlighted exciting research that explodes sexuality as a discrete category.  To date, New Sexualities at UCSB has redefined sexuality studies as a field in three ways by 1) centralizing race, ethnicity, class, and culture alongside gender and sexual orientation, 2) utilizing domestic and transnational lenses, and 3) examining the role of “the state”, neoliberalism, and human rights in theory and practice. Group members produce new discourses on areas that include the military and the state, new media and technology, pornographies, and religion, among others. In New Sexualities, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary theoretical engagements and methodological approaches expand the traditional field of sexuality studies.

To learn more about New Sexualities, visit the website.

Working at Living

This working group explores the social relations of precarious labor, both formal and informal, from an interdisciplinary, global, and intersectional approach that considers how sociocultural inequalities are and have been magnified and countered during times of financial crises, technological development, and increasing unemployment. Attentive to social contexts that shape, even as they are shaped by, constructs of gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, ability, age, and citizenship, it considers categorical questions of what counts as work and who counts as a worker from feminist, ethnic, and cultural studies perspectives. We bring to the conversation insights from the humanities sometimes missing from investigations of the informal sector and too often ignored in discussions of the global economic and employment crisis. A website containing scholarly essays and teaching modules will represent the major deliverable. Participants will create a module based on their research area. We envision this website as a living resource that can be added to and will be maintained by UCSB's Center for Research on Women and Social Justice or another appropriate open access site. Our purpose is three-fold: to stimulate theoretical and empirical research, encourage creation of additional modules, and model a practice of scholarship that is both collective and accessible.  Visit the center at the UC Humanities Forums website.

Faculty Participants:
Lalaie Ameeriar, Asian American Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Maurizia Boscagli, English, UC Santa Barbara
Piya Chatterjee, Gender and Women’s Studies, Scripps College
Fatima El-Tayeb, African-American Literature and Culture and Critical Gender Studies, UC San Diego
Aisha Finch, Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies, UCLA
Noah Zatz, UCLA School of Law
Christopher Newfield, English, UC Santa Barbara
Kalindi Vora, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, African American Studies, Women’s Studies and Queer Studies, UC Irvine