From: sarker-AT-Macalester.edu
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 12:16:37 -0500
Subject: Re: postcolonial-digest V2 #1571



PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY.

The International Task Force of the National Women?s Studies Association (NWSA) based in the U.S., invites you to submit proposals for NWSA 2002 in Las Vegas (Nevada, U.S.A).  This will be the  4th meeting of the task force 
since it was revived in 1999.  This year (2000), the ITF hosted 3 Roundtables?Feminist Understandings of Terminologies (transnational, international, global), Women in the Global Economy, and Internationalizing 
Women?s Studies Curricula.

For NWSA 2002, the International Task Force is again hosting 3 Roundtables. 
It offers the following topics and looks forward to receiving your proposals.  Please send a 750-1000 word proposal, in Microsoft Word or Rich 
Text Format, electronically to sarker-AT-macalester.edu or in print form to Sonita Sarker, Women?s and Gender Studies, Macalester College, 1600 Grand 
Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA.  Please include your full contact information.

Roundtable #1: Counter-Hegemonic Leaderships
Grassroots efforts, non-governmental organizations, and other community-based movements play an important part in challenging and reformulating dominant policies and practices in the current world events. How do women and men, as individuals, participate in collaborative efforts, 
many of which are formed at a busy intersection of race, sexuality, gender, 
nationality, religion, and class?  What is the impact of such organizations 
on systemic inequities?do they perpetuate and/or reconceive existing norms? How do we recognize the limitations they face and the advantages they enjoy?  Most importantly, what are the present and future prospects for feminist, trans-categorical, leadership and change?

Roundtable #2: Feminist Politics of Positionality in Research
Tied to the first roundtable in significant ways, because of the often-contentious relationship between academics and activism, this roundtable focuses on the issues that arise in both ?familiar? and ?unfamiliar? terrains of feminist research.  How do modern and postmodern attitudes about race, nation, class, gender, religion, and sexuality facilitate and/or obstruct the realms in which we can speak and write?  Are 
there always notions of authenticity and legitimacy that abide, even as previous boundaries of feminist research are broken?

Roundtable #3: Coalitions and Fractures
Given the complex issues of membership and representation that emerge in the first two roundtables, this roundtable analyzes and speculates on the promise and fate of feminist convergences and divergences.  In the context of contemporary events based in military and political might, minority resistances, international conferences (on racism, on globalization, on terrorism), do we have local loyalties (of gender, nation, race, etc.) that 
contribute to, or on the other hand, supersede more extended/global concerns?  Or is the opposite true: Is it imperative that we think of our interrelated identities as urgently determining the commitments we make? Do we coalesce and fracture simultaneously, and is that inevitable?

Sonita Sarker
Chair, Women's and Gender Studies/Associate Professor, WGS & English
Macalester College       1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA.
PH: +1-651-696-6316      Fax: +1-651-696-6350  sarker-AT-macalester.edu


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