Kay Warren is the Charles B. Tillinghast Jr. '32 Professor of International Studies and professor of anthropology at Brown University where she directs the Politics, Culture, and Identity Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies.  Areas of Interest: Foreign aid and transnationalism, trafficking in persons, war and community responses to violence, social movements and political minorities, indigenous rights, gender, religion, and the anthropology of multi-cultural democracies; also documentary film and media issues.

 

Kay Warren will also meet with graduate students for an informal discussion at 2:00 p.m. in the Graduate Student Lounge, College Avenue Campus Center. Refreshments will be served. In preparation for the meeting with each speaker, graduate students are asked to read a selection of their work, but preparation is not required to attend and participate in discussion. Click here to download Kay Warren reading (pdf).

Professor Amrita Basu is a scholar of South Asian politics who has a particular interest in women's movements and other social movements. Her most influential publications concern the contested meaning of feminism and the complicated relationship between feminist and women's movements, the prominent role of women in the religious right and the relationship of local movements to larger global forces. She teaches courses on women's activism, human rights and post colonial nationalism.

March 5 - Melissa Wright, Professor of Geography and Women’s Studies, Penn State
“A Person is Missing: Femicide, Fantasy, and the Marketing of Human Rights”

Melissa W. Wright studies the dynamics linking cultural and economic processes. Her research is based primarily in Mexico and along the Mexico-U.S. border. She has also conducted fieldwork in southern China and in Hong Kong. Her recent work has focused on the emergence of an international social movement that protests violence against women along the Mexico-U.S. border. Another project has examined the meaning and practice of corporate citizenship. She is starting a new project on environmental contamination and community health initiatives in the binational border region.

April 9 – Sonia Alvarez, Professor of Political Science & the Leonard J. Horwitz Professorship in Latin American Politics and Studies, Director of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, UMass Amherst
“Global Localities: The Travels and Translations of the World Social Forum”

Feminism in Movement, her newest book, is due out next spring; she is also co-editing an anthology of writings by Latina scholars on the “politics of translation.” Her studies lead her to consider such questions as “What are the boundaries of Latin America, do they end at the Rio Grande—or at Chicago? Holyoke? Los Angeles?” In researching a concept like alternative globalization—what role do “mild-mannered housewives in Argentina,” for instance, play in such a movement?—she seeks its human face.