Conference Archive

This is part of IRWG's Program on Native American Culture, Gender, and Healing, directed by Joe Gone. This program convened Native American traditional healers, clinically trained service providers, and cross-cultural mental health researchers for a public roundtable exchange. The purpose was to advance professional knowledge pertaining to the integration of indigenous healing practices and conventional mental health/substance abuse treatments in community-based services for American Indians. A private pre-event gathering, sponsored by the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, was held for collective preparation for the roundtable, which consisted of four public sessions targeting the broad university community.

This one-day conference was organized by IRWG's Program on Gender, Media, and Social Change, directed by Prof. Susan Douglas (Communications).

The symposium, sponsored by the Lesbian, Gay, Queer Research Initiative, highlighted the range of methodological approaches currently being devised for writing the history of same-sex love and desire in periods before the emergence of a widely-perceived, distinct homosexual identity. Experts crossed historical periods in an effort to think comparatively about the methodological issues involved in writing a non-identitarian history of sexuality. The symposium considered as well why the writing of lesbian history, in contrast to gay male and transsexual history, remains primarily the endeavor of scholars trained in literary studies.

This working conference featured more than 40 videotaped oral histories with feminist activists and scholars from China, India, Poland, and the United States. Conference panels and presentations explored the histories' potential for research and use in classroom settings. The conference introduced the Global Feminisms project to a larger audience and discussed how the project materials could be used for pedagogical purposes. In plenary sessions, site coordinators from the four participating countries presented materials developed during the project and discussed some of the specific themes that emerged in interviews.

This conference, organized by IRWG's Program in Culture, Health and Medicine, examined the ways in which contemporary assumptions about health are sometimes at odds with human well-being. Of particular interest were the ways in which politics and ideologies about race, gender, class, social norms and mores, and economic structures work to define "health" in the ways that benefit certain groups of people, while excluding others. Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the first black woman Surgeon General, and Dr. Susan Love, a surgeon and pioneer in the field of breast cancer research, both addressed the conference.

This daylong conference explored the present tensions between feminist theories of security and actual practice in the United States and elsewhere, particularly in light of recent UN efforts to develop policies to redress women's unequal positions in such areas as health, education, victims of armed conflict, and human rights. Conference papers were prepared for a journal specializing in feminist theory and international politics.

The IRWG Program on Global Turns and Gender Returns, directed by Nancy Hunt, sponsored a series of symposia to develop likely approaches to reduce racial disparities in the outcome of pregnancy, from three important dimensions—leaders, providers, and patients. These symposia had three goals: (1) to develop an infrastructure to support interdisciplinary research on persistent disparities in pregnancy outcomes; (2) to develop testable hypotheses for new and more effective approaches to augmented prenatal care; and (3) to provide a mechanism for communicating research-based information to leaders, providers, and patients to improve access to and the quality and effectiveness of prenatal care for African American women.

This conference, planned by the Gender Achievement Research Program (GARP) provided an international forum for presenting, hearing, and discussing cutting-edge research on self-concept and related constructs. The special focus of the 2006 SELF research conference was on different traditions that drive self-concept and identity research. The conference brought together scholars interested in the nature of, and the association of, self-concept, self-esteem, and social and personal identities (including gender and ethnic identities) with motivation, activity choices, and mental health.

Gender and the Meaning of Mental Health was a conference focusing on the role gender plays in defining and diagnosing mental abnormalities. The conference had three focal points. First, several talks explored how gendered characteristics have been pathologized over history. Second, experts reviewed the latest research on mental health in the LGBT community, discussing the political and social perspectives on mental health among this group. Third, speakers focused on how images of "healthy" masculinity impede men from receiving needed mental health care. The purpose of this conference was to create an opportunity for scholars from the social sciences, medical sciences, and humanities to come together and discuss the role of gender in definitions of mental health and mental disorder.

The Adoption, Infertility, and Gender Study Group at IRWG presented a four-day international conference exploring the reproductive disruptions and challenges women and men face around the world. Some of the issues discussed at the conference included: pregnancy loss and child death, prenatal diagnosis and disability politics, the psychological effects of abortion, local practices detrimental to pregnancy and birth, conflicting reproductive goals between women and men, race and reproductive rights, transnational adoption, and the globalization of new reproductive technologies, including those used for gender-selection purposes.

This workshop presented strategies for obtaining funding for research on women and gender.

Panel members included research experts from the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health, NIDA, and the University of Michigan. Topics covered the new NIH Roadmap for Research, the process of writing grants for federal agencies, working with Institutional Review Boards, and intramural sources of funding at U-M.

An interdisciplinary group of social scientists and public health scholars contributed to a volume focusing on health inequalities structured around gender, race, and class. The book, Health and Illness at the Intersections of Gender, Race and Class, was edited by Amy Schulz and Leith Mullings, and published by Jossey-Bass in November, 2005.

This symposium focused on parenting and women's lives, including women with serious mental illness. Experts gathered for discussion on the parenting challenges women with serious mental illnesses face and programs to help them cope effectively with these challenges.

This working conference addressed issues of intersectionality focusing on the intersections of ethnicity, class, and gender in early childhood education. The conference was designed to facilitate mentoring relationships between senior and junior faculty by providing the opportunity for senior faculty participants to offer junior scholars feedback and constructive suggestions on their work and the papers they prepared.

This international conference was sponsored by IRWG's Program on Looking into Visual Culture: Issues of Women and Gender, directed by Joanne Leonard. The aim of the conference was to explore the complex works of Charlotte Salomon, a young German-Jewish woman who produced more than 1,300 autobiographical paintings while in exile in southern France. Drawing on transdisciplinary dialogue, participants explored Salomon's complex work and sought to reconfigure our understanding of its unique cultural moment in a traumatically changing Europe in the 1930s.

The Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI) hosted the first international conference to address the subject. The purpose of the conference was twofold: to explore the notion of gay shame as a useful mode of inquiry for lesbian-gay-queer theorists, and to highlight U-M as a center for lesbian-gay-queer studies.

The Gender and Achievement Research Program at IRWG hosted the second meeting of the newly formed Society for the Study of Human Development, which was founded by researchers interested in looking at human development across the lifespan. Many of the members are longitudinal researchers whose samples have aged and thus, their research questions have gotten more focused on adult development or the interactions between generations.

This one-day conference brought together international feminist scholars and activists and U-M faculty members to examine the two aspects of "Censoring Feminism": first, the ways that feminism is censored around the world; and second, the ways that (Western) feminism censors other forms of local or global resistance to social injustice and oppression. The conference was part of the Gender Based Censorship project at IRWG and built on the February, 1999, conference "Towards a Definition of Gender-Based Censorship."

Based on an initial exploratory trip to China in 1999, the Gender and Development in Comparative Perspective Program, directed by Muge Gocek, initiated a program of international exchange between the University of Michigan and universities in China and other Asian countries, in collaboration with the Women's Studies program, the Center for Chinese Studies and the International Institute. In addition to providing guidance to developing women's studies programs, a three-day intensive workshop was held for faculty and administrators from several universities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan on establishing women and gender studies in Asia.