Submissions are invited for an Edited Collection entitled "Birth, Loss, and Trouble: Women of Color Reflect"

This collection will bring together representative narratives of academic and professional women of color as they reflect on their experiences with assisted reproduction, miscarriage, preterm labor, and adoption, and the impact these experiences and interventions have on their lives and family units. Submissions due by May 17, 2013.

Despite statistics that show a staggering number of pregnancies ending in miscarriage, pre-term labor, selective abortion, or stillbirth, the popular imaginary still portrays a healthy child as the inevitable outcome of nine months of pregnancy. For many women of color, the challenge of having a non-normative reproductive experience is coupled with the challenges of finding community or negotiating specific cultural attitudes toward birth. Do we feel isolated from communities where the women are expected to be white? Are we surprised to identify across cultural lines? Do we have specific cultural expectations to meet or overcome? Do our communities prepare us with useful resources for facing difficulties?
To address a dearth in scholarship on how women of color struggle with (in)fertility, difficult pregnancies, and loss, this collection will bring together representative narratives of academic and professional women of color as they reflect on their experiences with assisted reproduction, miscarriage, preterm labor, and adoption, and the impact these experiences and interventions have on their lives and family units. By combining scholarly essays, creative nonfiction, and autobiographical accounts, this collection will appeal to readers seeking informed, well-written, and thoughtful expressions of the complex realities behind baby making for a cadre of women reared to believe that they might, with planning, fortitude, and a healthy ovarian reserve, have it all.
We invite 250- to 300-word abstracts that propose scholarly essays, creative nonfiction, or autobiographical accounts that address the following and related topics:
· (Re)defining motherhood for women who have experienced miscarriage and preterm labor
· (Re)defining the language and meaning of pregnancy, fertility/infertility, and loss
· Pregnancy: popular culture vs. material realities
· Culture, conception, and loss
· Finding community across cultural lines
· Faith
· Cultural resources for facing loss and other troubles
· Adoption
· Pregnancy after 35
· Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART)
· Tenure clock vs. biological clock
· Surrogacy (traditional and/or gestational)
· Sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood
Please send submissions and queries to: fertilitycfp@gmail.com
All submissions must be submitted in .docx or .rtf format by 17 May 2013

University of California, Davis invites applications for a Two-Year Visiting Professor

University of California, Davis invites applications for a two-year Visiting Assistant Professor position supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Hart Hall Social Justice Initiative. They are looking for new or recent Ph.D's in gender/feminists studies, critical race/ethnic/indigenous, and arts/cultural studies; ideally in combination with a commitment/involvement in community development and social movements. Ph.D. must be in hand by July 1, 2013. Application deadline is March 8, 2013.

MELLON VISITING ASSISTANT PROFESSORSHIP HART HALL SOCIAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE 2013-15
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
The Women and Gender Studies Program, Department of Chicana/o Studies, and Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis invites applicants for a two-year Visiting Assistant Professor position supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. We are looking for new or recent Ph.D's in gender/feminists studies, critical race/ethnic/indigenous, and arts/cultural studies; ideally in combination with a commitment/involvement in community development and social movements. Ph.D. must be in hand by July 1, 2013. Preference will be given to candidates with interests in developing activist research and methodologies. The position will be administered in Women and Gender Studies, Native American Studies, or Chicana/o Studies, depending on the successful candidate's research interests, to be part of the Hart Hall Social Justice Initiative from July 1, 2013-June 30, 2015. Duties will include teaching three courses per year in social justice and critical race/ethnic/gender studies in any of the above programs/departments and participating in the organization and delivery of the social justice initiative program activities. Other responsibilities include conducting research and collaborating with faculty in the supervision of graduate and undergraduate student's community and campus research projects.
Applicants should submit a letter of interest, CV, and the contact information for three (3) references (we do NOT accept letters via Interfolio) through the online application form found at:
https://recruit.ucdavis.edu/
Applications are due March 8, 2013. The position is open until filled.
The University of California, Davis, is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer with a strong institutional commitment to the achievement of diversity among its faculty and staff.

Join CSCL for presentations from the finalists in the Assistant Professor Search

Please join CSCL for presentations from finalists in their Assistant Professor search. There will be four talks over the next two weeks.

Michael Gallope
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"Listening as a Philosophical Act: A Case of Free Improvisation"
This talk explores ways in which the activity of listening to music might help us illustrate the nature of conceptually driven questions about the dynamics of improvisation. I will begin by playing a brief excerpt of an improvisation by Ornette Coleman and Joachim Kühn. Then I will distinguish and compare the key elements of two different philosophies of improvisation, one forwarded by Vladimir Jankélévitch and the other proposed by Jacques Derrida. Both describe the phenomenon as a negotiation between temporal experience and technical mediation, though the two differ as to the experiential character of the vanishing now, the weight and character of various mediations, and the exact role of skill and virtuosity. The talk concludes by returning to the recording in order to test how one might "translate" the details of listening into a new speculative conversation with the two philosophical positions.
Friday, February 15
4:00 PM
135 Nicholson Hall
Tsitsi Jaji
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"Pirate's Choice: Hacking into (Post-)pan-African Futures"
"Pirate's Choice: Hacking into (Post-)pan-African Futures" shows how new technologies have given rise to a set of practices that pirate, informalize and distribute the sonic archives of transnational black solidarity traced throughout my current book project Africa in Stereo, potentially opening participation in pan-African imaginaries to new subjects. I trace the development of this pirate logic in three recent works by the Ghanaian-British filmmaker John Akomfrah, Senegalese feminist author Ken Bugul, and the South African-based duo known as the Heliocentrics, Neo Muyanga and Ntone Edjabe. Music forges new publics in the Afro-futurism of Akomfrah's 1987 film, The Last Angel of History, which traces the "mothership connection" between Africa and experimental diasporic music from Sun Ra to George Clinton. Ken Bugul's 2005 novel Rue Félix-Faure is suffused with Billie Holiday's blues and Cesaria Evora's Cape Verdean mornas, the soundtrack for the emergence of transnational feminist solidarity. And the Heliocentrics' ongoing internet radio project, the Pan-African Space Station hacks into the future archive of solidarity as an exploration mission that has yet to dock.
Monday, February 18
4:00 PM
135 Nicholson Hall
Duy Nguyen
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"The Image of Death and Redemption in B·∫£o Ninh's Sorrow of War"
This paper explores representations of the Vietnamese Revolution in Bảo Ninh's The Sorrow of War (Nỗi Buồn Chiến Tranh), which is considered to be one of the most important literary works on the Vietnam War. The reading will focus in particular on the novel's peculiar conception of a freely-appropriable common. This common, which the novel opposes to both private possession and state collectivization, is characterized in the text as the product of a de-sacralization of the commodity-fetish resulting from the devastation produced by the War.
Wednesday, February 20
4:00 PM
135 Nicholson
Jasper Bernes
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"Art, Work, and Endlessness in the 2000s"
In this talk, Jasper Bernes will consider the consequences of the postindustrial restructuring of labor for art and literature today, focusing in particular on the effect of new media technologies. Drawing from his book project, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization, he will narrate how utopian projections of both the "end of art" and the "end of labor" cancelled each other out in the 1960s and 1970s. The result was a reorganization of the workplace in accord with certain values associated with art and artists (flexibility, cooperation, autonomy, and openness to risk) as well as a growing indistinction between work and non-work time, an indistinction felt especially poignantly now that digital and network technologies have joined home and workplace into a single manifold. What possibilities for the artistic critique of work remain today, in the face of a workplace designed to anticipate and neutralize such critiques? Analyzing the internet trolls, office-poets and would-be Bartlebys of contemporary literary and artistic engagements with the digitized workplace, Bernes will trace some consequences of the foreclosure of qualitative and artistic challenges to the dominion of work. He will conclude by examining signs that these challenges might soon re-emerge on a new basis.
Friday, February 22
4:00 PM
135 Nicholson

Coffee Hour Talk titled "Symbols and Discourses: Art, Landscapes, and Geographic Imaginings"

A coffee hour talk titled "Symbols and Discourses: Art, Landscapes, and Geographic Imaginings" will feature a panel of local artists discussing art, landscape, and geographic imaginings. This event is hosted by Department of Geography, Environment, and Society and will be held on Friday, February 15, 2013 from 3:30-5:00 in Blegen 445.

Please join us Friday, February 15 for an exciting Department of Geography, Environment and Society Coffee Hour. We are holding a panel discussion about art, landscape, and geographic imaginings titled, "Symbols and Discourses: Art, Landscape, and Geographic Imaginings." Geographers have long been interested in exploring the intersubjectivity in landscape meaning and symbolism, reading the political, social, and economic context embedded in the materiality of place, and comprehending landscape as part of a cultural-political process. We've invited a panel of local artists to talk about the role landscape plays in their imagination, interpretation, and representation of place. Join us for a lively discussion and the visual pleasures of their artwork.
Please see the attached PDF for flyer and for the list of participating artists with links to their work.
The panel will be held in Blegen 445 beginning at 3:30. Complementary refreshments and coffee will be served at 3:15.
Hope to see you on Friday!
ArtistPanel.PDF
Artist PanelList.pdf

Film Screening and Discussion of Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild will be presented by the Department of African American & African Studies and the Black Student Union. The event will be held on Wednesday, February 20, 2013 beginning at 5:30 in Coffman Memorial Union Theater.



You are invited to attend a film screening and critical discussion of BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD. This event is a special Black History Month presentation by the Department of African American & African Studies and the Black Student Union of The University of Minnesota. It will be held on Wednesday, February 20th, 2013 beginning at 5:30 PM with the reception from and the screening and discussion from 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM in the Coffman Memorial Union Theater at 300 Washington Avenue SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 | University of Minnesota - Twin Cities.
Film Screening
In a forgotten but defiant bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levee, a six-year-old girl exists on the brink of orphanhood. Buoyed by her childish optimism and extraordinary imagination, she believes that the natural world is in balance with the universe until a fierce storm changes her reality. Desperate to repair the structure of her world in order to save her ailing father and sinking home, this tiny hero must learn to survive unstoppable catastrophes of epic proportions.
Discussion
A post-screening discussion about the film will feature:
Leola Johnson, professor and chair of Media and Cultural Studies, Macalester College
Darryl Bullock, filmmaker
ShaVunda Horsley, actress
Keith Mayes, professor of African American & African Studies, University of Minnesota
For further information, please email or call aaas@umn.edu or 612-624-9847.

Keith Mayes Talk on Feb. 18th at 3:30pm

Keith Mayes presents "Silencing Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown: The First Amendment and the Politics of Speaking Freely in Cold War America". This is the fourth lecture in the Black Studies and American Studies at the Crossroads series and will be held Monday, February 18th at 3:30pm in 815 Social Science Tower. For more information on the remaining events in the series, please continue reading.

Remaining events in the Black Studies and American Studies at the Crossroads Lecture Series:
Anissa Wardi of Chatham University presents "African American Literature: An Ecocritical Perspective." This will be held on Monday, March 11th at 3:30pm in 815 Social Sciences Building.
To conclude the series there will be the Annual David Noble Lecture featuring University of Michigan Professor and University of Minnesota American Studies Alumni (PhD '00) Tiya Miles on Tuesday, April 9th at 6pm at the Weisman Art Museum.

Two-year Assistant Professor Position in LGBTQ Studies

The Comparative American Studies Program at Oberlin College invites applications for a two year term position at the Assistant Professor level with an emphasis on LGBT studies. Applicants should have completed their Ph.D. by the first semester of the 2013-2014 academic year. Application deadline: March 29, 2013.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative American Studies
Posted Date: Jan 29, 2013
Application Due Date: Mar 29, 2013
Department: Comparative American Studies
COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES - LGBTQ STUDIES
The Comparative American Studies Program at Oberlin College invites applications for a full-time non-continuing faculty position in the College of Arts and Sciences. Appointment to this position will be for a term of two years, with the possibility of renewal for an additional two years, beginning in the Fall semester of 2013, and will carry the rank of Visiting Assistant Professor.
The incumbent will teach five courses a year in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies. Courses will include both general introductions to the major and intermediate and advanced courses in LGBTQ Studies. Areas of expertise may include but are not limited to health and social justice, disability studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, and queer theory. Ability to teach community-based learning courses is also desirable. The Comparative American Studies Program is committed to interdisciplinary and theoretically informed intersectional pedagogy at the undergraduate level. Faculty are expected to integrate issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and citizenship within comparative and/or transnational frames throughout their teaching.
Among the qualifications required for the appointment is the Ph.D. degree (in hand or expected by the first semester of 2013-2014 academic year). Candidates must demonstrate interest and potential excellence in undergraduate teaching. Successful teaching experience at the college level is desirable.
To be assured of consideration, please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, and the title and brief descriptions of 2-3 courses the candidate can teach to the following email address: LGBT.Search@oberlin.edu. Also, please have graduate and undergraduate academic transcripts and three recent letters of reference* sent directly to CAST LGBTQ Search Committee, Comparative American Studies Program, Oberlin College, 10 N. Professor Street, King 141D, Oberlin, OH 44074 (Phone: 440-775-8982; fax 440-775-8644) by March 29, 2013. Application materials received after that date may be considered until the position is filled. *By providing these letters you agree that we may contact your references.
Oberlin College is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer committed to creating an institutional environment free from discrimination and harassment based on race, color, sex, marital status, religion, creed, national origin, disability, age, military or veteran status, sexual orientation, family relationship to an employee of Oberlin College, and gender identity and expression.
Oberlin was the first coeducational institution to grant bachelor's degrees to women and historically has been a leader in the education of African Americans; the College was also among the first to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. In that spirit, we are particularly interested in receiving applications from individuals who would contribute to the diversity of our faculty in all respects.