conference

UK Feminista Summer School (7/31 - 8/1/2010)

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Amnesty International Human Rights Action Centre

London, England

UK Feminista was started by Kat Banyard, the author of The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Men and Women Today, who gave a particularly inspiring speech during the first panel, "The Importance of Feminist Organising."

The enormous strength of the first day of summer school was its focus on practice. The afternoon was split into workshops on different levels of involvement: from how to organize a Ladyfest to running effective campaigns, organizing demonstrations, and planning direct action. All the materials from the workshops will be available at the UK Feminista website in the coming days.

Simultaneously to the events, UK Feminista volunteers were tweeting, providing quote selections and links so well that I didn't feel the need to take many notes. Instead, I have an online record of what was being said under the #femschool hashtag on Twitter. It is a goldmine of news, information, and people!

What struck me about the event, aside from supreme organization, was the enthusiasm of everyone involved, organisers and participants alike. People were chatting away and forming new alliances all the time. There's no better feedback for an event than when people just don't want it to end.

The second day was a lot more opinion- and discussion-based, but great training was still being given. We learned how to use media and influence politicians, how to fundraise and include disabled people in campaigning, the importance of promoting diversity within feminist groups, and why is climate change a feminist issue. The two arguably biggest events of the day, however, were the opening and closing panels. The first was with Jess McCabe of The F-Word, Hannah Pool, and Kira Cochrane. All three talked about their experiences with the media, and all agreed that to be a female journalist takes more effort and more talent, but their examples showed it was possible, and important.

The closing panel, "Feminist Question Time" with Bidisha, Dr. Aisha Gill, Sunder Katwala, Karon Monaghan QC, and Julie Bindel, provoked a lot more controversy. Bindel said there was a lot of terrible anthropological research concerning women in the sex industry, and that they should not be treated as an anthropological field research group; she went so far as to say that if she had one bullet in a gun, it would not go for the pimp, but for the academic who's all into the sex industry. Bindel also said, "we make a lot of excuses for men to the point where we praise them for not being fuckheads," which made everyone laugh, but later someone angrily said that the men in the audience must feel very excluded in the current talk, to which both Bindel and Bidisha reacted heatedly.

Overall I am inclined to say this was the best summer school I ever attended. It was a really inspiring, great opportunity to learn, meet people, and acquire skills and information to proceed with conviction and fury.

Excerpted from Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things

Photo credit: Kirsty McCall-Thornley

Written by: Marta Lucy Summer, August 11th 2010

12th Annual Allied Media Conference (6/18 - 6/20/2010)

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Wayne State University

Detroit, Michigan

This weekend I attended my favorite conference: the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit. This year was way more subdued than the last two years I’ve attended. There were fewer people of color present; I didn’t go to very many sessions; I was on my period, feeling real low energy; and it was still amazing and transformative, and once again reminded me of what I’m here to do in this world. Even with its challenges, the AMC is the kind of conference that has me checking the calendar to make sure I’ve got it on deck for next year.

The most powerful part of the conference for me was being connected to the Creating Collective Access folks, organized in less than a month by some of the fiercest people I know. I was reminded how conferences themselves create a non-sustainable way of folks relating to each other, to themselves, and to their own needs. On some days the conference schedule was filled from 8am-2am. Being connected to the Collective Access folks allowed me to give myself permission to chill, to not push through exhaustion and inattentiveness to be at every session, and to not sacrifice a really good slow conversation to make it to a panel presentation on listening. I felt more in my body, more aware of my needs.

Creating Collective Access also had me questioning what collective space looks like and what to do when access may be so different for different people. I went to one of the sessions that was part of the Indigenous Media and Technology track, and the presenters were using smoke as a tool in the workshop. I was thinking about folks with disabilities that need scent-free spaces and how you hold those things together or, if you can’t, what do you do? Are we willing to do what it takes to create or use tools to share across real boundaries?

I was amazed by Adrienne Marie Brown’s Octavia Butler Symposium, people’s overwhelming interest as well as her awesome awesome facilitation skills. Adrienne is so fierce she had the notes up later that day! I was once again struck by folks' reluctance, and perhaps inability, to talk about trauma in our movement and how we heal or don’t from all these –isms that impact our lives.

I feel softer now, and sharper at the same time. I am refined and focused, recommitted to kindness with direction, and more prepared to speak up as an ally for the disability justice movement and the rights of indigenous peoples. I’m full and content and feel myself coming into a new era of myself. I’m hopeful and it feels really good.

Cross-posted at Crunk Feminist Collective

Written by: Moya Bailey, July 21st 2010

Left Forum 2009 (4/17-4/19/2009)

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:02:00 +0000

Pace University

New York, New York

Left Forum is an annual meeting of liberal intellectuals, academics, activists and students hosted by a New York City college or university. The conference is divided up into panels that take place in classrooms scattered across the campus. As I sat listening and astutely taking notes at the first panel I attended, a sudden feeling of nostalgia washed over me. I couldn’t help but feel transported back to my years as an undergraduate. Choosing panels was like choosing between courses. There was everything from “Long Term Strategies for the Left," to the more specific “The Challenge of Right-Wing Populism in Northern Core Capitalist Countries.” Like everything seemed in college, the choices were abundant.

Of the many panels I had the chance to attend, two in particular stood out. The first, “The Iraq War in Perspective” offered a dynamic spattering of writers, activists, and journalists who had been in and out of Iraq since the beginning of the U.S. occupation. Initially I was struck by the lack of an Iraqi presence on the panel: every one of the speakers was an American male, and with the exception of one, they were all white. This is something that Left Forum seems to struggle with: balancing elite academic ideologies with the actual people implicated in the theories. Despite this, the speakers offered what they experienced on the ground in Iraq, much of which is not reported through the U.S. media. Eight years after the launch of the invasion of Iraq, we are no closer to withdrawal than we were when we began; from the failure of the anti-war movement in America, to the foreshadowing of Obama’s foreign policies, the panelists painted a bleak portrait of the situation in Iraq, which is a picture you will not find on the front page of the New York Times.

The second panel, “The Culture Wars & Sexuality” grappled with the social and political restrictions on sexuality and identity politics. Betty Dodson—who is widely known as a sex educator, author, and artist—was effervescent. A witty woman in her eighties, she dominated much of the conversation with talk of the need for self-pleasure in sexual fulfillment. The panelists also spoke about Proposition 8 and raised serious questions about whether it should be a flagship cause in the gay rights movement. One of the most informative panelists, Bianca I. Laureano, worked with the sex-positive website Latino Sexuality, and was the first in the group to directly address the issue of race in the context of sexuality. It was refreshing to have a young, female panelist of color, and her experiences added exponentially to the dialogue.

Ultimately, the nostalgia I initially experienced persisted throughout the conference. This feeling was not just a result of physically being transported to a university; rather, it was the cocoon-like nature of Left Forum. From the communist publications being distributed at the front door to the inside leftist jokes about the implications of Obama’s foreign interactions, I felt as though I were in an intricately constructed liberal bubble. The attendees at the conference largely represented the fringes of political norms, but for a few days, surrounded by peers, they were in the center of a liberal terrarium.

Despite the institutionalized nature of such an academic gathering where certain voices go unheard, there was much to be gained. Having the opportunity to engage in dialogues with an array of highly respected academics, activists, intellectuals, and students is immeasurable. Many times those sitting in the audience next to me had just as much to offer as the panelists themselves and questions from the audience blossomed into beautiful diversions that would never exist outside of the surreal world of Left Forum.

Written by: Lizzy Shramko, April 26th 2009

Lessons Learned from WAM! 2009

admin — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:25:00 +0000

Women, Action & the Media

This past weekend, I attended the [Women, Action & the Media](http://www.centerfornewwords.org/wam/" target="_blank) Conference (WAM!) in Boston. It was a great weekend that offered over forty workshops and panels, a film series, two keynote talks, and a "genius bar" allowing conference-goers to sign up for time with media experts throughout the conference.

I started on Friday with the session PR: Getting Your Work Out There. It definitely set the tone for the rest of the conference—we'd be learning new skills, sharing our own experiences, and making new connections. On Saturday, my morning began with [Gender, Non-Conformity and the Media](http://twitter.com/search?q=%23wam09gnc&source=navbar&category=search" target="_blank), which explored how the trans experience connects with feminist dialogues and how it's portrayed in the media. I continued my day with a guide to self-publishing, which covered tips for creating your press, using your resources, what costs to expect, and hustling to get your work out there. A panel about community and ethnic media touched on the pressures of speaking for and to a community, the importance of intersectionality, and how "selling out" by relying on advertising actually supports local small businesses. In the Global Abortion Dialogue panel, we learned statistics about access to safe abortions around the world, and watched [Not Yet Rain](http://www.notyetrain.org/" target="_blank), a touching short film about access to abortion in Ethiopia. The last session I attended was [Pulling the Plug on Rape Culture](http://twitter.com/search?q=%23wam09rc&source=serp&category=search" target="_blank), which not only defined rape culture as a way of normalizing rape in our society, but also provided strategies for ending it.

In addition to the dynamic sessions I attended, I was able to follow some of the other panels I was interested in by keeping up with the [#wam09 Twitter feed](http://twitter.com/search?q=%23wam09&source=serp&category=search" target="_blank). This was a great way to make the conference interactive and to follow the conversations happening elsewhere. WAM! was also able to film a number of the sessions, which they'll post on their website in a few weeks.

We shifted gears a bit for the keynote talks. Friday's panel was Women Reporting from the Global Frontlines, and we were able to hear the experiences of three women who lived and reported from Iraq, Colombia, and Zimbabwe. Their stories were inspiring and reminded us how important it is to cover global issues in the mainstream media. Saturday's keynote was presented by Cynthia Lopez of [P.O.V.](http://www.pbs.org/pov/" target="_blank), who gave us a look at some of the compelling documentaries they've presented and urged us to become more involved in public broadcasting.

In wrapping up the highlights of the event, I can't possibly forget about the funniest time at WAM!, our evening with Sarah Haskins. If you're not familiar with her work, don't waste any more time and go check it out. She was even funnier at the event than she is in her videos! She made the night interactive and we all critiqued media and advertising together.

WAM! was a great experience. It was a place to meet the experts, hone our skills, learn new ones, and make connections with like-minded people. The blood, sweat, and tears poured into this event were evident, and I, for one, can't wait for next year.

Written by: frau sally benz, April 3rd 2009