Kimberlé Crenshaw, Pioneer in the Field of Women’s and Gender Studies, to Speak at Lafayette
Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at Columbia University and UCLA, will deliver the keynote address celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Lafayette College at 7 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 17 in Colton Chapel. The talk, “The Charleston Imperative: The Challenge and the Promise of Intersectional Feminism,” is free and open to the public. A book signing will follow.
Read more about Lafayette’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
Her pioneering scholarly work has been central to the development of the field of women’s and gender studies over the last three decades.
Crenshaw is director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) at Columbia Law School, which she founded in 2011. The Center examines how social structures and related identity categories such as gender, race, and class interact on multiple levels to create social inequality.
A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. She was also influential in drafting the equality clause in the South African Constitution. Crenshaw authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nation’s World Conference on Racism, served as the Rapporteur for the conference’s Expert Group on Gender and Race Discrimination, and coordinated NGO efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration.
Crenshaw is also co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), an innovative committee that connects academics, activists and policymakers to promote efforts to dismantle structural inequality. The work of AAPF encourages frameworks and strategies that address the bases of discrimination as they relate to the intersections of race, gender and class.
Crenshaw’s talk is sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Presidential Speaker Series on Diversity, Office of the Provost, Office of Intercultural Development, Department of Government and Law, and Africana Studies Program.
30th Anniversary Events
Lafayette will be celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program with several events throughout the year. Next up is “Failure is Impossible: The Absolutely True Story of Women’s (and Gender) Studies at Lafayette” at 4:10 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 8, in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium, room 104. Professors Susan Basow, Debbie Byrd and Mary Armstrong will conduct a whirlwind tour through the 30-year history of the Lafayette Women’s and Gender Studies Program, discussing the program’s history and development, tracing its evolution within trends in feminist scholarship and offering thoughts on the future of WGS at Lafayette and in higher education today. This event is sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and the College Archives.
For more information, contact Mary Armstrong, professor of English and women’s and gender studies, (610) 330-5992, armstrom@lafayette.edu.
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Lafayette is a highly selective, national liberal arts college in Easton, Pa. with 2,400 students and 215 full-time faculty, offering a wide variety of undergraduate degree programs including engineering.
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Photography by Annabel Clark. Higher resolution photo, https://flic.kr/p/xsGmQC
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