Indiana University Press Journals Weblog

Women and Leadership in the Evolving 21st Century World

Prominent women leaders who have served in various national and international capacities will discuss “breaking barriers” at the University of Central Florida, Tuesday, Oct. 27. The forum is part of an annual focus, “Women and Leadership in the Evolving 21st Century World.”

Organized by the UCF Global Perspectives Office in a partnership with retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the forum will take place in the Cape Florida Ballroom of the Student Union from 2:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

Robin Buckelew, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Claudia J. Kennedy, Mary C. Rawlinson and The Honorable Winifred Sharp will all make presentations during the event. Maria Cristina Santana, interim director of UCF’s Women’s Studies Program and associate professor of journalism in the Nicholson School of Communication will serve as moderator.

Mary C. Rawlinson is the editor of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and an associate professor at Stony Brook University.  She served four years as associate dean for curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences and founded the Learning Communities Program. She won the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998 and was Stony Brook's nominee for Carnegie Teacher of the Year in 1997. She is an Affiliated Faculty in both Comparative Literature and Women's Studies.  Rawlinson is also the co-editor of “The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics” and “Derrida and Feminism,” as well as the editor of five issues of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. She has lectured all over the world.

Voice, Power, and Responsibility in Health Care

IJFAB, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2
Special Issue: Voice, Power, and Responsibility in Health Care: Papers from the Sixth International Congress of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics   

From the Introduction by Wendy Rogers and Carolyn McLeod:

The new issue of IJFAB, Volume 2, Issue 2, is based on papers presented at the Sixth International Congress of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB). The theme of our 2008 congress, in Rijeka, Croatia, was “Voice, Power, and Responsibility in Health Care.” The congress offered two and a half days of stimulating thought, fresh insights, vigorous debate, and new perspectives on issues in bioethics. The papers in this issue reflect the current strength and diversity of feminist bioethics. The issue includes articles from eminent colleagues, together with papers from younger scholars whose strong contributions indicate very promising futures. The FAB biennial congress has played a significant role in the development of feminist bioethics. The first FAB congress in San Francisco in 1996 led to the publication of Embodying Bioethics: Recent Feminist Advances, edited by Anne Donchin and Laura Purdy. Several other collections based on papers from FAB congresses, including a special issue of Bioethics, provide critical resources for teaching and scholarship. In 2007, FAB established IJFAB to advance feminist approaches in bioethics. Beginning with this issue, every fourth issue of IJFAB will be based on FAB’s biennial congress.

The field of feminist bioethics has expanded far beyond an early focus on issues that primarily affect women. This volume includes papers that elegantly and successfully use feminist theory to investigate topics that are very much in the mainstream of bioethics (e.g., conflicts of interest or evidence-based medicine), as well as papers on topics that have particular resonance for women (e.g.,care of the elderly and hybrid embryos). As we write this, the World Health Organization has declared the emerging swine flu to be a level-4 pandemic. If a full-blown global pandemic ensues, health care systems and societies around the world will be challenged to find just and ethical ways to respond. Several of the themes in this issue are relevant here. Who will care for those affected, and who will receive care? It is unlikely that existing services will be able to care for all who become ill. How will resources be distributed, and will those who already are vulnerable be further disenfranchised? What notions of duty and responsibility will be at play, and on what basis will health care professionals advise their patients in this situation of uncertainty? The first congress issue of IJFAB demonstrates clearly that feminist bioethics plays a crucial role in addressing these and other questions in the potentially difficult times ahead.

IJFAB, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2

Special Issue: Voice, Power, and Responsibility in Health Care: Papers from the Sixth International Congress of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics   
VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2

ESSAYS
Long-term care for the elderly worldwide: Whose responsibility is it?
Rosemarie Tong

Shades of gray: From caring to uncaring labor
Monique Lanoix

Stories from the margins: Immigrant patients, health care, and narrative medicine
Anna Gotlib

“Babies with some animal DNA in them”: A woman's choice?
Françoise Baylis

Glass houses: The power of money in bioethics research
Jocelyn Downie

Trust and responsibility in health policy
Meredith Celene Schwartz

Evidence-based medicine and patient autonomy
Robyn Bluhm

Why reading the title isn't good enough: An evaluation of the 4S approach to evidence-based medicine
Kirstin Borgerson

To subscribe to IJFAB visit our website http://inscribe.iupress.org.

Schüssler Fiorenza: Leading feminist thinker and activist

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

JFSR Volume 25 Issue 1

Special Issue: In Honor of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza

This special issue of JFSR highlights leading feminist scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s contributions to feminist studies in religion through various constructive engagements with her work. The academic world too often divides itself into categories of expertise and discipline. As this volume shows, however, the work of a leading feminist thinker and activist like Schussler Fiorenza cuts across these lines and engages a wide range of topics and conversations. Many people are familiar with Schussler Fiorenza’s groundbreaking work in feminist biblical studies. Her path-breaking book In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins has been translated into more than 10 languages. However, even those familiar with her work in this area are often unaware of her contributions to feminist studies in religion more broadly. Speaking about topics ranging from "the religion of thinness" to metaphysics, from feminist hermeneutics to pedagogy, from Muslim feminist theology to the politics of nationalism, this volume engages the work of Schussler Fiorenza from areas of interest beyond Christian Testament studies. In the process, key theoretical models in feminist studies in religion and feminist theologies that Schussler Fiorenza has pioneered — critical rhetorical feminist analysis and critical liberationist feminist theology — are explored, applied and developed in new and creative ways, demonstrating the ongoing vibrancy of the field of feminist studies in religion.

Since Schussler Fiorenza is the co-founder of JFSR, it seems fitting that this volume celebrating her work also launches a bold new cover design for the journal. The complex interconnections of the symbols visually represent the broad range of religious traditions and their feminist intersections and conveys the journal’s commitment to fostering feminist conversation and activism that is multidiscipinary and multireligious.

Susan Weiss wins "Women in Law" award

Jerusalem lawyer, Susan Weiss is one of the contributors in the newly published issue of Nashim 17. We have just learned that Susan was awarded this year’s “Women in Law” citation by the Israel Bar Association, at a ceremonial dinner held on June 2 in Eilat.

Susan Weiss is the founder and executive director of the Center for Women’s Justice in Jerusalem, which is committed to advancing the rights of women to equality, dignity and justice under Jewish law.

You can check out their website at www.cwj.org.il.

Susan's contribution to Nashim 17 is Under Cover: Demystification of Women's Head Covering in Jewish Law and can be found in Nashim's newest special issue titled: Sexuality in Jewish Contexts.

How Women Wrote History in the Early Modern Era

Devoney Looser will present an invited lecture, "Catharine Macaulay in Context" at the conference Comment les femmes écrivent l’histoire à l’époque moderne (XVI-XVIIIe siècles) (How Women Wrote History in the Early Modern Era, 16th-18th Centuries), to be held June 6th at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Université de Paris III.  The conference is the first of two planned colloquia, reflecting on the relative invisibility of women historians in the early modern era. The conference sets out to investigate the extent to which history writing was a masculine bastion, as has been previously assumed. Looser's paper looks at the ways women historians were discussed and labeled after Catharine Macaulay (1731-1791) became widely known as the "celebrated female historian" in the 1760s. 

Looser is the author of British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (2000), Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (2008), and is the co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. 

 

Sexuality in Jewish Contexts

NASHIM 17: Special Issue

Sexuality in Jewish Contexts

From the introduction by Tova Hartman

"For many feminist women and men, religion continues to be a place they not only return to for comfort, but also continually and substantively revisit, with passion and rigor. Once it might have been possible to take for granted that religion is inherently oppressive in its patriarchal hierarchies; but if it were exclusively oppressive, more people, and certainly more feminists, would have made a clean break. Instead, we have Muslim academics like Fadwa El Guindi claiming the veil as tool of feminist liberation. In my own research, I have heard women express a wide range of feelings about the traditional Jewish woman’s menstrual rites, from enthusiasm, to indifference, to contempt—some times all voiced by the same woman! And I have watched gay men and women, who readily acknowledge that their sexuality is delegitimized within traditional Judaism, converting to much higher levels of observance, in some cases becoming Orthodox.

What binds these people – what binds all of us – to remain within this seemingly endless conversation?
One reason for the tenacity with which feminism and religion have held onto each other, is that, on the one hand, sexuality is an embodied experience that cannot ultimately be relegated to theoretical analysis. At the same time, religion itself, while always open to criticism, proves curiously (or naturally) resistant to ultimate dismissal. The analyses of sexual cultures undertaken by the writers in this issue demonstrate in different ways that, to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, it is “bodies that matter” as much as the more abstract formulations of sexual ideology. Each author adds richly to our sense of what can be included within the protean field of sexuality and feminism, and expands the range of implications that jump, like sparks, out of the friction between theoretical models and the sense people make of their daily lives." 

Special Issue Price $19.95

To subscribe call us at 800.842.6796 or visit us online.

Bioethics require a global perspective

New from IJFAB
International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Vol. 2.1

TRANSNATIONAL DIALOGUES

Guest Editors:
Arleen Salles, PhD, Centro de Investigationes Filosóficas, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Constance Perry, PhD, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA

Increasingly, the problems of bioethics require a global perspective. Issues such as the migration of care workers, trafficking in prostitution or egg donation, or the use of economically and socially vulnerable populations in medical practice and research require a transnational and multidisciplinary analysis that focuses on the central role of women’s experience in these practices.

Transnational Dialogues stages a series of dialogues across national borders that explore the effects of social and economic inequity on health policy and health care. These articles and responses demonstrate how health policy or economics in one country may have serious consequences for and raise serious ethical issues in another. The issue’s authors, who span the global North and South, consistently place ethical issues in health care in their social, political, and economic context, while paying attention to the global effects of local policies. The issue not only includes detailed analysis of ethical issues in egg donation/commerce, the globally increasing rate of C-sections, or the use of age assessment techniques on rape victims, it also challenges the reader’s moral imagination by focusing on the link between health and justice in a global horizon.

To order a single issue or a subscription to IJFAB visit our website at http://inscribe.iupress.org.

British Women Writers Conference

The 17th Annual Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Association (BWWA) Conference took place at the University of Iowa, from April 2-5, 2009.  Papers, lectures, and conversations among its approximately 200 attendees focused on the theme for this year’s conference, "Fresh Threads of Connection."  

Co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Devoney Looser, was one of four scholars to speak on a plenary panel, "Refreshing Conceptions of the Other."  Devoney and fellow panelists, Looser (University of Missouri), Misty Anderson (University of Tennessee), Florence Boos (University of Iowa), and Shuchi Kapila (Grinnell College) offered their perspectives on how considering age, class, religion, and empire in new ways might revitalize scholarship on British women writers. The panel also discussed approaches for articulating this scholarship as fresh knowledge with likely broader appeal and deeper readership.

Since 2004, Devoney Looser has served as co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, published at Indiana University Press. She is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri.

She is also the author of Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (forthcoming, Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) and British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2000; paperback 2005). The latter was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and received honorable mention for the Outstanding Book of 2000 from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Looser has edited Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) and co-edited Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (U of Minnesota P, 1997).

The Past that Does Not Pass

January Read for Free Selections

Bookmark our READ for FREE site and visit often for free access each month to articles from our journals.

Dalia Ofer, The Past that Does Not Pass: Israelis and “Holocaust Memory”.
Israel Studies Apr 2009, Vol. 14, No. 1: 1–35.  For more information on Israel Studies, please click here.

Wendy Rogers, Angela Ballantyne, When is sex-specific research appropriate?
International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics Oct 2008, Vol. 1, No. 2: 36–57.  For more information on IJFAB, please click here.

Chad M. Bauman, Redeeming Indian “Christian” Womanhood? Missionaries, Dalits, and Agency in Colonial India.  For more information on JFSR, please click here.

Vivian Nixon, Patricia Ticento Clough, David Staples, Yolanda Johnson Peterkin, Patricia Zimmerman, Christina Voight, Sean Pica, Life Capacity Beyond Reentry: A Critical Examination of Racism and Prisoner Reentry Reform in the US.
Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts Oct 2008, Vol. 2, No. 1: 21–43.  For more information on R/E, please click here.

New Scholar Award

Professor Bauman Wins New Scholar Award

Butler University Assistant Professor of Religion Chad Bauman submitted an article to The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion late last year, just hoping it would be published.

Not only does the article appear in the fall 2008 edition, but it earned him the journal’s Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award, given to the young scholar who writes the best article in feminist studies of religion for that year.

The award, named for the feminist biblical scholar and theologian, earned Bauman $1,000, as well as publication of his article, “Redeeming Indian ‘Christian’ Womanhood?: Missionaries, Dalits, and Agency in Colonial India.”

“I was really surprised and grateful to receive the award,” said Bauman, who's in his fourth year teaching at Butler.“The editors at the journal contributed significantly to the quality of the article during the editing phase. It was the best and most productive publication experience I've ever had.”

Bauman’s article examines the interactions between Hindus and Christian missionaries from about 1870 through 1940 in a region of India called Chhattisgarh.

To subscribe to The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/fsr.
To learn more about the journal visit http://www.fsrinc.org/jfsr/.