This page is part of the description of the Seeing Women Transnationally
film series, an interdisciplinary video and discussion series held
on our University at Albany campus during the 1997-98 academic year
and partially funded by a 1997 Initiatives For Women grant. We are
featuring these descriptions and information as an example of what
one IFW group of recipients accomplished.
Seeing Women Transnationally
Dear Faculty Member,
During the 1997-98 academic year, there will be an
interdisciplinary video and discussion series on campus entitled
Seeing Women Transnationally. Funded by the University Libraries'
Diversity Committee and Initiatives For Women, this series aims
to bring to the University community an accessible and informative
educational forum that interrupts narrow ways of understanding women's
situations in the world. To see women transnationally is to make
visible what is often invisible even through the lens of today's
multiculturalism. This series will not put women's differences on
display or view women's lives as spectacles, but rather it will
challenge assumptions that often limit "first world" ways
of seeing women. The series intends to provoke new understandings
of women's situations globally and to deliberately include the "first
world" as fully participatory in a cultural and political economy
that crosses borders.
There will be a total of five sessions throughout
the year; three during the Fall semester and two in the Spring.
Each session will comprise viewings of documentary videos linked
by a thematic thread and facilitated discussion on the topics the
videos raise. Facilitators will pose questions and promote discussion
between and after the videos. The events are intended to be forums
for thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion that brings into
question traditional ways of comprehending women's lives.
We hope that this series will be helpful to your
teaching, directly or indirectly, and we encourage you to include
these events in your class syllabi. If these topics are not pertinent
to the content of your class per se, they may certainly be of interest
to your students in other endeavors.
Please announce the series to your classes.
Sincerely,
Rosemary Hennessy
Donald Juedes
Deborah LaFond
Vivien Ng
