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Research

Whether individual or collaborative, funded or unfunded, our faculty are leading national networks and conferences, providing research frameworks, engaging students, traversing international archives and making significant contributions to UMD's research enterprise.

Our faculty are at the forefront of their fields, producing transformative knowledge across the multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas, within and beyond academia, that constitute women, gender, and sexuality studies.

The department is home to numerous research programs and events including annual symposia like the DC Queer Studies Symposium and Harriet Tubman Day, student conferences like our biannual Graduate student conference Interventions, and research collaborations like the University of Maryland's Indigenous Futures Lab. 

In addition to our larger events, each year is filled with exciting research activities and events including book talks and gatherings that bring together feminist scholars and activists from across the university and across the globe. 

Scroll to learn more about new faculty publications and upcoming research events.

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Good Technology is a Portal to Other Worlds

Neda Atanasoski's essay appears in The Good Robot

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Neda Atanasoski
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, UC Santa Cruz

 

Dates:
Publisher: Bloomsbury
The Good Robot

What is good technology? Is 'good' technology even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it? The Good Robot addresses these crucial questions through the voices of leading feminist thinkers, activists and technologists. Each thinker provides a snapshot of key challenges, questions and provocations in the field of feminism and technology.

While the question of whether various AI and technological advances can be ethical is not new, the embedded nature of feminist perspectives pulls out whether this perceived 'goodness' or 'wrongness' might actually impact our lives in the 21st century. This book explores both the radical possibilities of technology to disrupt practices of patriarchy, colonialism, racism and beyond but also provides a significant critique of how we can contain the ethical possibilities of entities we cannot predict. In exploring unjust technological practices and engaging critical voices in the tech industry, the existing moral issues are brought to light as well as the possible ethical quagmires.

This book opens a new space of discussion on digital technologies – one that insists that the future of AI is an urgent feminist issue.

This chapter can be found in Part IV: Good Visions, Chapter 15 and was written in collaboration with Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

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The Sandbox, Sisterhood, and a Sociological Journey

Bonnie Thornton Dill publishes essay in new book on comparative race and ethnicity studies

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Bonnie Thornton Dill
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Margaret L Anderson and Maxine Baca Zinn (Editors) 

Dates:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Moving from the Margins Book cover

At a time when movements for racial justice are front and center in U.S. national politics, this book provides essential new understanding to the study of race, its influence on people's lives, and what we can do to address the persistent and foundational American problem of systemic racism. Knowledge about race and racism changes as social and historical conditions evolve, as different generations of scholars experience unique societal conditions, and as new voices from those who have previously been kept at the margins have challenged us to reconceive our thinking about race and ethnicity. In this collection of essays by prominent sociologists whose work has transformed the understanding of race and ethnicity, each reflects on their career and how their personal experiences have shaped their contribution to understanding racism, both in scholarly and public debate.

Merging biography, memoir, and sociohistorical analysis, these essays provide vital insight into the influence of race on people's perspectives and opportunities both inside and outside of academia, and how racial inequality is felt, experienced, and confronted.

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Reproducing Racial Capitalism: Sexual Slavery and Islam at the Edges of Queer of Color Critique

Dr. Atanasoski publishes new article with Dr Rana Jaleel in South Atlantic Quarterly

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Neda Atanasoski
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Rana M. Jaleel, Cultural Studies Chair, Associate Professor, University of California Davis

Dates:
Publisher: Duke University Press
South Atlantic Quarterly Vol 123 issue 1 cover

This article tracks contemporary debates surrounding human trafficking, sex slavery, and the slave trade, in which the specter of the Ottoman empire and its system of slavery—as well as other “Oriental” slave systems—emerge as templates for imagining the place of sex in slavery. At the same time, the authors highlight how Ottoman and “Oriental” slavery is largely considered irrelevant to the genealogy of present‐day racial capitalism. By contrast, the authors argue that considering historically parallel and entangled slave systems is important not just to accounts of modern‐day slavery but also for how we conceptualize the “racial” in racial capitalism and the “queer” and “of color” in queer of color critique. Building on Black feminist historiography on the transatlantic slave trade, the commitments of queer of color critique, and contemporary research concerning sexual violation and racial capitalism, the authors explore how interconnected struggles across the globe are partitioned by imagined frameworks of racial and sexual difference that isolate entangled systems of gendered and sexual enslavement.

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Indigenous Feminist Evaluation Methods: A Case Study in "My Two Aunties"

Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner publishes new article in The Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Jeremy Braithwaite, Karan Thorne, Art Martinez, Elizabeth Lycett

Dates:
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation Volume 38 Issue 2

This paper offers some key characteristics of Indigenous feminist approaches to evaluation and spotlights a unique and promising example of Indigenous feminist evaluation methods in the My Two Aunties (M2A) program. Though Indigenous feminist evaluation methods are diverse, complex, and community-specific, some general characteristics we point to in this analysis are commitments to anti-colonial conceptions of family, gender, and belonging, an assertion of the epistemic and evaluative importance of felt knowledge, the explicit confrontation of settler colonialism’s impact on Indigenous life, and the commitment to the transformative potential of community-led caretaking. We then turn to what we see as an exemplar of Indigenous feminist evaluation methods—the evaluation component of the My Two Aunties (M2A) program. Our paper will provide theoretical scaffolding for Indigenous feminist evaluation and add to the growing body of Indigenous scholarship that challenges what “counts” as evidence in settler scholarship arenas.

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The “Smart” Business of Menstruation, Hormone Tracking, and the Corporate Construction of Risk

Dr. Mathiason examines the fascinating world of FemTech, offering a feminist framework for reimagining the FemTech industry.

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Jessica Lee Mathiason
Dates:

In 2021, startup companies raised $1.9 billion for what entrepreneur Ida Tin calls FemTech, or digital tools designed to promote women’s health including medical wearables, diagnostic kits, and self-tracking apps. Not only is FemTech a booming industry, but it is touted as an innovative, feminist corrective for how biomedical devices have traditionally been designed with a male body in mind. Two such FemTech products are LOONCUP, the world’s first “smart” menstrual cup, and EverlyWell’s line of home-health tests. Rooted in the neoliberal logic of personal responsibility and individual self-mastery, these products purport to empower women by giving them tools to manage their health but, in fact, work by enlisting them to place their bodies under corporate surveillance. By drawing parallels to the 20th century FemCare industry, I show how today’s FemTech companies entice customers by offering new, technological solutions to female body management that promise greater convenience and entry into elusive, upper-middle class lifestyles. Through their marketing they co-opt feminist slogans to sell women’s health products, replacing intersectional feminist critique with neoliberal commodity feminism. Then, when customers use these products, their subjective evaluation of their health is replaced with numerical data (despite questionable accuracy) which is subsequently entered into for-profit databank. This misuse of medical technology is not, however, inevitable. In the final section, I offer a feminist framework for reimagining the FemTech industry by allowing product development to emerge from the daily needs of women, prioritizing outward-facing technologies that conceive of health as environmental and collective, replacing built-in goals with open-ended modeling, and engaging in feminist data practices which emphasize user privacy and the democratization of knowledge.

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Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution

Dr. Atanasoski's 2022 coedited anthology on post-socialism examines the ongoing transnational legacy of socialism

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Neda Atanasoski
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Kalindi Vora is Professor of Ethnicity, Race and Migration, and of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, History of Science and Medicine, and American Studies at Yale University. She is author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of OutsourcingReimagining Reproduction: Essays on SurrogacyLabor and Technologies of Human Reproduction, and co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. With the Precarity Lab, she is author of Technoprecarious.

Dates:
Publisher: Routledge
Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution-2022

Moving past the conflation of state socialism with all socialist projects, this book opens up avenues for addressing socialist projects rooted in decolonial and antiracist politics. To that end, this anthology brings together scholarship across regions that engages postsocialism as an analytic that connects the ‘afters’ of the capitalist– socialist dynamic to present day politics. Resisting the revolutionary teleology of what was before, “postsocialism” can function to create space to work through ongoing legacies of socialisms in the present.

Looking at the Middle East, Scandanavia, Korea, Romania, China, and the US, the chapters in this book assess ongoing socialist legacies in new ethical collectivities and networks of dissent opposing state- and corporate- based military, economic, and cultural expansionism since the end of the Cold War.

The majority of the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Social Identities.

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On Emancipatory Potentials of a Virus: Some Thoughts

Sayan Bhattacharya explores Chaitanya Lakkimsetti's Legalizing Sex is this article publised in GLQ

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Sayan Bhattacharya
Dates:
Publisher: Duke University Press
GLQ 2022

Legalizing Sex joins an ever-expanding body of literature on the gender and sexuality rights movements of South Asia and their contested negotiations with the nation-state. Deploying participant observation and in-depth interviews with policy makers, activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and community-based organizations (CBOs) across several Indian cities, conducted sporadically between 2007 and 2015, and discourse analysis of legal documents and activist literatures, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti demonstrates that HIV transformed the relationship between the Indian state and queer, transgender, and sex-worker communities, whom she refers to as "sexual minorities" in shorthand. This article was published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

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Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century

Dr. Ahuja's 2021 book explores the interconnectedness of climate change, migration, and racism

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Neel Ahuja
Dates:
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Award Organization:

Honorable Mention, 2023 Association for Asian American Studies Award for Best Book in Multidisciplinary/Interdisciplinary

Planetary Specters Cover Ahuja

Neel Ahuja tracks the figure of the climate refugee in public media and policy over the past decade, arguing that journalists, security experts, politicians, and nongovernmental organizations have often oversimplified climate change and obfuscated the processes that drive mass migration. To understand the systemic reasons for displacement, Ahuja argues, it is necessary to reframe climate disaster as interlinked with the history of capitalism and the global politics of race, wherein racist presumptions about agrarian underdevelopment and Indigenous knowledge mask how financial, development, migration, and climate adaptation policies reproduce growing inequalities.


Drawing on the work of Cedric Robinson and theories of racial capitalism, Ahuja considers how the oil industry transformed the economic and geopolitical processes that lead to displacement. From South Asia to the Persian Gulf, Europe, and North America, Ahuja studies how Asian trade, finance, and labor connections have changed the nature of race, borders, warfare, and capitalism since the 1970s. Ultimately, Ahuja argues that only by reckoning with how climate change emerges out of longer histories of race, colonialism, and capitalism can we begin to build a sustainable and just future for those most affected by environmental change.

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An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure

Alexis Lothian publishes co-written article on race and feminist data structures in fan fiction

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Alexis Lothian
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Mel Stanfill, University of Central Florida

Dates:

In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of fannish racism, we turn to the specifics of AO3, the political commitments embedded in its systems, and how attention to racial justice could transform them. Drawing on fan fiction genres, we offer three potential models for thinking through these possibilities: a fix-it that would extend AO3's existing metadata structures; a canon divergence that would alter the makeup of the content on AO3; and an alternative universe that draws from abolitionist organizing to imagine the broadest structural changes of all.

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The Analogy of Race and Species in Animal Studies

Dr. Ahuja's article appears in the March 2021 issue of Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Litereature from Duke University Press

The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Author/Lead: Neel Ahuja
Dates:
Publisher: Duke University Press

The emerging field of animal studies builds on ethical insights from the animal rights philosophies that involve an analogy between racism and speciesism, or discrimination based on species. Analyzing recent works addressing human-animal relation ships in Black studies, this essay con tends that it has been necessary for emerging scholarship on race to transcend this analogy in order to con front the persistence of anti-Black racism and contemporary environmental crisis.

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