Research
The Institute for Research on Women expands its offerings to undergraduates
At the start of the spring semester, 17 juniors and seniors – representing 14 different majors – will become the first undergraduate scholars to participate in a new learning community designed and offered by the Institute for Research on Women (IRW), one of the oldest autonomous research institutes at Rutgers.
The institute, founded in 1977 to stimulate interdisciplinary research and scholarship on women and gender, launched the pilot program to expand its offerings to the university’s undergraduate student body and to serve as a model for other centers, bureaus, and institutes at Rutgers. The scholars’ experience will be linked to the institute’s 11th annual multidisciplinary seminar: "Communities: Research and Action." A hallmark of the institute, the seminar brings Rutgers researchers together with visiting scholars from the United States and abroad for intellectual discourse around a different theme each year, supported with lectures, symposia, and conferences.
“We wanted to give undergraduates a new kind of exposure,” said Dorothy Hodgson, elected this fall to a three-year term as IRW director. “Learning community scholars will make meaningful connections to faculty who share their interests and will be able to support and guide them.” In addition, she said, the students will conduct their own research projects related to activism in communities.
Hodgson is the first IRW director to work in the global south, as well as the first social scientist to hold the position. A cultural anthropologist, she took part in the 2002-03 IRW seminar, “Reconfiguring Class and Gender: Identities, Rights, and Social Movements,” which served as the launching pad for her new research on collective action among African women.
“[The seminar] is an intellectually generous space, very much about people presenting their work in progress, sharing ideas, learning to give and accept criticism,” said Hodgson, who also is a professor of anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences. The seminar meets every Thursday from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at the IRW Library (second floor, 160 Ryders Lane, Douglass Campus). Seminar sessions are open to the public, but guests are urged to request and read the paper to be discussed in advance.
Each year the institute awards fellowships to scholars from a pool of applicants whose research connects to that year’s seminar theme. For 2007-2008, it is sponsoring 12 fellows – seven Rutgers faculty and five advanced graduate students – whose studies frame community through the lens of gender and women. The projects range from “fair trade organic tea production and women’s community activism in Darjeeling, India” to experiences of young women growing up in high-crime Philadelphia communities and how professional mothers define experience of community and place. In addition, five visiting global scholars, funded by foundations or their home institutions, will present their work in the seminar, joined by Rutgers faculty who attend the seminar regularly.
As Hodgson explains this year’s theme, communities – whether geographical, figurative, virtual, or imagined – have long served as sites of research and sites of activism for feminists. The seminar participants will consider the principles, processes, politics, and poetics of inclusion and exclusion through which communities are created and maintained as well as how studies of communities and community-based activism have shaped ideas about women, gender, and sexuality and inspired broader campaigns for social change.
A second major initiative of Hodgson's term as director is to secure funding to support visiting global scholars at the IRW, particularly those from the global south who are least likely to be able to secure independent funds and from whom their Rutgers colleagues will benefit most.
Abigail Lewis, a doctoral candidate in history at Rutgers who has taught in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, will coordinate the pilot undergraduate learning community, comprised of 15 women and two men, and help create a bridge between the undergraduates and faculty. “I love working with undergraduates, and this group is impressive. They are a racially and academically diverse group – with majors that range from biology to Spanish to economics,” Lewis said.
Lewis, whose dissertation explores the multiracial activism of the YWCA, also will supervise the learning community scholars’ research and social action projects. Several students have expressed interest in studying women’s participation in the Clinton campaign; one student plans to research women in immigrant communities; and another will examine African-American mothers' leadership styles with a focus on community.