Abstract
“Unsettling Feminism(s): Disrupting the Center, Dismantling Oppressions, Transforming Social Work” took place on May 22–24, 2011 in the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Three participants in the “unconference” reflect on how the conference realized its intent of “unsettling” current thinking and expanding the possibility for transformative and emancipator action. While the unconference provided space for a generative dialogue among a rich diversity of participants, multiple spaces are required for interrogating, integrating, and building multiracial feminism/feminisms and knowledge for the transformative social work we envision as possible.
Drawing from the work of Freire (1970), one can understand
We write these reflections on the Unsettling Feminism(s) unconference from three varied perspectives representing diverse social locations and experiences. Gita and Patricia were part of planning and presenting work at the unconference; Lindsey and Patricia were involved in the coordination of the conference at its site at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Lindsey is a recent masters in social work (MSW) graduate from the Jane Addams College of Social Work, with a concentration in community health and urban development. She identifies as a white heterosexual and comes from a New England family with a history of progressive political involvement. She has worked in multiple direct service social work settings, most recently with a dynamic homeless population in the Chicago area. Gita is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington, with interests in violence against women in South Asian and queer women of color communities, as well as feminist and interpretive research methods. Patricia identifies as a white lesbian-feminist educator who teaches community practice and social work with women. She is also an advocate and scholar working with criminalized women in and out of prison.
Lindsey LaPointe
The classroom always harbors a power divide, no matter how many times we move desks from rows into welcoming circles. As I began to wrap up my 3 years of social work graduate studies, so close to an MSW, this power divide lingered a bit, of course, but then began slowly to melt away. My experience serving as a project assistant of the Unsettling Feminism(s) unconference challenged these typical hierarchies and broadened my notion of what social work is. The collaborative planning process and the event itself, complete with embraces and gratitude from women I had never seen before, placed the power divide in a box and lost the key, at least temporarily.
It is not often that you have a room full of academics, all bearing some resemblance to your favorite professor: fully present, working to change systems, engaged in service, and so on. You want to ask so many questions. For me, many questions emerged throughout the conference process, some more irrelevantly curious than others. How did you get here? How did your research interests come about? How do you collaborate with colleagues across the country and the world? I restrained myself (at times) while answers emerged in spontaneous conversations.
The conference itself was a wonderful and collaborative experience but also exhausting in the most positive sense. We spun many plates and broke none. Although I attended only two sessions, I had the pleasure of reading all the abstracts that were submitted, including the handful from people who could not attend at the last minute. My unique position as a compiler, logging in and coding the content of the abstracts instead of rating them, afforded me the pleasure of a nonjudgmental window into the deep breadth of interpretation for such an unparalleled call for proposals. Although I did not experience the depth of content and formats through actual participation in the sessions, my lens into all the abstracts provided insights into not only the necessary expanse of social work, but the necessary intersections with other disciplines.
The extremely broad scope of material and presentation styles reaffirmed the broad scope of social work and my own choice to enter this dynamic field. On rare occasions, I have questioned my choice of social work and compared it to other possible fields of education, such as counseling or public administration; however, my choice of a social work education has always been confirmed by its broad scope, systemic orientation, and mandate to eliminate oppression. It also seems that social work, more than other fields, embraces individuals who have experience in both the academic world and the practice world. Conversations with many conference participants, especially a few who pursued the academic track later in life, exemplify this capacity for movement across locations and interests (and answered my ongoing question, How did you get here?). Although surely beginning a PhD later in life comes with its own challenges and the term
Another ongoing curiosity of mine—how one collaborates with people in different parts of the country or even around the world—was never worth asking aloud because the ongoing answer came at the moment I began work on the conference. I learned by doing with the aid of technology, clear communication, timely responses, and a clarification of time zones. This collaboration across geography is not so novel in itself; however, jumping into an established group of women I had never met, who had all been already collaborating could have been intimidating. As it played out, little room for intimidation or power plays existed, and this group of women swiftly welcomed me, a social work student, with respect and trust. In this way, I learned how to collaborate actively with a group that was spread across the country, a scenario surely to arise again in my social work career.
Six months of long-distance collaborative work brought significant anticipation and excitement when the date of the conference finally arrived. I would finally meet the voices known only through telephone calls and e-mail messages, while the conference program and steering committees would finally lay eyes on the actual site. We introduced, embraced, chatted, and got to work. I also looked forward to meeting the many presenters and participants I had been communicating with for several months via e-mail and telephone. I imagined registration sign ins and figuring out who was who, finally putting faces to names. In this role at the conference, I pictured myself as sort of an operational outsider, not directly participating or presenting, but answering questions and directing, staying in the margins to ensure a content-driven event. My picture of the event was only half correct, as is often the case. I jumped to answer unanticipated questions and did a fair amount of directing, but I also did a significant amount of embracing, engaging, and laughing. Individuals, both presenters and participants, who I had communicated with only via e-mail greeted me and the conference with genuine engagement. I did not fully anticipate (but enjoyed) this engagement—engagement when conference participants meandered over to the registration table during breaks to find out who I was. I knew many of the participants and presenters through the written word only and relished finally conversing face to face.
At the end of the conference, I was left with new ideas of social work, new connections, and ongoing questions. Upon reflection, I now wonder, What was distinctive, from my more operational perspective, about this social work and feminism/feminisms event? Would I expect the level of engagement, trust, or respect that I experienced as a project assistant at a business, science, or even policy conference? I doubt it. Those around me asked for my personal engagement and demonstrated respect and trust. These concepts are particularly relevant to social work and feminism, since both demand genuine personal engagement, along with self-examination and reflection. From the unconference, I took these reaffirmed concepts, along with a freshly tested set of organizational skills and several new relationships, with me.
Gita Mehrotra
In fall 2009, I received an invitation from my mentor, Susan Kemp, to participate in a planning meeting for a feminist social work conference. Even though I accepted the offer and made plans to attend this initial meeting in San Antonio, I had no idea what to expect when I entered the room on the day of the planning session. Soon after I arrived at the meeting, I realized that I was one of only a couple of doctoral students present, which was highly intimidating. At the same time, I felt stimulated by and resonant with many of the voices in the room and, for the first time in my doctoral education, I felt certain that this was a group of my intellectual and political colleagues. As we spent the day together brainstorming and planning the possibilities of a feminist gathering (what became known as the “unconference”), I could immediately see that for me as a young scholar, being in conversation with a multiracial group of critical, creative, and progressive feminist academics was a new and invaluable experience.
Following that meeting, I became a part of the program committee of the unconference—a small group of people who were responsible for conceptualizing the conference call for participation, overall program agenda, and conference structure. In the many telephone calls of the planning committee, I was struck by the ways that all of us, despite our positionalities and experiences, were collectively committed to creating an intellectual and political feminist space that would push the field forward and would simultaneously challenge traditional modes of producing and disseminating academic knowledge. In my activist life, I have often been known to say that “how we do the work is the work itself.” Consistent with this view, the vision of the unconference was to create a space that reflected the radical possibilities of feminist social work itself. The structure and format of the unconference not only aimed to “unsettle” feminism/feminisms but to problematize and challenge traditional, masculinist, Western academic norms of the presentation modalities, goals, and approaches of a conference.
In addition to the program committee planning work, I began to talk with other enthusiastic feminist doctoral students at my school about the possibilities of presenting at the unconference. After much discussion, I ended up presenting at a panel on feminist methodologies and a panel on critical research on intimate partner violence (IPV) in diverse communities of color and facilitating a group dialogue on intersectionality and the state of contemporary feminism. I was, and have continued to be, deeply affected by participating in the unconference in all the roles I played in it—being part of the program committee, developing conference presentations, and facilitating or presenting at the unconference itself. Not only did the unconference break some of my own academic and political isolation as a queer South Asian feminist social work academic, but it brought forth a few key themes that I believe are of ongoing importance to me personally and professionally and to feminism/feminisms in social work.
Crossing (and Bridging) Borders and a Feminist (Diasporic) Identity
As a queer South Asian woman who came to doctoral education with a rich practice and activist background largely in feminist and queer-of-color circles, I have often felt like I crossed a border into academia by entering a doctoral program. In addition, my engagement with interdisciplinary feminist scholarship has contributed significantly to my need to be able to navigate the boundaries of different kinds of political and academic conversations. As a queer woman from an immigrant community, I found that the concept of negotiating multiple homes, identities, and relationships and the ability to traverse borders is a skill that I have to apply in all facets of my life and work everyday.
In my own scholarship, I explore the framework of diaspora as a way to think in more dynamic ways about migration and concepts of identity and home. Through this lens, I began to think about the ways in which I, as a feminist activist in academia, take up a kind of diasporic subjectivity. In his critical exploration of the use of the concept of diaspora, Brubaker (2005) suggested that despite the semantic, political, and theoretical contestation of diaspora, three core assumptions remain relatively constant in its deployment: (1) the dispersion of peoples across space and borders, (2) orientation to a real or imagined homeland as a source of identity and connection, and (3) maintaining an identity and sense of community to preserve a distinctive identity in the host culture over time. Brubaker also proposed the utility of claiming the concept of diaspora not as a fixed term but as an analytic and practical category that can “seek to remake the world” instead of simply to describe it (p. 12). In this way, diaspora can be used as a means to “think about questions of home, belonging, continuity, and community in the context of dispersal and transnational networks of connection.” (Fortier, 2001, p. 406). If I think about feminist activist movements (largely outside academia) as my own “real or imagined homeland” or as a space where I have found political and intellectual connection and identity, then, even as I have crossed space and borders to enter into a different location to become an academic, teacher, and scholar, I feel the importance of maintaining a feminist politic in my host culture of academia/social work. The Unsettling Feminism(s) unconference became a significant way for me to think about my own political and intellectual home and community, as well as to build and expand my sense of networks across and between academic social work and community-level feminism/feminisms. If diasporic subjectivity can be a way to “remake the world,” then it is also highly relevant to a feminist politic. Through the planning process and the unconference itself, I felt reflected in the thinking and politics around me—I was beginning to find a sense of home, even across and between borders, as a young feminist of color scholar and activist.
In addition to gaining this sense of a feminist diasporic positionality, I also saw in action the value of bridging and integrating academic social work feminism and feminist activism and practice in the community. For instance, in one of the panels I was a part of, I was able to talk about an activist project I have been a part of regarding IPV in queer Asian communities that has the potential to challenge some of the traditional social work discourse on IPV. The unconference provided a platform in which this kind of conversation was possible—I was able to share insights from activism with the goal of ultimately influencing both community work and scholarly work on IPV in these populations. I have not been able to share these ideas in other traditional academic conferences that have privileged academic research as a primary way of knowing and of creating and informing social change.
The Critical Importance of Multiracial Feminist Politics, Perspectives, and Relationships
Through this experience of planning and presenting, I had the opportunity to build relationships with diverse feminist social work scholars who have a range of social positionalities, perspectives, and experiences. Because I am a doctoral student and thus new to the field, I was particularly excited to build many new connections with feminist colleagues across the country. Even with such rich relationship building throughout the unconference (both while planning and attending), I was also continually able to observe and learn from some of the tensions, feminist histories, and politics that exist within feminism/feminisms and feminist social work. I deeply value the importance of participating in a planning committee and unconference that was intentionally multiracial, multigenerational, and aimed at nurturing relationships and community building. In all the panels that I was a part of, I presented with diverse women of color who varied across age, generation, role in academia, sexual orientation, class background, and political beliefs. However, each of these spaces demonstrated the importance of this diversity, the ability to be with the complexity of dynamic power relationships, and the value of building a feminist social work that can hold multiple, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives.
Diverse Methodologies and Modes of Producing or Disseminating Knowledge
As I mentioned earlier, the planning committee thought it was critical to broaden the scope of what constitutes the “valid” production and dissemination of feminist knowledge. While traditional social science research conferences privilege scientific method, a lecture presentation format, and positivist methodologies, the unconference opened up space for artistic expression, critical dialogue, projects using emergent and interpretive methods, and the posing of vital questions without an attachment to finding the one “true,” “objective” answer. All the presentations that I was a part of encouraged group discussion and dialogue and valued them as much as the panel presentations themselves. In addition, two of the panels I was on specifically focused on the collective production and dissemination of knowledge in which all of us worked together to weave themes and ideas throughout our work, in contrast to the traditional, masculinist, individualistic approach of the traditional way of disseminating research. We built a sense of feminist scholarly community through our work together in our research presentations. All the sessions I participated in highlighted reflexivity, critical perspectives, intersectionality, and creativity as central concerns and values for contemporary feminist methodology and scholarship.
Moving Forward With Hopefulness
By the end of the unconference, I was exhausted, and it was hard for me to expend a lot of energy envisioning where we need to go next. Nevertheless, the unconference provided me with a sense of hopefulness as a young feminist activist scholar. We can, should, and will build on the work and connections we started there. I know that my research, as well as the research of my copresenters, has been affected by our participation in the unconference. When we all started our doctoral program, it felt like feminist social work had ended 20 or more years ago and that feminism was something happening either in the community or in other disciplinary spaces. The unconference felt like the beginnings of a reinvigoration of a feminist social work that can be contemporary, dynamic, multidimensional, and critical.
Of course, as feminists and those working toward justice, we are always able to critique any space—an awareness of women and social groups who were not present, topics that were not discussed, a desire for more time together for dialogue, voices that were marginalized in different ways, things we could have done differently, and so forth. Yet, these critiques occur simultaneously with a recognition of the positive aspects of the unconference that we created and participated in. As progressive scholars, we have to take risks to create new spaces and visions even if our efforts are imperfect, even if we do not meet every one of our feminist political values, and even if we replicate oppressions in our complicated processes. We must work toward creating change and doing things differently as much as we work on our critique of systems and movements.
Patricia O’Brien
My central hope in engaging in the Unsettling Feminism(s) conference was that we “doers” who took up the charge of making it happen, it could coconstruct a space and time for invigorating social work—what we do, how we think about it, how we conduct research, and how we teach those who will pick up the challenge for carrying it forward for individual healing and collective justice. Several months later, as I reflect on how and what we did, I think this hope was in part realized; in other ways, not yet.
When I jumped into the initial conversation, the context was the crowded room of people at the 2008 CSWE Annual Program who came together to discuss “Feminism(s) and Social Work” led by Mimi Abramovitz, Betty Garcia and Jeane Anastas. Recognizing from that conversation that we had some initial interest but not a broad-enough comprehension of what we wanted to weave together, an all-day meeting prior to the 2009 CSWE-APM in San Antonio a year later provided us with more clarity and a much more critical picture of the potential and power that such an undertaking could have for participants and for the profession. There was a heady sense of possibility in our conversations on power and privilege and our play with challenging how we represent multiple complexities in identity and understandings of feminism and its relevance in social work and in the academy. It was clear that whatever event we produced, it had to be different from the usual academic conference at which we meet to present to each other from our own isolated locations; it had to be inclusive of a broad and intersectional base of feminist thought and action in and out of social work but with real-world implications for practice; policy; research and teaching; and, most important,
In the days that followed into 2010, we worked across multiple time zones to make it happen. Getting the date and location was a first priority—and trying to find a location that was as centrally located to the East and West Coasts and possibly more affordable than usual moved us to consider a university setting early on. The Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago seemed like a good choice in its location, its availability, and its legacy as a social space where the women (and some men) of Hull House provided leadership for social reform.
Once the location and dates were confirmed, organizing the body of the conference began. The program committee met regularly (by telephone) to discuss the shape of the conference, to visualize all that we wanted to manifest, and to begin reaching out to all the groups and organizations that we hoped could inform the workings of the conference. We were aspirational at this point with the years of pent up desire for a feminist event that could foster both our critical and creative activist selves. We wanted art and culture, intellectual stimulation, and liberating conversations, process and vibrancy, good weather, and good food!
After 6 months of, at times, numbing details, the unconference finally opened on a Sunday night as people of all colors from multiple locations flowed in to fill the tables for the opening reception and discussion. Some of my worry about whether and how it would happen finally settled into a sense of great pride and appreciation for all the hands that had reached out to help make it so. I recognized familiar faces and people I would get to know better through charged and focused discussions about things that matter.
Listening to the sweet harmonies of Artemis Chicago’s lesbian choir, I observed some impatience and only realized later that the chorus as the opening performance already set the stage for some narrowing of our “inclusiveness.” (Full disclosure, I had recommended Artemis for the opening.) The first questions in the small groups led us into other sticking points. These points seemed to stem from apparent generational differences in the language of how participants voiced their responses. It reminded me of the powerful essay by Reagon (1983), entitled “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” that discussed the challenge of working across lines of identity and boundaries while attempting to build a coalition to move in a similar direction. Reagon described the distinction between the safe, homelike space that those who challenge the status quo may need to bolster themselves and help define their work and the challenging, stretching, and often uncomfortable space of meeting across differences with the intent of transforming—especially when we do not know each other, and trust is even further behind in the context of only a few days together.
While there was indeed much embracing and a sense of finding a “home” with each other, as Lindsey and Gita celebrated, there were also tensions about what next steps we needed to take toward “Transforming Social Work.” These tensions were most observable in the sheet put up by Alchemy (illustrators) for the participants to provide feedback in the “here and now” experience of the event. This immediate form of feedback (much more than what was formally received at the end of the conference) was timely and provocative. It came close to meeting many of the aims of “unsettling” that we hoped could generate new or different ways of envisioning our work.
As others said to me in the course of the conference, it was apparent that we were hungry for both connection and time for complicated conversations, rather than the quick sound bites by which we manage our overwhelmed lives. With all the unconference’s amazing variety, there were missing pieces—less so in content than in process. I wanted more unstructured time for dialogic encounters and fewer sessions structured by PowerPoint presentations that I might see at other academic conferences. The opportunity to try out some new radical ideas with differently thinking and challenging kin, however, reinspired me to risk a bit more in my teaching and my activist work: I will do a better job of talking about the abolition of prisons, and I will continue to think about how my feminism builds my capacity as a leader in multiple spaces. And I will hope that I can recognize all the new possibilities seeded by the Unsettling Feminism(s) unconference.
Footnotes
Authorship of this work is equal.
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.