Intellectual Mission of the Pembroke Center

The Pembroke Center supports interdisciplinary research and teaching across the humanities, social sciences, and creative arts. With a focus on the human cost and potential of social change, the center’s research agenda has a transnational perspective that includes the global south. We examine the circulation of bodies and markets, technologies, and transnational labor. In a related vein, the Center investigates questions of representation, values, and the production of knowledge as issues in their own right and as methodological tools. The scope of the Center's research activities will continue to expand to deal with fields such as international public health, legal studies, the history of science and medicine, and new media studies. All of these research initiatives are firmly linked to our commitment to the training of undergraduate and graduate students.

he Pembroke Center supports interdisciplinary research and teaching across the humanities and social sciences. With a focus on the human cost and potential of social change, the center’s research agenda has a transnational perspective that includes the global south. We examine the circulation of bodies and markets, technologies, and transnational labor. In a related vein, the Center investigates questions of representation, values, and the production of knowledge as issues in their own right and as methodological tools. The scope of the Center's research activities will continue to expand to deal with fields such as international public health, legal studies, the history of science and medicine, literary studies, and new media studies.All of these research initiatives are firmly linked to our commitment to the training of undergraduate and graduate students.

The Center's research framing is not solely on gender but rather on difference. We draw here also on literary and artistic representations of difference, on investigations into forms of meaning, as well as into values and ethics. In a theoretical vein, we examine critical approaches to how difference operates in texts, media, and arts. We draw on qualitative research methods and critical theory from the humanities, social sciences, and gender studies. We are interested in how the arts, public culture, and local media interpret global issues for local audiences, affecting social action and politics.

We are interested in the difference that historical context, culture, and social relations make for the way that transnational issues actually play out in different parts of the world in practical ways. We examine the often-neglected social relations that mediate change -- how families, communities, transnational networks, non-governmental organizations, and institutions of all sorts operate in this globalized world. Our qualitative approach focuses on social relations, rather than the aggregate character of populations with abstract individuals as the unit of measurement. By contrast, we resituate individuals socially and historically and pay attention to their wider contexts and actions as meaning makers.

Our model draws on collaborative research in the sciences where it is more common for distinctive fields to collaborate on issues of common concern. The Center's research activities bring scholars and postdoctoral fellows from all over the world to work with Brown faculty and students from a variety of disciplines on global issues that call for interdisciplinary understanding. The Pembroke Seminar, a year-long forum bringing together faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and select undergraduates to interrogate a common set of issues, is a continuing site of critical scholarship and intellectual excitement. Recent topics have included nature and the cultural other, identity and psychoanalysis, the language of victimization, new forms of health activism, markets and bodies, humanitarianism, the language of governance and expertise, and the question of consent.

What makes the Center unique is its emphasis on an evolving agenda of transnational problems addressed through sustained study in a variety of forums: year-long research seminars, conferences, graduate and undergraduate courses, lecture series, roundtables, and longer research initiatives. Departmental faculty, committed to research collaborations that involve different disciplines, play an active role in deciding which particular issues are pursued. Undergraduates and graduate students take active roles in these scholarly activities.

The Pembroke Center also sponsors Brown's undergraduate concentration on Gender and Sexuality Studies, the prominent journal of feminist cultural studies differences, the Nanjing-Brown Joint Program in Gender Studies and the Humanities, the Feminist Theory Papers, the Christine Dunlap Farnham Archives on nineteenth and twentieth-century Brown and Rhode Island women and their organizations, and annual commencement forums. A core focus of the Pembroke Center Associates, a group of alumnae/i, parents, and friends who support the work of the Pembroke Center, is to honor the legacy of Pembroke College in Brown University and women's historical efforts to gain access to higher education.

Establishing the Pembroke Center

Brown University established the Pembroke Center in 1981 as a research center on gender, with historian Joan Wallach Scott as its founding director. Funded in its early years by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Center now supports its programs largely through endowment, made possible by generous alumnae and other donors.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, numerous centers for research on women and gender were established in the US. What distinguished the Pembroke Center was its focus on the theoretical dimensions of the category of gender. The story of the Center's uniqueness can be seen in the relation between its name and its research mission--a relation that has carried a productive tension from the beginning. In 1981, a decade after the merger of Pembroke College into Brown University, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women was named in honor of Pembroke College and the history of women's efforts to gain access to higher education. The first two women were admitted to Brown in 1891. In 1928, the women's college was named Pembroke after Pembroke College at Cambridge University and retained that name until the 1971 merger. The name of the Center was designed to keep alive the history of women at Brown and Pembroke.

On the one hand, the name of the Center evokes the concrete historical achievements of women. At the same time, the Center's research and teaching has, from the outset, questioned the self-evident meanings of the categories of "women" and "woman." While most centers and programs in the late 1970s and the 1980s were taking women as a starting point, the Pembroke Center's scholars and students took neither women nor gender for granted, but looked, rather, at the many and complex articulations of difference that produce such categories and give them their historically specific meanings.

At the heart of the Center's research agenda is a questioning of what counts as foundational knowledge in a given discipline. This questioning of the production of knowledge is related, in turn, to the challenges that studies of "difference" present to the academy--gender studies; studies of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism; cross-cultural and postcolonial studies. Scholars affiliated with the Center look to the complex ways "differences" are produced culturally, socially, epistemologically: sexual and gender differences, the differences that are fundamental to the categories of "race" and ethnicity, nationality, religion, and so forth. It is there, at the intersection of the production of knowledge and articulations of "difference," that the Pembroke Center locates its research and teaching.