Center News
Kay Warren Appointed Pembroke Center Director
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The Pembroke Center is pleased to announce that Kay B. Warren, the Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. ’32 Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology has been appointed incoming director. During her tenure, Warren will be developing a range of initiatives to support advanced interdisciplinary research on transnational issues across the humanities and social sciences. The Center also will be developing new courses for its interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies concentration that deal with transnational issues and with theory and research framings that crosscut the humanities and social sciences. |
“The faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and students involved in Pembroke Center research are grappling with global issues that get to the heart of the human cost of social change,” said Warren. “Through new research initiatives, conferences, the Pembroke Seminar, our journal, and other programs, the Center will be engaging other departments at Brown and forging connections with academic institutions around the world.”
Warren earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Princeton, began her career at Mount Holyoke College, and served on the senior faculties of Princeton and Harvard before coming to Brown in 2003. She directed the Politics, Culture, and Identity Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies where she held a joint appointment from 2003-2009.In 2009-10, Warren directed the year-long Pembroke Research Seminar on “Markets and Bodies in Transnational Perspective.”
Warren’s vision includes expanding the Pembroke Center’s research mission to deal with the global circulation of new health technologies, labor migration, illicit trade across borders, emergence of new social media, and development strategies that target the poor. In studying these issues, scholars will grapple with the difference that historical contexts, culture, and representations of the body and technology make for the way these issues play out around the world. Center research will continue to draw also on literary, medical and artistic representations of difference, on investigations into forms of meaning, as well as into values and ethics.
While Warren is on sabbatical for the 2010-11 academic year to finish her book on transnational human trafficking, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies, will serve as acting director of the Pembroke Center.
The Pembroke Center is pleased to announce that Kay B. Warren, the Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. ’32 Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology has been appointed incoming director. During her tenure, Warren will be developing a range of initiatives to support advanced interdisciplinary research on transnational issues across the humanities and social sciences. The Center also will be developing new courses for its interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies concentration that deal with transnational issues and with theory and research framings that crosscut the humanities and social sciences.
The Pembroke Center is pleased to announce that Kay B. Warren, the Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. ’32 Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology has been appointed incoming director. During her tenure, Warren will be developing a range of initiatives to support advanced interdisciplinary research on transnational issues across the humanities and social sciences. The Center also will be developing new courses for its interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies concentration that deal with transnational issues and with theory and research framings that crosscut the humanities and social sciences.
Remarks of Joan Wallach Scott
Delivered on April 11, 2006 in Sayles Hall, Brown University
Keynote Lecture for the Inaugural Leadership for Change through Education Award
"In Praise of Social Justice"
For the last several years I’ve been very active on the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure and in that capacity have come up against a really disturbing trend–the insistence by conservatives that everything be "fair and balanced," that teachers present all points of view in every class, and that they restrict themselves to "objective" coverage of the material to be taught. David Horowitz, a former leftist journalist, now a rabid right-winger has been on the war path these past years, organizing Young Republicans on campuses (this one included) to support some version of his Academic Bill of Rights. Introduced in some twenty state legislatures (though as yet passed by very few of them), this bill would enjoin professors not only from expressing extra-curricular opinions in the classroom, but also from offering interpretations of the material at hand–interpretations based on their scholarly research and commitments. Instead, according to Horowitz, professors must maintain a posture of "neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within their fields of inquiry." This would mean, presumably, that creationism would have to be taught in biology classes and that Holocaust deniers would have to be added to reading lists in history courses. But even if we rule out those extremes, the Academic Bill of Rights insists that students have a "right" not to be offended and, indeed, not to be made uncomfortable by being exposed to ideas and opinions that don’t accord with their own. The Arizona state legislature has before it a bill right now that would require professors to offer alternative reading lists to students who find a course’s assigned reading morally or religiously offensive. In the old days, students who didn’t like a course simply dropped it, but now the attempt to regulate what goes on in the classroom, perversely in the name of academic freedom, is a major concern for those who have no business in those classrooms: politicians and judges.
One of the buzz words that most offends Horowitz and that he points to as evidence of the corruption of universities by leftist ideologues is "social justice." Testifying in February before a committee of the Pennsylvania State Legislature, Horowitz pointed to Social Work courses at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania to call attention to what he considers an alarming trend. These courses state as their mission developing a sense of social justice in their students. Since social justice, Horowitz told the legislators, is a code word for communism (he didn’t say communism, he said critics of the free market and advocates of socialism), then this mission statement is propagandistic and must be eliminated in the name of greater balance and objectivity, and in order to protect future social workers from having to become concerned about social justice.
I must say I was dumbfounded when I read Horowitz’s testimony because it seems to me that a sense of social justice is indeed a prerequisite for social work (why else enter a field that is so difficult and badly paid?). Beyond that though, social justice is a value–a moral value--that even some conservatives endorse; it’s a value that lies at the heart not only of democracies, but of many religions. It has to do with concern for others, with fairness and equal treatment, with a sense of collective destiny, with the idea that as inhabitants of this earth we have responsibility for lives other than our own. Social justice (like equality or liberty) is a term we’ve long taken for granted--at least since Plato, who rebuked the young Sophist Thrasymachus for asserting that justice was whatever the strongest decided it would be. So its startling and disturbing to find people who are opposed to having social justice be part of a university education.
David Horowitz isn’t the only critic of social justice. He represents a trend evident in many places these days: in the congress which cuts education budgets and social services with alarming ease, among ideologues of tax cuts who think only of individuals and never of the common good, among corporate executives who steal their employees pensions with impunity, among those who seek political power to advance only their own interests, usually by serving the lobbyists who fund them. The changes that began in the Reagan years and that have now come to full fruition represent a victory for the ideologues of ruthless individualism. To consolidate their reign, they want to stifle the critical voices that remain in this country. Many of those voices are in the universities, historically the place where changes in thinking are initiated, where new ideas are developed, where differences from whatever is taken to be standard are encouraged, where critical thinking is taught. (Brown has long been a proud exemplar of the very best of this educational tradition so it is not surprising that Brown was an early target of David Horowitz’s campaign.)
Those of us concerned about these developments have sought to protect universities and we have spoken out against the distortions and misrepresentations offered by its critics on the right. In the 1950‘s the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about the deep anti-intellectualism in American culture waiting to be tapped in his day by the likes of Senator McCarthy; it is that same anti-intellectualism that right-wing pundits appeal to now. The challenge to us though is not simply to denounce our critics on whatever public platforms we can use, but to find ways to perpetuate the traditions that we cherish. In this sense, ironically, it is we who have become conservatives, looking to protect deeply held values–liberal values-- from the violence being done to them by the radicals who would take over not only this country, but the world. Perpetuating those traditions doesn’t just mean talking about them, but living them, exemplifying them in the work we choose to do, transmitting them by example, especially to children and young people growing up in our society. Education is not just about formal schooling, not just about the transmission of factual information, not just about developing skills. It is also, more vitally, about nurturing values–this happens most effectively not through indoctrination, but through lived example–that is the meaning of Leadership for Change through Education.
The meeting today honors two women who exemplify this kind of leadership and whose work upholds and exemplifies the values of social justice at a time when they are under siege as never before. Marion Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, has been a tireless advocate for the rights and needs of children for more than thirty years. Based in Washington DC, the CDF provides, in its own words, "a strong, effective voice for all the children of America who cannot vote, lobby, or speak for themselves." Concerned especially with the needs of poor and minority children and those with disabilities, "the Children’s Defense Fund educates the nation about the needs of children and encourages preventive investment before they get sick or into trouble, drop out of school, or suffer family breakdown." The idea is to oppose legislation that harms children and support legislation that helps them–Head Start, vaccinations, health insurance, foster care, family leave...the list goes on.
If Marion Wright Edelman works on the macro level, Sister Mary Reilly, no less effectively and importantly, works on the micro level, putting into practice the "preventive investment" that saves children’s physical and intellectual lives. The Sophia Academy in Providence "was born," she says, "of a belief that if we could capture girls early enough–if we could make a difference in their lives—then perhaps their dreams would be so big that theirs would be the generation that escapes illiteracy, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, prostitution, domestic abuse and all the other ills of society that marginalize women." As if that were not enough, there is also Dorcas Place, a center for adult learning and literacy, committed to assisting "low-income adults in realizing their full potential through literacy, employment, advocacy and community involvement." Not just the children, but their parents get a shot at education.
It is fitting I think that we are honoring these two women at Brown University, currently headed by a woman who herself is finding ways to implement social justice, indeed to demonstrate to the world of higher education how the needs of the very poorest of undergraduates can be met through scholarships. I’m sure it was Ruth Simmons who conceived of the scholarship program that Sidney Frank so generously funded–a scholarship program that provides full financial assistance (no loan packages) to undergraduates whose annual family income is lower than $30,000. That program bears the marks of her ingenuity, just as did the welcome she extended to Dillard University faculty and students after Hurricane Katrina, and the effort she made shortly after she assumed the presidency to address the legacy of slavery that had long haunted Brown’s history.
It’s also fitting that the event is taking place at the Pembroke Center, an exemplary institution in its own right, a place which for twenty-five years now has been investigating the ways in which notions of difference–sexual, racial, class, ethnic, religious–have been used to organize relations in society–relations which are often unequal and so, unjust. The scholarly work produced at the Pembroke Center has shown that when inequality is attributed to natural difference, social injustice is taken to be a natural–hence incontestable-- fact; when, however, inequality is understood as a set of choices made about how to organize society, social injustice is seen for what it is–something unfair, in need of-- indeed susceptible to--correction. The Pembroke Center is, of course, a center devoted to teaching and research on women and its interest in difference stems from that. But like Sarah Doyle, one of my heroines, and an early advocate for women’s education at Brown, the center believes in and embodies the fact that "women’s sphere is one of infinite and indeterminate radius."
Sarah Doyle’s comment has always intrigued me, I think because it was paradoxical. She was at once accepting the idea, prevalent at the end of the 19th century when she uttered it, that women had a separate sphere, that they were different from men, and she was refusing the limits that the idea of separate spheres implied. If women’s sphere was of infinite and indeterminate radius then there was nothing to stop women from following any path they chose, including ones that had been customarily reserved for men. That kind of brilliant reasoning is characteristic not only of feminists in the past, but of today’s strong, effective women–among them the two we honor this afternoon.
Like Sarah Doyle, I don’t believe there is a women’s sphere based in something we might think of as women’s biological or God-given nature. But I do believe that the idea of women’s sphere has been used to keep women in their place, to prevent them free and open access to all the goods society has to offer. So I’m not inclined to argue for equality in the name of women’s natural difference. I do, think, though, that women’s experience–the experience of discrimination, of being treated differently, of not having access to the institutions and language of the powerful--has not only given us a different perspective on society and its arrangements, but also has inspired great creativity. It’s a creativity that’s shrewd, that involves impressive (sometimes it seems almost intuitive) understanding of how politics and political institutions operate. It demonstrates that politics and women are not contradictory categories; indeed it shows how effective women’s leadership can be. The creativity I’m referring to is a strategy that involves turning liabilities into assets by redefining the terms of discrimination to reveal how inaccurate and dangerous they are.
So Sarah Doyle demolishes separate spheres even as she invokes the idea. And Sister Mary Reilly chooses names for her institutions that insist on wisdom (Sophia) and on good works and good deeds (Dorcas). In both cases, the names indicate qualities that are not stereotypically associated with women. Sophia means wisdom in Greek, a trait not of ordinary mortals, but of the goddess Athena. The name on their school tells the mortal girls who come to the Academy that despite their enormous difficulties and the low expectations usually held out for them, wisdom is within their reach; in fact, it is already within them waiting to be recognized. Dorcas, who was raised from the dead by the apostle Peter, was, we are told, "not content to be charitable by proxy, but gave herself as well as her possessions." Could we think of this woman raised from the dead as an invitation to those served by the Dorcas Place Learning Center to raise themselves from poverty and illiteracy and so begin new lives? And can we not conclude that the substitution of Dorcas for Jesus as inspiration is meant to insist on the spiritual and earthly powers of women?
Marian Wright Edelman, restates George W. Bush’s empty rhetoric and announces that her movement’s mission is to "leave no child behind." One of the activities of the movement is "Wednesdays in Washington and at Home" which organizes supporters to press congressmen–in their local and national offices-- to act to meet the needs of America’s children. The website explains that Wednesdays was inspired by the 1964 "Wednesdays in Mississippi," "a moral witness of women during the Civil Rights Movement. White and Black northern women traveled to Mississippi to develop relationships with southern women, to bear witness for racial justice, and to build bridges of understanding between White and Black women across income and racial lines. Wednesdays...was also inspired by the New Testament parable describing an unjust, powerful judge who ignored a powerless widow’s pleas for justice. But she did not give up." The judge finally gave in, commenting that "Because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice so that she may not continue coming forever and wear me out." "So must we," the website concludes, "wear out our leaders with our relentless insistence until they commit and act to truly Leave No Child Behind." Here Edelman uses the figure of the woman as a nagging pest–a standard misogynist trope–to turn the tables on the powerful. Yes, we’ll inhabit the role you think we play, she seems to be saying, in order to exert a political force you think we don’t have.
The cover of Sophia Academy’s Evaluation booklet for 2005 has a wonderful quote from someone who was national teacher of the year in 2003. "Our schools can be fixed," she says. "It is my belief that all children deserve a quality school in their neighborhood that will not only serve as a place of learning, but a haven of safety. I believe that educators along with the citizens of our country can make this happen..." Sister Mary Reilly’s school is demonstrating the validity of this belief in a small experiment that will have huge resonance-- in the lives of its students who, we hope, will go on to multiply its effects, and on the state and even national level as proof that small classes and attention to many aspects of the lives of students and their families pays off. It’s a preventive investment (to use the words I cited earlier) whose returns are already visible in the awakened imaginations of the students–girls who might otherwise have floundered, are now thinking ahead to high school and college with vocations in mind. "In my other school," a fifth grader remembered, "I didn’t like math, but here at Sophia, the math is easier for me because the teacher pays attention to me." A teacher comments that "it is wonderful that so much of our teaching lets the girls see that women are strong, powerful and that they can do anything." In case you’re wondering, that fifth grader hopes to become a social worker–and you can be sure she’ll come to her profession with a well-developed sense of social justice!
If Sister Mary Reilly’s school proves that that teacher of the year is right–"our schools can be fixed"–it is the organized work of Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund that, nationally, is helping to make it happen. It’s precisely the children that the Sophia Academy educates, that Edelman’s group lobbies for so that they can be ready for the education that places like the Sophia Academy offer.
Marian Wright Edelman’s name was a household word for my family. Both my parents were teachers, both worried that the most precious resource of this society was being under served, indeed neglected by politicians who thought only of the bottom line. For my father, an idealist, whose commitment to social justice was perhaps the most important thing I inherited from him, Marian Wright Edelman was someone to honor and support. He did that as best he could during his lifetime (we all had CDF calendars and stationary and the annual reports on the status of children in America were mandatory reading–and if we hadn’t absorbed their contents, he’d read them aloud to us) and I’m sure he’d be thrilled today to know that I was here to participate in this event. I’m also sure he would have added Sister Mary Reilly to his list of great educators, because it was education for change that he took to be the highest calling anyone could pursue.
Education for change–that notion actually is what social justice is about. Education involves not only the acquisition of skills, but learning to think, to think critically, beyond the status quo to something better, something more. The French philosopher/historian Michel Foucault had a great way of putting it: the point of an education (in history for him) was that it "serves to show how that-which-is has not always been," and so to show "why and how that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is." The idea of social justice is what drives the desire for change; education is a means to that end: a better world, a more equal and just world–the kind of world imagined by today’s honorees–a world which leaves no child behind, a world in which girls "shall grow up to be competent, healthy, happy women," a world in which all children are considered society’s most valuable product and everything possible is done to provide good lives for them.
The women we honor today have put this idea of education into action and by their example they teach us not only about the value of children and the possibility for change. They also teach us a vital lesson in democracy: even against great odds, citizens can work together to achieve the aims of social justice; they can (in the words of the old civil rights movement) speak truth to power and so demonstrate the power of the very best ideals, the very best principles our culture has produced. It is the power of those ideals that people like David Horowitz want to challenge. If they can discredit social justice, they think, they can deprive people like Marion Wright Edelman and Sister Mary Reilly of followers and in that way silence those nagging women who force the judges to grant them the justice they deserve. The point for Horowitz, of course, is not just to silence a few women, but to disempower a movement whose values challenge the selfish individualism of the likes of David Horowitz. For it’s important to note that speaking for social justice means speaking for more than yourself, for more even than the lives of children right now. It’s the future these women want to guarantee, a future in which their dreams can be realized at least in part and in which other young people–women and men–will, inspired by their example, take up the torch and push ever harder for a better world to come.
Joan Wallach Scott
Harold Linder Professor
School of Social Science
Institute for Advanced Study
Founding Director, Pembroke Center
Center Receives Rubinstein Grant
The Pembroke Center is pleased to announce that it has once again received a grant of $10,000 from the Helena Rubinstein Foundation. The grant will fund a graduate student intern for the Center‘s scholarly journal, differences.
Center Receives Rubinstein Grant