UQ seminar explores global feminism

A University of Queensland seminar today, Thursday, September 20 at the St Lucia campus will explore the topic: Is there a Global Feminism?

Associate Professor Kay Schaffer of the Department of Social Inquiry at the Adelaide University will be guest speaker at the seminar, which will be in the Michie Building, room 539 at 3pm to 4.30pm.

The seminar is sponsored by UQ's Research Centre for Women, Gender, Culture and Social Change and the Women's Studies Teaching Committee.

Centre director Associate Professor Carole Ferrier said in May this year, Kay Schaffer returned from a semester teaching assignment on the American university program Semester at Sea.

"For four months she journeyed around the world, from Cuba to Japan, stopping in 10, mainly 'developing', non-Western countries," she said.

"In each location she invited female interport lecturers and university students from the country who visited her shipboard classroom. With other staff she also organised field trips for her students out into the community to address women's issues in the various countries and debate the salience of international feminism.

"In this seminar Kay will share aspects of her unique teaching experience and explore various responses to the question of whether there is a global feminism"

Associate Professor Schaffer teaches in the areas of gender studies, cultural studies and postcoloniality. She is the author of several books, including Women and the Bush (Cambridge, 1988) and In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories (1995). Her latest publications include the edited anthologies: Indigenous Australian Voices: A Reader (Rutgers U.P., 1988), Constructions of Colonialism (Cassell, 1998) and The Olympics at the Millennium (Rutgers, 2000).

With Sidonie Smith she is presently working on a study of the intersections between autobiography, human rights and social transformations around the globe.

Media: Further information, Associate Professor Carole Ferrier, telephone 07 336 53146, website: http://www.uq.edu.au/~encferri or Jan King at UQ Communications 0413 601 248.