Dr. Kim TallBear is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is also a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science.  Professor TallBear's faculty page.

Cultural Studies doctoral candidate Jeanelle Hope is researching the role black women artists play in combatting gentrification in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento.  Hope places gentrification in a greater historical context of a racial resegregation that has been ongoing since deindustrialization.

Indigeneity, settler colonialism, and borders are central frames for the feminist research of Ethnic Studies doctoral candidates Leslie Quinatanilla and Jennifer Mogannam.  Quintanilla’s research on the U.S.-Mexico border is in conversation with women of color feminism.  Mogannam examines what is happening in Palestine through a framework of settler colonialism.

Pharmacologist Renae Ryan discusses gender equity in STEM, institutional change-making, and the value and importance of inclusive and diverse research teams.

Renae Ryan is a Professor of Biochemical Pharmacology in the School of Medical Sciences at Sydney University, Academic Director of Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE), and Chair of the Sydney Medical School Gender Equity Committee.

Natasha Myers’ work is grounded in a thinking through of feminism as a political theory of the asymmetries of power in relations not only between humans but also between humans and the “more than human” world.  Much of Myers’ work explores the possibilities of an aspirational episteme in service to plant beings, termed the Planthropocene.

Legal scholar Ikemoto applies critical race and critical feminist theory to an intersectional examination of reproductive rights and justice issues.  The goal of reproductive justice is for every person to have all the means necessary to make self-determining decisions on behalf of themselves.  This includes access to education, safe neighborhoods, and environmental justice.

Karen Tongson discusses queer theory, gentrification, and popular culture.  Feminist research of popular culture can help us understand what kinds of interventions we can make into prevailing cultural messages and create conditions of possibility for new narratives and trajectories.

Dean Spade discusses feminist frameworks for research and resistance in terms of the dynamic between the personal and political as well as the importance of compassion and care in the work to dismantle normative systems of hierarchy.  Centered in a racial and economic justice perspective, Spade uses pinkwashing as an example to raise questions about propaganda and skill building in community media reading practices.

Tristan Josephson discusses feminism, Trans Studies, and Trans/feminism.  Josephson brings a social justice perspective to researching how the state classifies transgender immigrants in asylum law, marriage, citizenship, and immigrant detention.  By taking a social justice approach to academic research, trans/feminist scholars provide helpful frameworks for thinking about how to challenge state violence and marginalization on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, and immigration status.

Quimera Rosa’s approach to feminist research emphasizes a transversality and embodiment that challenge fixed notions of identity, scientific objectivity, and epistemic universality.  They use art as a medium with which to build collaborative relations between feminist arts and science.  Locating a foundational dualism of Western thinking in the constructed boundary between nature and culture, Quimera Rosa works to deconstruct this normative dualism through the notion of the cyborg.

Scientist Dawn Sumner shares how she came to be involved with FRI and her views on the value and importance of feminist research in the natural and physical sciences.  By expanding the place for feminist research and theory in science, Sumner asserts, we can dramatically improve the “advancement, understanding and vitality of science as a human endeavor.”

Sara Ahmed discusses feminism's commitment to changing the world by developing an understanding of, and intervening in, power relations.  Ahmed emphasizes the need to explode universalism in order to create a world where people have more room to live in accordance with their own wishes.

Artist-scholars Sprinkle and Stephens introduce the concept of ecosexuality and discuss the importance of pleasure and play in the exploration of new visions of feminism.  

Professor Moeller discusses her feminist research on corporate power and the role of difference in the construction of the global economy. Through the example of “the Girl Effect,” Moeller looks at the ways corporate investment masks the targeting of young women of color through the use of coded, race-neutral language, as part of a larger expansion of corporate power over new populations, institutions, and geographies.

For filmmaker Gargi Sen, feminism provides a lens through which to look at the ways power operates in the world and see how it can be transformed.  Here Sen discusses how her approach to social justice filmmaking has grown more open-ended and relational since her initial involvement in the early 1990s, and emphasizes the need for collaboration between artists and academics in times of crisis.