DAY ONE – MAY 31
13:00-17:00 Arrivals, Registration, Hotel Check-in
19:00 Public Event: Contemporary Chinese Feminist Activism - Roundtable
DAY TWO – JUNE 1
08:30-9:00 Breakfast in hotel
09:00-11:00 Session One – Introductions
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break and Informal Discussion
11:30-13:00 Session Two – What is socialist feminism? Does it have a shared international history?
13:00-14:30 Lunch
14:30-16:00 Session Three – Cold War politics and legacies impacted the historiography of socialist feminism
17:30 Dinner
DAY THREE - JUNE 2
08:30-9:00 Breakfast in hotel
09:00-11:00 Session Four: Methodological Questions
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break and Informal Discussion
11:30-13:00 Session Five: What are the epistemic issues surrounding this history?
13:00-14:30 Lunch
14:30-16:00 Session Six: Art Museum or U Michigan Tour
17:30 Dinner
DAY FOUR – JUNE 3
08:30-9:00 Breakfast in hotel
09:00-11:00 Session Seven: Theoretical issues.
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break and Informal Discussion
11:30-13:00 Session Eight: What can we learn from the past?
13:00-13:30 Break
13:30-16:00 Session Nine [Working lunch]: Building a new field.
16:00- 16:15 Break
16:15-17:15 Special Commemoration: The Fight for Gender Democracy
18:30 Farewell Banquet
Readings for Conference Session 2:
Only in Conjunction With the Proletarian Woman Will Socialism Be Victorious (1896) by Clara Zetkin
The Social Basis of the Woman Question (1909) by Alexandra Kollontai
“Economic Revolution and Women’s Revolution” (1907) by He-Yin Zhen
Reading for Conference Session 3:
Readings for Conference Session 4:
Reading for Conference Session 5:
Reading for Conference Session 7:
How Should We Name the ‘Women-Friendly’ Actions of State Socialism? by Krassimira Daskalova
Communism was a State Patriarchy, not State Feminism by Mihaela Miroiu
Readings for Conference Session 8:
Organizers
Wang Zheng
WANG Zheng is Professor of Women's Studies and History and Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at University of Michigan. She is the author of Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964; Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories and the coeditor of From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society; Translating Feminisms in China; and Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era. An academic activist who has been promoting feminist curricular transformation in higher education in China, Wang Zheng is the founder and co-director of the UM-Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies that is located at Fudan University, Shanghai.
Elisabeth armstrong
Elisabeth Armstrong is a Professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She teaches courses on feminism, land and labor-based social justice movements around the world. She’s written two books on the praxis of organizing, one about India called Gender and Neoliberalism: The All India Democratic Women’s Association and Globalization Politics(2013), and one about the US called The Retreat from Organization: US Feminism Reconceptualized (2002). She is an executive board member of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research based in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. She is on the editorial board of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism & Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, a queer feminist journal on gender and sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa regions.
Kristen R. Ghodsee
Kristen R. Ghodsee is professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an author and ethnographer who has spent the last thirty years studying the lived experiences of socialism and postsocialism in Eastern Europe. She is the author of nine books, including seven that focus on everyday life and the social, political, and economic upheavals following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Her articles and essays have been translated into over a dozen languages and have appeared in publications such as Foreign Affairs, Dissent, Jacobin Magazine, The Lancet, The New Republic, Aeon, The World Policy Journal, The Baffler, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
She has held residential research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC; the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany; the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany; the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; and at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki in Finland.
In 2012, Ghodsee was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in Anthropology and Cultural Studies.