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fall 2021 Letter from the Director

Dear Friends of the Women’s Center,

It’s tradition for the Director of the Women’s Center to open the year with a letter of welcome. While I know we are well into the quarter, I am only a week or so into my new position, so I hope you will forgive this tardy but heartfelt note of welcome and gratitude. 

I am writing to you from the tail end of a very busy, very joy-filled week. In addition to planting my own feet, three new people joined our Center staff this week. Please find bios for each of them in this month’s newsletter. Lami is based in Chicago (huzzah!) and is the responsible party for both a renewed sense of community in that space and the beautiful new layout for the newsletter. Hannah has already been contributing to the Women’s Center as an organizer of the Graduate Womxn of Color Group, but is now also taking a more formal role as our Graduate and PostDoc Programming Coordinator, and Stephanie is a junior but also a transfer student so we are very happy to have her mix of honed people skills and fresh perspective at our front desk and in the review of our Center’s accessibility. They are joining a team of myself, melisa stephen, Aaliyah Berryman, and Njoki Kamau once she returns from leave, effectively doubling our work force and bringing so much new energy and expertise into our space. 

As you know we are focusing on Disability Justice as Feminist Practice this year. Melisa and I have been discussing the use of the word “as” vs “and” in the title of our theme. It may seem like a small choice, but we hope that our communities will note our intention to disrupt the notion that access is separate or combinatory, that it is something we get to when other work is done. 

Feminism has always been, at its core, an argument that the world ought to be made for us to thrive within. Where the history of feminism is troubled is where the “us” is taken for something narrow or niche. I have high hopes for the capaciousness of the term going forward. For our part, Disability Justice as Feminist Practice argues that DJ doesn’t so much contribute to feminist thought as informs and shares a fundamental set of principles central to a feminist future worth making. When we call the Women’s Centers feminist spaces, we hope you will  hear that these are places to put our anti-oppression frameworks into practice--to  exercise fat liberation, engage in pro-queer world making, practice anti-racism, support survivors, and invest in justice for every body. 

We will be inviting scholars and activists to help us make these connections for our Women’s History Month Symposium. I will be teaching the expanded canon of feminist disability justice in my spring course Feminism and Social Change, and a deep dive into disability justice as theory and practice is already underway in the Care Work reading group melisa facilitates. 

We have also promised in the year to come that we will center the lives and experiences of our trans community each quarter and so we shall. This quarter we are hosting a workshop by Chicago-based artist and organizer jireh l. drake called “Plant Care as Self Care,”something that could surely benefit anyone but is specifically designed to uplift and support the wellness of a community subject to much gender injustice on and off campus. 

As the newsletter and our expanded staff forecast, there is much more to come. And in some sense literal new ground on which to build it. 

If you have been to the Evanston Women’s Center recently, you will have noted a deep trench snaking its way around the building as part of the steam pipe replacement construction project. All of the ground that surrounds us has been turned over for important work that is nearly complete. The deep tilling of the soil around us (and our crabapple tree’s determination to thrive within it) remind me that this land holds both a potential and a past that feeds us but is not ours to claim. In the spirit of that recognition and the homecoming I was privileged to witness this morning at the launch of Wayne Valliere’s birch bark canoe into a turbulent Lake Michigan, I would like to close with a note of thanks to our broad community of humans and to the land where we do our work, the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa. 


In Solidarity, 

Sarah Brown

 

above image: A ripe crabapple tree with red fruit on a grey day. The trunk is surrounded by construction netting with a brick building and windows to the right and a green temporary fence behind. The Evanston Women's Center view from the East lawn.