Christine Littleton
Director, 2003 - 2005

Under Professor Christine Littleton’s lead, CSW held the 2003-2004 Gender Equity workshop series and summit, administered an intramural grant from the Institute for Labor and Employment, co-sponsored a four part Sociology of Gender series, and successfully submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation for Professor Sharon Traweek’s research project on developing digital historical archives at KEK (Japan’s National High Energy Accelerator Organization) and collecting oral histories for the archive.

Littleton joined the UCLA School of Law faculty in 1983 and started teaching in Women's Studies soon thereafter.  She is now in her second term as Chair of Women's Studies and divides her time between law and women's studies, teaching and writing in both.  As a feminist legal theorist, she published the classic "Reconstructing Sexual Equality" and a number of articles expanding on the relationship between legal theory and feminism; and organized the West Coast Feminist Critical Legal Scholars, which helped enable a flourishing of feminist legal scholarship in the late 1980's.  As a lawyer and activist, she helped to found the California Women's Law Center, and has represented individuals and organizations in cases involving sex and sexual orientation discrimination in employment, affirmative action, racial discrimination, disability rights, sexual harassment, educational equity, and animal welfare.  Before coming to UCLA, she received her J.D. from the Harvard Law School and clerked for the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal.

Accomplishments: 2003 to 2005

Christine Littleton, Professor of Law and Women's Studies and Chair of the UCLA Women's Studies Programs agreed to take on the position of interim director for the 2003-2004 and 2004-2005 academic years.
 
By far the biggest achievement for 2003-2004 was the Gender Equity Workshop Series and Summit, under the auspices of, and institutional support from Associate Vice Chancellor Rosina Becerra and the Office for Faculty Diversity. The May 17th summit engaged faculty in discussion to develop strategies for addressing recruitment, retention, academic climate, and other issues raised by the Gender Equity Climate Report released in Spring 2003. The meeting focused on recommendations developed by faculty from twenty departments and professional schools in a series of workshops focusing on recruitment, promotion, and leadership.
 
The Center for the Study of Women and Women's Studies Program issued their second joint newsletter, written and edited by Women's Studies graduate students. This effort reflects the ongoing goal for collaboration between the CSW and Women's Studies. The second issue of this fifteen-page newsletter focused on both local and global gender-related issues associated with women and science and building transnational linkages, and included a report on a speech given at UCLA by Shirin Ebadi, the 2004 Nobel Laureate for Peace.
 
Thinking Gender: The Fourteenth Annual Thinking Gender Graduate Student Research Conference was once again co-hosted by the UCLA Graduate Division and the USC Center for Feminist Research. It featured seventeen panels on such topics as "Thinking Transgender: From Margin to Center and Border Crossing" and "Migration: Gendered Flows of Culture, People, and Capital," as well as what has now become an annual presentation on "How to Get an Article Published" by the co-editor of Signs.
 
The CSW Calendar of Events lists a total of fifty-one programs for the 2003-2004 academic year. The forty-three events organized solely by the Center had excellent program attendance, and co-sponsors for the other events included the LGBT Studies Program, the Office for Faculty Diversity, the School of Law, the Center for Medieval Studies, the Center for Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia, and the MRG for Transnational and Transcolonial Studies. Co-sponsored lecture series included the four-part Sociology of Gender Series, now in its seventh year, and the fourth year LGBT Studies series. The CSW also co-sponsored the LGBTS Q-Grad conference.