This project, co-facilitated by Esha Niyogi De and Sondra Hale, concerns feminist, postcolonial, and transnational theories and holds workshops. It was first conceived by former director of CSW, Professor Miriam Silverberg.

A recent event on March 6, 2006, featured members of the "Migrating Epistemologies" workshop presenting their work:

Lisa Lowe, Professor of Literature at U.C. San Diego, is the author of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms; Immigrant acts; and The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. 

Lisa Yoneyama, also a Professor of Literature at U.C. San Diego, is the author of Hiroshima Traces:  Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory; Violence, War, and Redress: The Politics of Multiculturalism; and Perilous Memories: The Asian-Pacific War(s).

Focus questions

In what ways do feminist ideas and women’s issues travel across geographical, national, linguistic, social boundaries?

What forms of translations and what appropriations occur between cultures of feminism, and when these cultures are unequal in the global economy?

How are ideas negotiated as they travel from the global North to the global South, and in what ways do the negotiations alter when ideas travel in the opposite direction (South to North)? [Note: Norths and Souths co-exist within national boundaries and across them.]

Moreover, how might the exchanges of feminisms alter when Southern cultures interact among themselves?

What factors keep Northern feminists and theoretical models from recognizing and valorizing the ways that Southern thinkers select from, reject, or alter western theory?

Are the models of poststructuralist, postcolonial, transnational theory prevalent to Northern academies, the American academy in particular, adequate in accounting for all the ways that Marxist, Socialist, Liberal, Psychoanalytic feminist concepts are appropriated and altered in Southern (and other non-western) cultures and languages?

List of Members

Published Papers

Decolonizing Universality by Esha Niyogi De

Utopia and Modernity by Lisa Lowe

Towards an ethics of transnational encounter, or "when" does a "Chinese" woman become a "feminist"? by Shu-Mei Shih

Working Group