Local and Global Feminisms and the Politics of Knowledge: Feminist Literacy at ASU

The Jenny Norton Research Cluster on Women seeks to bring faculty across the academy to deeply engage intersectionality as a feminist theory and method: 1) to further develop feminist tools that promote the intellectual mission of “making visible” the workings of power and oppression in our globalizing society; 2)  to interrogate the relationship of intersectionality and gender studies to theories of globalization and globalism. 3) and to query how feminist theories and methods contribute to the university’s mission of producing knowledge and ideas that may inform social issues and institutions.

The group seeks to generate analytic tools and methods grounded in praxis and informed by feminist theory that will allow us in our transdisciplinary research and teaching to more effectively intervene and critically engage the questions of how our work in the academy can be transformative in our communities, interrogate the corporatization of knowledge, and enhance ASU’s mission to  become a  global university and to embrace even greater transdisciplinarity by constituting a site of critical engagement and inquiry.  The research group will be open to scholars whose work engages feminist theory, including faculty participants inviting graduate students who are committed to attending regularly.  We will use Blackboard to post common readings, engage in discussion, and other organizational purposes.