The theme “Backlash, (Im)mobility, Reaction” captures the world in flux, the world overcome by turbulence, with opposite forces clashing, breaking, turning over. The Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice invites applicants to address the following question: what does it mean to think, to write, to act, and to create art in such a world? Do we succumb to the forces of the moment (such as reactionary forces) that inhibit movement? Do we react to them, mutiny, redirect, and fight back? How do scientists, artists, thinkers, and activists survive backlash—perhaps even turning the forces of backlash against themselves? What makes people move and react, during reactionary times that hinder people’s mobility?
Is backlash always reactionary? Backlash is a response to a breakthrough, feminist writer Susan Faludi asserts in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. The “wrath” of a backlash, she argues, is marked by its brutality. It is a preemptive strike against real gains and, as such, is reactive. Backlash often disguises itself as “pity,” “worry,” “concern,” or cynicism. “The backlash is not a conspiracy… For the most part, its workings are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic,” she writes. While in the 1980s, demographers, sociologists, economists, and legal scholars rallied to claim feminism was the culprit behind the “infertility crisis,” “female burnout,” and the erosion of the American family, in our time, politicians—finding ample support in incel, trad-wife, and far-right communities—similarly hold feminism and other progressive movements responsible for various social ills. Backlash is episodic: it manifests as moments of resurgence, as flare-ups or outbreaks. Here, we ask: is backlash the right term to understand our cultural and political moment? How does one survive or fight back amid a backlash?
The term “reaction” is twofold: in reacting, one can respond well or defensively. One can overreact or fail to react at all. In our world, the term “reaction” often evokes nuclear reactions or corrosive chemical agents. Reactive agents have a high tendency to interact and cause damage. Reactionary movements try to stop the tide of change. Reactivity is often built into architecture (e.g., automated doors) and technical systems such as AI. We are also interested in visceral or bodily reactions (e.g., how one’s body reacts upon hearing the news). Reaction can trigger forms of anticipatory obedience (e.g., the scrubbing of DEI policies and statements by institutions and companies).
Immobility names a paralysis—an inability to respond or react. By contrast, mobilization seeks to enable collective and large-scale responses. Tariff and border wars signal the end of a certain type of mobility that once defined the era of globalization. The current crisis is one of both immobility and mass displacement. How do we make both phenomena visible? Activist Harsha Walia asserts that the so-called migrant crisis is “a misnomer, and what we are faced with is a crisis of immobility, where millions of displaced people are prevented from moving to safety and held in cordoned-off zones of containment.” How do we theorize mobility and immobility in an era of mass displacement and rapid, unpredictable change?
provoke your assumptions
Provoke your assumptions, challenge your beliefs and grow as a student and citizen by engaging in dialogue, research and scholarly collaboration at the Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice. Bringing together faculty, students and experts in gender-related fields in the arts, humanities and social and natural sciences, the Fisher Center fosters mutual understanding and social justice in our contemporary society.
History
Since its founding in 1998, the Fisher Center has brought hundreds of national and international experts to campus to explore the facets and implications of one driving question: How do we more nearly realize, through our educational program, scholarship and presence in the larger community, our democratic ideals of equity, mutual respect, and common interest in relations between men and women?
The Fisher Center was endowed with a $1 million gift from Emily and the late Richard Fisher, whose son Alexander graduated in 1993.
It was inaugurated in October 1998, with an event titled "Engendering the Future: Educating Women, Educating Men, Educating Women and Men," that featured noted experts Carol Gilligan, professor of psychology and the Patricia Albjerg Chair of Gender Studies at Harvard University; and Michael Kimmel, who has written and edited many books on the topic of masculinity.
The Fisher Center's 20th anniversary was celebrated with an official name change from The Fisher Center for the Study of Women and Men to the The Fisher Center for the Study of Gender and Justice, moving away from the limits of binary conceptions of gender while continuing to lead the campus and community dialogue on pressing issues around gender and social equity. A series of special events took place in the 2018-19 academic year including a keynote speech by internationally renowned activist, professor and author Angela Davis.
2024-2025 Speaker SeriesWalls
This year's Fisher Center theme is Walls, broadly defined. We'll discuss walls and barriers of different kinds: physical border walls, the carceral system, barriers to academic freedom, and book bans, among others. We'll also talk about how people negotiate barriers limiting their freedom and movement-via migration, organizing, writing, and art.
spring 2025 March 5
212 Demarest, 7 p.m.
Nostalgic Hunger - Chinese art after the Cold War
Darja Filippova is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar from Tallinn, Estonia with no permanent home. Her work comes from the experience of migration and aims to define alternative narratives of belonging. Her academic writing deals with post-socialist art and politics and is informed by critical theory and the discourse on translation. She has an ongoing interest in religion as a mode of resistance, and her thesis traces lineages of Orthodox aesthetics and political protest art in Russia.
March 26
Deming Dance Theatre., 6:30 p.m.
Performance: Walls?
A performance by Professor of Dance and Movement Studies Donna Davenport, followed by a discussion. Free admission.
April 2
212 Demarest, 7 p.m.
Insurrection and "Political Disabilities": Confederates Respond to the Fourteenth Amendment's Third Section, 1868-1872 by Associate Professor of History Laura Free, and From Demonizing to Dehumanization: The Moral Risks of Moral Outrage by Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Blaize Gervais.
april 16
212 Demarest, 7 p.m..
Channeling Arctic Amplification in Joachim Trier Thelma (2017)
A talk by Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Robinson Murphy.
april 30
212 Demarest, 7 p.m.
What To Do When There Are Not Enough Walls: The Art Museum's Predicament by Clarence A. Davis '48 Visual Arts Curator Meghan Jordan, and Women, Girls, and Carcerality in the New York House of Refuge, 1825-31 by Fisher Center Pre-Doctoral Fellow Sarabeth Rambold.
fall 2024 SEPTEMBER 25
212 Demarest, 7 p.m.
Walls Are Not Real
Joshua Dubler is an associate professor of religion at the University of Rochester, where he directs the Rochester Education Justice Initiative and is a founding member of the Rochester Decarceration Research Initiative. He is the author of Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison (FSG, 2013), coauthor of Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons (Oxford, 2019), and co-editor of Religion, Law, USA (NYU, 2019). He is currently writing a cultural history of the concept of guilt in the United States.
October 23
212 Demarest, 7 p.m.
Isaac Kamola is the Director of the newly endowed Religion, Justice, and the AAUP's Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom and an associate professor of Political Science at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His latest book project, Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (2021), examines the dark money behind the so-called campus free speech crisis. His previous book, Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Duke, 2019), examines how relationships between universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial organizations shape the reproduction of academic knowledge about the world as global.
November 13
212 Demarest, 7 p.m.
Harsha Walia is a Canadian activist and writer based in Vancouver. She has been involved with No one is illegal campaign, and has been an active voice in immigration politics, indigenous rights, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-statist movements.
Walia is the author of Undoing Border Imperialism_(2013) and Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021), co-author of Never Home: Legislating Discrimination in Canadian Immigration (2015), and Red Women Rising: Indigenous Women Survivors in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (2019). She has also contributed to over thirty academic journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers.
2024-2025 Faculty Research Fellows
Sarabeth Rambold, Fisher Center Pre-Doctoral Fellow Sarabeth Rambold is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Rochester and the 2024-2025 Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Fisher Center. Her archival scholarship investigates the intellectual lives that antebellum American women cultivated within their homes. Her dissertation, titled “‘The sphere of woman is eminently practical’: Female Intellectual Labor in the American Home, 1783-1860,” explores what it means to lead an intellectual life within the confines of the nineteenth-century home and examines how participation in the care economy shapes one's intellectual pursuits. Her work at the Fisher Center will examine how nineteenth-century speakers, authors, and activists confronted the barriers and power dynamics within the walls of educational institutions, as they sought to dismantle them and create more equitable spaces for learning.
Stephen W. Woodworth ’54 Fisher Center Student Summer Fellowship
Take your curiosity beyond the classroom and complete research around issues of race, gender and class through the Stephen W. Woodworth ’54 Fisher Center Student Summer Fellowship. Over the course of a summer, students will conduct research under the guidance of a faculty adviser in fields such as English, dance, religious studies, history and more. Fellowships are competitive. Accepted students receive a stipend and campus housing.
Fisher Center PreDoctoral Fellowship
An opportunity to gain experience teaching in a private liberal arts college while completing thesis work. The fellowship carries a stipend in exchange for teaching one course per semester related to your research and the year's theme, attending Fisher Center lectures and meetings, making a public presentation and assisting with administration of Fisher Center programming. The pre-doctoral fellow participates in the Faculty Fellows Research Group which meet twice a month to discuss their research as related to the year’s theme.
Faculty REsearch Fellows
Each year four or five Faculty Research Fellows are chosen to participate in the Fisher Center Research Group, meeting regularly to discuss research around the year's theme. Research Fellows present their work to the broader community during the spring semester.
Sarabeth Rambold, Fisher Center Pre-Doctoral Fellow
