Projects, Series and Research Initiatives
Through our projects, we engage in original research, fieldwork and critical textual analyses designed to produce fundamental new knowledge and insights into contemporary debates in feminist, queer and sex theory. Students, faculty, staff and researchers collaborate with us to strengthen the understanding of gender and sexuality's role across multiple disciplines and to produce ideas for future exploration.
Each project features its own events, workshops and seminars, which continue to bring together those with common interests who help further our mission of shaping the thought of gender and sexuality within the University and in the public as well.
Current Projects and Series
- Black Women Work: The Labor of Black Women in Institutions, Communities & Families Symposia and Program Series
Project Director: Lisa Moore, Crown School
On December 1, 2023, the Black women work symposia provided an opportunity for Black women at the University of Chicago and beyond to have a space to reflect on their labor in the dimensions of community, institutions, families, and healing. This convening is being organized by social workers, grounded in liberatory social work traditions that are creating a space for the stories/narratives of what labor does to the well-being of Black women, their families, communities, and their healing. Coming together to discuss the centrality of labor in how Black women’s lives are often organized, facilitates an opportunity to slow down and bring attention to the ways work is sometimes a site for oppression, liberation, and a space for organizing.
Spring 2024 programming and other announcements for the project are TBA. - The Lexicon Project: Articulating the Middle Ages
Sponsoring Faculty: Julie Orlemanski, English and Kris Trujillo, Comparative Literature
The Lexicon Project is a working group of scholars funded by the CSGS that seeks to recover and explore the ways that people wrote and thought about questions of embodiment in the Middle Ages. Now in its 5th year, the Lexicon Project aims to develop a critical vocabulary that addresses issues relating to the study of gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, race, human/nonhuman animals, and monstrosity in order to give voice to the distinct ways medieval sources take up these themes while also interacting with contemporary theoretical approaches. By doing so, the members of the Lexicon Project hope to broaden contemporary debates about the nature of embodiment while also recognizing that thinking through concepts in a medieval framework can be a way of pushing back against the notion that the medieval can be recuperated to justify normative assumptions in the present.