NEWSA Planning Meeting Minutes

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October 12, 2002

18 NEWSA members met at Bentley College this past Saturday, October 12, 2002, from 10-12 to discuss NEWSA plans for the next year.

After circulating a NEWSA fact sheet she had composed and giving a brief NEWSA history, Jo Trigilio, co-coordinator, reviewed the 3 main goals identified by NEWSA members at the retreat held in Rockport in September 2001:
1) Providing an informational network for women’s studies professionals, women’s center directors, activists and community workers on women’s issues and women in the workplace.
2) Focusing our events and activities on pro-actively on race, racism and white privilege.
3) Organizing short conferences or topic-focused meetings.

Jo reported on how we have addressed those goals in 2001-2002. On January 26, NEWSA held a roundtable at Bentley College on Race and White Privilege and is holding a second roundtable on November 2 at Tufts University. On March 23, NEWSA and Bentley College co-sponsored a one day conference called CULTURE, WORK AND POWER: Building Working Relationships between Women of Color and White Women. Both of these events addressed all three goals and generated a lot of energy and requests for further work in this area.

Andrea reported on the NEWSAWebsite, which has been online since September 1, 2002. Laura Roskos suggested finding ways other ways to make the site easier to locate like getting the website listed on search engines and linked through other websites. Virginia Metaxas suggested making wider use of the online member list by including other list-serves as “member” listings.

ROUNDTABLES ON RACE AND WHITE PRIVILEGE

Andrea also explained the upcoming roundtable history and format.

Jo turned the discussion to future NEWSA plans. She outlined a plan she would like to implement of compiling race and white privilege materials based on the NEWSA roundtable model to be listed on the website and advertised via email lists to New England institutions and organizations. In addition to formulating the program, NEWSA would promote it and also promote via emails and the website the roundtable events that institutions and organizations plan.

Vicki Kirsch and Amy Agigian raised issues concerning the training and debriefing of facilitators of roundtables on white privilege, since not all roundtables will be as productive as NEWSA’s first one was. Several agreed that this is an issue NEWSA should address, but at the same time keeping in mind the necessity of not promising more than we can, as a group, deliver.

A sign-up sheet was circulated and a committee formed to work with Jo on formulating the materials and work out issues of facilitation, debriefing and NEWSA’s role in these processes.

Furthermore, Anne Pollock of MIT and Vicki Kirsch of Wheelock College volunteered to look into hosting a white privilege roundtable at each location in spring 2003.

ONE DAY CONFERENCE

Laura Roskos asked us to discuss what we thought made last March’s conference so successful so that we could think about how to build on that success. Bonita McAllister, one of the planners for that conference, spoke about how the conference met all of the goals set at the retreat and in so doing provided a context in which women could speak frankly about their experience to audience members who either understood the experience or listened and learned.

Virginia Metaxas talked about ways to promote student work with a student-organized conference such as the one being planned for next fall at Southern Connecticut State College. Laura Roskos raised the issue of global connections among women and the ways in which US women could be much more effective in facilitating those connections and thus the success of women doing women’s studies and feminist work in international settings, particularly settings which are isolating and resistant to such work. LiHua Wang suggested women and war as a global topic of intense concern to women at the moment. Dominica Lord-Wood mentioned a conference in Maine on Women and Politics as a model. Sarah Avery Sullivan mentioned that the Graduate Women’s Studies Consortium, of which she is now the administrator, is offering a course on gender, militarism and peacekeeping, which could be a source of material and information.

Amy Agigian and Laura Roskos volunteered to form a committee to plan a one day conference for spring 2003 dealing with global issues of connection among women across international and racial boundaries with a probable focus on war and peace-keeping. A sign-up sheet was circulated and a committee formed.

ONGOING WOMEN’S STUDIES TEACHER FORUM

LiHua Wang, who attended the conference, agreed with Bonita McAllister’s assessment of last spring’s conference and said she would like to see NEWSA build on that work by broadening the discussion in several ways. She would like to participate in a forum in which teachers can discuss not only pedagogical issues for doing anti-racist work, but also to discuss strategies for handling student racism directed at teachers and other institutional racisms teachers face. Andrea Humphrey suggested a threaded chat on the website, but Virginia Metaxas said, and all agreed, that we need face-to-face forums. LiHua Wang also suggested that racism and white privilege discussions should include other racisms besides the black/white binary, which everyone also agreed with.

Virginia Metaxas and Amy Agigian both recommended that NEWSA establish a series of meetings in which teachers of women’s studies could regularly address these issues. A sign-up sheet was circulated and a committee formed to make this happen.

OTHER INITIATIVES

We briefly discussed ways in which NEWSA could facilitate or collaborate other women’s studies and women-centered events in New England. We agreed that the initiatives listed above were probably all we could commit active hours to. However, we brainstormed ways to use NEWSAWeb site and the online mailing list to help PR other events. Andrea Humphrey, web administrator, reiterated that the web site information will only be as good as the information NEWSA members send in. Therefore, send in announcements and events and information to be listed. We did agree that eventually, NEWSAWeb would only email to its members NEWSA sponsored or co-sponsored events so that NEWSA members’ email accounts are not flooded.

DISCLAIMER

These are the minutes of the October 12 meeting as I recall them. Please feel free to submit corrections and additions. I will list these minutes on the website – if I can figure out a clean way to do so.

Thanks for your attention. And can I just add --- I am so excited by NEWSA’s work and growth and I thank you all for it!!

Andrea L. Humphrey
NEWSA Co-coordinator (with Jo Trigilio)

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