Julie Shayne organized two sessions and presents a paper at the Pacific Sociological Association (PSA) conference
IAS faculty member and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies coordinator Julie Shayne organized two sessions at this year’s PSA conference. The first one was “The Feminist Classroom: Pedagogy, Student Research, and Film” where she presented a paper called “Feminist Pedagogy and Collaboration: The Feminist Community Archive of Washington (FCA-WA).” The session also included a paper by Shayne’s former student and IAS alum Taylor Hiner (read by Julie in their absence.) Shayne and Hiner presented about the FCA-WA; Shayne about its creation and the assignment that fills it, and Hiner about the sense of empowerment queer and transgender students feel as a result of researching local gender justice organizations. (Shayne and Hiner, with co-authors Dave Ellenwood and Denise Hattwig, have a paper forthcoming in Feminist Teacher about the archive and assignment.) The third presenter was Jonathan Skurnik, founder of Youth & Gender Media Project and Chair of New Day Films. Skurnik, spoke about using film in the classroom. They followed this session with a screening of Skurnik’s film Becoming Johanna, a documentary about a young transgender Latina in Los Angeles. After the film, Jonathan and Johanna answered questions from the audience and Shayne read comments from Hiner with suggestions for faculty who want to make their classrooms more welcoming to transgender students.