Introduction: Conference-making

On March 20, 2003, the United States began a full-scale invasion of Iraq, based partly on the rationale of liberating the Iraqi people from the human rights violations perpetrated by an abusive dictator. Nine days later, the second annual New England Women's Studies Association's (NEWSA) conference took place at Suffolk University's Law School, while across Tremont Street in the Boston Common over 50,000 people gathered for an anti-war rally and die-in. Most of the conference presenters and attendees felt torn by the need to express opposition to their government's actions and the need to examine the ideological underpinnings of the opposition itself. With the guidance of co-chairs Laura Roskos and Amy Agigian,¹ the NEWSA conference explored human rights discourse and raised awareness among U.S. women's studies practitioners of a paradigm in wide use internationally among feminists and social justice activists, including those located in the countries of the Middle East.

The conference was an expression of NEWSA's mission as "a feminist anti-racist network open to all which actively seeks new meeting ground for discussions about Women's Studies and social change." This mission statement was generated in September 2000, after NEWSA had acted as program committee for the National Women's Studies Association's (NWSA) annual conference held that June at Simmons College in Boston. The following spring, we organized half-day workshops on racism and white supremacy, and in the spring of 2002 we sponsored our first regional conference in several years at Bentley College: "Culture, Work and Power: Building Working Relationships among Women of Color and White Women." Our 2003 conference on human rights, for which this section is an abridged "proceedings," gave us new insights for implementing NEWSA's mission and underscored the importance of introducing the human rights paradigm in women's studies classrooms. Not surprisingly, many of the essays included here grapple with the problems of holding the U.S. government accountable to international norms and standards.

In her keynote address that opened the conference, Anannya Bhattacharjee raised provocative questions about ideology and education. In the U.S.A., the women's studies classroom is one of the few contexts in which students can engage in theoretical analyses of effective activism. Yet, the parity between theory and practice mandated by feminism only produces scholar-activists—and makes activists of their teachers—when the connection between ideology and action is pedagogically explicit and reinforced by course requirements. While it is enormously difficult to apply one's critical faculties to those ideologies that one holds dear, understanding their history, limitations, major debates, and central conflicts from the standpoints of all concerned provides a powerful grounding for activist praxis.

In the interview below, Laura and Annanya explore some of the debates recalled in Annanya's keynote address, "From Civil Liberties to Global Democracy: Responsible Feminist Citizenship in a Changing World Order." Laura asks Anannya to take apart terms like "citizenship" and "feminist" and to compare the role of nonprofits and NGOs in the U.S., India, and Brazil. Their discussion reflects a globalized economy structured by multinational political alliances and transnational corporate forces. They describe a situation where the capacity of national governments, accessible and accountable to some extent to individuals and community groups, to address human rights concerns is uncertain, or perhaps even diminishing. Increasingly, non-profits and NGOs take on the weight of remedying human rights concerns even though they are not sufficiently funded, staffed, structured or popularly mandated to effect institutional or social change (Afkhami et al. 2002, 665). Under such pressures, non-profits or NGOs may choose to ignore or gloss over the ideological conflicts amidst which they carry out their work, narrow their analysis to a single-issue, or become mired in over-professionalization—any of which can dissipate the very...