Center for Transnational Women's Issues

Learning from and moving with women across borders

CTWI aims to promote transnational awareness of women’s issues in the community via research, arts, education, advocacy and activism.

WHY TRANSNATIONAL?

By promoting “transnational” awareness of women’s issues, we aim to bring attention to international women’s issues and to the work of local, national, and international women’s organizations on these issues, and connect groups working on these issues. By doing so, we hope to help individuals move beyond the dominant Western or Northern perspectives and see international women’s issues as they are defined and solutions as they are created by women of different cultures.

By “transnational”, we also recognize and aim to make visible the complex system of inequalities women around the world face, that bear the intersecting effects of sexism, racism, class injuries, casteism, homophobia as well as nationalisms, fundamentalist movements, neocolonialism and economic policies that harm women.

Acknowledging our own our roles and responsibilities, as well as our privileges in various inequalities, and the differences in the inequalities we face, as women and men interested in justice, we hope to work across national borders towards productive and appropriate solutions to particular problems women face.
 

ANNOUNCEMENTS OF EVENTS AND NEWS FROM MEMBERS

Uma Asher's article "Transparency provides clearer vision of flaws" is published in the Centre Daily Times on November, 19, 2011. In this piece, Uma discusses a series of events that took place at Penn State University, showing the university's culture of silence/silencing in the face of racial, sexual discrimination and seeking of labor rights. She writes "Institutions should value dissent so they can be self-correcting, and transparency allows criticism." Uma Asher is a journalist in New Delhi who studied at Penn State. She is also the Collective Board Member of CTWI and the author of the blog Mukta's Laugh.

 

Pramila Venkateswaran was selected as the 2011 Walt Whitman Birthplace Long Island Poet of the Year.   Pramila Venkateswaran is the author of Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002), Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008), Draw Me Inmost (Stockport Flats, 2009), and Trace (Finishing Line Press, 2011), has a doctorate from George Washington University and teaches English and Women's Studies at Nassau Community College, New York. She is also the Collective Board Member of the CTWI.

As covered in the New York Times, this year, Pramila also won the First Prize in 2011 String Poet Prize with her poem "Kummi Dance", which refers to a folk dance of South India, from where Pramila's family originates. The poem extols her grandmother’s musical gifts: As a young woman, her grandmother “would have danced the Kummi dance with her friends in the temple, during festival seasons.” You can also listen to Beth Anderson's composition of the poem at the String Poet's site (right hand corner), as performed by Anderson (piano) and David Wong (violin).

 

If you would like to share the announcement of an event related to transnational women's issues, or news about yourself, please send it to admin@c4twi.org.

 

Mira: CENTER'S BLOG

Mira means look, see in Spanish, Mir –peace in Russian, to be amazed, to be in wonder in Romanian, wonderful in Latin, Mir’at- holding a mirror, mirroring each other in Arabic. 

 

Mirabai or Meera is a sixteenth century poet, singer and saint in India who sang and danced herself into ecstasies, even in public places like temples. Her words of beauty and joy express a kind of female liberation rejecting and showing disdain for the wealthy and their life of riches appealing to the poor.  While valuing women as mothers above all, India also reveres the self-expression of Mira, a childless woman who is identified as having rebelled against her husband and in-laws. 

(from http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/heroine12.html )

 

With our new blog below ("Blog posts" below), we invite you to look, see, hold mirrors to each other as women and as people and working together for just, joyful and ecstatic (as Mirabai) lives and societies/communities..

 

Please send anything you would like to post here to admin@c4twi.org

 

Blog Posts

CTWI

Another test..

this is second testing :))

Posted by CTWI on August 28, 2011 at 2:43pm

OUR SISTER BLOGS

MUKTA'S LAUGH: A WOMAN'S EYE-VIEW OF LIFE IN INDIA
An ant flew to the sky and swallowed the sun. Another wonder - a barren woman had a son. A scorpion went to the underworld, set its foot on the Shesh Nag's head. A fly gave birth to a kite. Looking on, Muktabai laughed.

~ Muktabai (1279-1297)


REVERIES AND PERCEPTIONS

A French and English blog by Zeynep Bengu about daily life in Istanbul, women’s conditions in Turkey, vegetarianism, philosophy, meditation, sustainable living and ecology, gmo’s in food chain, organic food as they relate to transnational conditions and as they affect women’s issues. She shares perceptions of realities and her dreams, giving time to time vegetarian recipes -sometimes with Turkish cuisine influences..


Photos

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