The Center for Feminist Futures is committed to fostering dialogue and collaboration among UCSB faculty members, staff, students, and community members around common research goals and projects. We invite applications for Research Cluster Funding for 2024-2025. Research Clusters aim to bring together faculty, staff, and students (as well as community members) with shared interests in interdisciplinary feminist, queer, and trans research. The groups will meet regularly during the academic year to collaborate on interdisciplinary research and host at least one public event. The purpose of the research clusters is to support:
- planning and implementing collaborative research
- programming (symposia, colloquia, workshops, etc.)
- sharing and presenting works in progress
- developing of public scholarship
- incubating new intellectual communities
- forming short or long term research collaborations
- strengthening community engaged work
Current Research Clusters
Feminist Environmental Justice and Futures
Gender is critical to thinking about our climate crisis. Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Global South communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Knowledge from these precarious communities shows us not only who is most vulnerable, but also how knowledge is produced by those most impacted.
Still Our Bodies, Still Our Selves
Gender and racialized bodies have long been sites of control and resistance from migration to reproductive politics. Struggles for body sovereignty span from supporting and protecting trans youth and reproductive justice, to protection against bio-surveillance, to decolonizing maternal health. How do we claim our bodies for ourselves?
Joy, Work, and Care Within and Against Rampant Capitalism
Gender is a key factor in economic precarity. Amidst debt, inflation, exploitation, and extraction, women sustain their lives and each other in the crevices of capitalism. How do feminist and queer communities live and labor as they navigate racial colonial capitalism?
Epidemics and States of Violence/Abolition Now for Our Future
Gender remains one of the greatest predictors of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, mass shootings, and nearly every other form of violence.
How do feminists imagine transformative justice and abolition as ways to address and curtail violence in all its states? What are the gendered impacts of war on women and girls? How do feminists imagine peace and post-conflict societies?
Health Justice and Disability Justice
How do gender inequalities exacerbate the impacts of environmental change, pandemics, disease, disability, and other vulnerabilities that require care?
We have experienced a global disabling event that continues to impact us. How can we center and value knowledge from disabled people to learn how to live differently? How do we ensure that access and healthcare are grounded in justice and liberation?
Future Research Clusters
Gender and Racial Justice/Revolutionary and Decolonial Futures
Our commitment to feminist praxis continues throughout generations. We are the leaders our ancestors dreamed of. Social movements are often led and sustained by women, queer, and trans people. How are our movements, rebellions, and our imaginings transforming and decolonizing the world?
A Future of Just Universities
Decolonial Feminist scholars urge us toward reflexivity in the academy. Universities have been grounded and grown in settler colonialism, enslavement, empire, and extraction. But they also have the potential to be models of reckoning, reparations, and transformations. How do we inhabit and transform the university for just futures?
Women in Leadership
Despite large scale social, political, and economic shifts, gender inequality still persists in leadership. How can we better support women pursuing positions of leadership in business, politics, and communities? What are the barriers that must be addressed so we can better transform our societies?