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History of the Project
This web-based anthology is devoted to the problem of integrating women's studies and selected area studies (Latin American, African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies) within the college classroom. It comes out of a four-year Ford Foundation-funded interdisciplinary higher education project entitled Curricular Crossings in Women's Studies: Women's Health and Welfare in a Global Perspective. The project was developed and carried out by the Five College Women's Studies Research Center under the aegis of Five Colleges, Incorporated and with the cooperation of the African Studies, Latin American Studies, Near Eastern Studies, and South Asian Studies Programs of the Five Colleges. It ran from 1995 to1999 and involved women's studies and area studies faculty from Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. During each of the three years it emphasized a different regional "area study."
In the course of the project six scholars from the chosen regions spent between three and nine months in the Five College community. The international scholars joined Five College faculty in year-long invitational seminars that focused generally on the health and welfare of women, as well as on new scholarship and pedagogy from such realms as economics, anthropology, history, health planning, art history, sociology, political science, and literature. Ford Scholars also delivered papers and ran workshops on a range of topics including HIV/AIDS in Tanzania, women and environmental degradation in Nigeria's oil fields, human rights abuses against foreign household workers in Lebanon, the problems of researching sexuality in the Indian Subcontinent, abortion rights in Puerto Rico, and indigenous healing practices in Mexico.
Each year, the seminar participants also took part in a major symposium hosted by the Five College Women's Studies Research Center which attracted Five College faculty, faculty from other colleges and universities and local activists. Participants were encouraged to reflect on how to make women's studies and area studies "speak" productively to each other, and to take up the challenge of conveying that dialog, to students. There was a considerable amount of discussion of new courses and syllabi, and as a result several participants developed entirely new courses; others altered or updated the courses they were already teaching.
Curricular Crossings: The Anthology This anthology represents an attempt to bring some of these discussions and deliberations to a broader audience. The short pieces were originally talks, given either in the faculty seminars or in the larger symposiums. The syllabi were either originally presented in the seminars or grew out of them, and some effort has been made here to recreate the "feel" of the seminars by matching syllabi to talks where possible.
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They do not necessarily represent the views of the Ford Foundation, Five Colleges, Inc.
or the Five College Women's Studies Research Center