The Gender Institute thanks the number of participants, attendees, and sponsors who made the third biannual graduate symposium on women and gender an unqualified success.   

Gender Across Borders photos (offsite link) 

List of Sponsors 

This year, 82 confirmed attendees and an additional 73 estimated audience members joined to advance their research at over 15 panels on hip-hop, medicine, pharmacology, ethics, border-crossing, gender practices, Buffalo activism, and much more.  Panelists from Hong Kong, Scotland, Ireland, New Mexico, California, and New Jersey traveled to collaborate with researchers from Toronto and the University at Buffalo. 

Our humanities keynote speaker, Layli Phillips, Associate Professor of Women's Studies and African American Studies at Georgia State University and editor of The Womanist Reader (Routledge 2006),  discussed the transformations taking place in womanism through spiritual theoretical perspectives.  Linking scholars AnaLouise Keating, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Barbara Holmes with concrete political and philosophical reflections, Dr. Phillips illustrated a possible future for woman-centered theoretical practice.

Renowned Albanian author and filmmaker Elvira Dones co-hosted an evening of documentaries about gender practices, illustrating another remarkable aspect of the 2008 conference: the number of panelists discussing gender practices, queerness, and the construction of sexualities suggested that women’s and gender studies is expanding to focus on the category of gender in all of its complexity and fluidity.

At our concluding roundtable, faculty, graduate students, and professionals reflected upon the conference’s remarkable conversations and on the core issues of gender practice, medical and science ethics, self and other relations, and university structure.  A common thread was the panelists’ and attendees’ deep appreciation for the educational and networking value of the conference activities and for the quality and level of the work presented.