Engaging Scholarship: four simultaneous sessions on Friday intended to address the conference theme and sub-themes and provide opportunities for networking.
Invited scholars will explain how their work articulates, engages with, and theorizes key issues in the field of women's and gender studies and in today's world.
Session participants will then break out in discussion sections to explore the various themes and issues in more detail.
PAST DEBATES, PRESENT POSSIBILITIES, FUTURE FEMINISMS
 Barbara Ransby is a historian, writer, and longtime political activist. She received her B.A. from Columbia University in New York and her Ph.D in history from the University of Michigan, where she was a National Mellon Fellow. Ransby is currently an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Departments of African American Studies and History. She is a recipient of a national Ford Foundation Post-doctoral fellowship for 2000-2001 and numerous other recognitions and awards.
She is most notably the author of an award-winning biography of civil rights activist, Ella Baker, entitled Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). The book has received 8 national awards and distinctions. Ransby is also the recipient of the prestigious Catherine Prelinger Scholarship Award for her overall contributions to women’s history and her unconventional scholarly career. She is currently working on two major research projects; a study of African American feminist organizations in the 1970s, and a political biography of Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson.
In addition to her academic work, Ransby is also a freelance writer who has had articles published in major newspapers and magazines. She is a guest contributor to the program Eight Forty-Eight on WBEZ, and writes regularly for the Progressive Media Project, which distributes opinion editorials to Knight Ridder Newspapers around the country.
GIRLS STUDIES AND ACTIVISM
 Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D., is Professor of Education and Human Development at Colby College in Maine.
Dr. Brown, a founding member of the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development and co-creator of the nonprofit Hardy Girls Healthy Women (www.hardygirls
healthywomen.org), has written two other acclaimed books on girls’ social and psychological development. Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girl (New York University Press, 2003).
Her latest book, Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketer’s Schemes (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), co-authored with Dr. Sharon Lamb, shows adults the image of girls that's being packaged and sold while also giving caring adults the tools to help girls resist these images.
PERFORMING FEMINISMS
 D. Soyini Madison (PhD 1989) is associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. During 2006-07 she is visiting professor in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Her published works focus on performance practices and the intersections between global economy and local activism in sub-saharan Africa. Her teaching centers on critical performance ethnography, social movements, and the political economy of performance.
Madison is a Fulbright Scholar and lectured at the University of Ghana from 1998-2000. Her current book project, Acts of Activism: Human Rights and Radical Performances, is an examination of local Ghanaian activists and their performance tactics in the defense of human rights and social justice as these performances are influenced by globality and national development.
 Mark Anthony Neal is Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture in the program in African and African-American Studies and Director of the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies at Duke University.
He is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005).
Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004). A regular commentator on NPR’s “News & Notes”, Neal blogs at http://newblackman.blogspot.com/
IM/MIGRATION AND MOBILITY
 Dr. Laila Farah is a Lebanese-American feminist performer-scholar. She
attended Lebanese American University and Eastern Michigan University while
working toward her BA in Theatre and Communication Arts. She continued at
Eastern Michigan University in order to complete her MA in Performance
Studies and Communication and received her Doctorate in Performance Studies
at Southern Illinois University.
She is currently an Assistant Professor in
Women’s Studies at DePaul University and working on future performance pieces
in Chicago, as well as touring with her production of “Living in the
Hyphen-Nation.” Her research interests include research with and the
performance of “Third World” women and women of color, postcolonial
identities and “alien-nation,” and ethnographic and autoethnographic
performance.
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